Back in 2018 (A LIFETIME AGO!) the people who made FTL came out with a new game called Into the Breach. Man, I *LOVED* Into The Breach and I totally wrote about it.
Into the Breach is a simple and elegant game where you’re playing the lead of a team of mechs. You’ve got a Protagonist Pilot, two generic pilots, and three mechs that can do different things.
The “Rift Walkers” mechs are pretty straightforward. You’ve got a combat mech that charges and punches the opponent and pushes him one square. You’ve got a cannon mech that fires a shell and hits the opponent and pushes him one square. You’ve got an artillery mech that does damage to the square in the middle and pushes whatever is in each adjacent square to the center one.
And you’ll fight the antagonists (bugs, if you’re curious).
Each map has different objectives. This one wants you to protect the train crossing the map. This other one will want you to destroy two mountains. Yet another map will want you to protect the power plant.
Each map is 8×8, each fight will take a little less than 5 minutes. Each continent has 5 maps. After you beat somewhere between 2-4 continents, you’ll have an opportunity to go against THE FINAL BOSS (which is two maps). If you do it after 2 continents, you’ll have fewer upgrades. If you do it after 4 continents, your mechs will be fully upgraded and you’ll have opportunities to swap out your generic mech pilots with skilled ones (ones that can do stuff like fly, or be immune to the enemy’s webbing, or get extra experience for kills… that sort of thing).
After you beat the game once, you’ll unlock new groups of mechs. The Rusting Hulks. The Zenith Guard. The Blitzkrieg. The Steel Judoka. The Flame Behemoths. The Frozen Titans. The Hazardous Mechs.
After you unlock all of those, you’ll find the different achievements worth chasing. “Drown 3 enemies in water in a single battle” or “Hit 4 enemies with a single laser” or “Have 5 enemies on fire simultaneously”. And this will have you looking at each map differently as you play.
Well, this game was *AWESOME* and I beat the heck out of it and then, like Alexander, wept because there were no more worlds to conquer.
Well, it’s been a while. And, finally, there is a new update to Into the Breach!
And, are you sitting down? Listen to this: IT’S FREE!!!
So far, I have unlocked the Bombermechs and the Arachnophiles and, lemme tell ya, I have no memory of how to play this game. I used to be able to beat the first four continents without taking a single point of damage and, now, I can’t beat the second continent without rage quitting first.
But that’s not important. What’s important is that the game is still good, it’s recently gotten a major update, and is currently on sale for 33% off. Ten bucks! Can’t beat that!
If you’ve never played it, pick it up. If you beat it back in 2018, pick it up again. It feels like the first time.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is Into the Breach Menu Screen. Screenshot taken by the author.)
Into the Breach never really hooked me the way FTL did. I suppose I should go back and give it another swing.
I’m currently playing Hard West, a game I bought when it first came out, played once, and never played again. I think I wanted something more XCOM and this ain’t it, but it has certain charms all it’s own, mixing magic and the occult with an old west theme. It’s been a lot more enjoyable since I picked it back up.Report
I don’t know that the update will necessarily grab you. The gameplay is unchanged and the tactics of doing damage and moving stuff around the board merely has more options than it used to.
They’ve added pilots, monsters, mechs… seriously, if this was your thing, it’d have grabbed you by now.
I doubt that this will change your opinion of the game but, as someone who *LOVES* it, I think that you should at least try to beat the first island.Report