Into the Breach Is a Puzzle Disguised as a Tactics Game
The past few weeks have involved me playing an inordinate amount of Subset Games’ Into The Breach, a laser-focused tactical mech combat game where you are tasked with ridding a climate-devastated earth of giant monsters known as the Vek.
Like Subset’s previous title FTL, Into The Breach is a marvel of simplicity. Games are played out on an eight-by-eight grid, with only three mech units against waves of Vek. A typical match regularly includes being overwhelmed by superior numbers, and through my time with the game, I found that it’s less of a tactics game and more of a puzzle game disguised as a tactical one.
My first few runs I found myself frustrated, banging my head against my tactics-game-instincts to crush each and every opponent one by one. Over time, the game teaches you the better and more efficient tactical flow that it is trying to encourage—not attack, but defense, flowing from each turn to turn and keeping the Vek under control, if not underground.
While dealing damage to the Vek is certainly one way to limit their advance toward the human cities in each scenario, even more important is to avoid damage being dealt to those cities in the first place. You quickly learn that while mechs have health bars of their own, their automatic repairs after each mission mean that they are expendable in a way the global health bar (harmed whenever a city takes damage) is not.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
