Into The Breach is a turn-based strategy game played on tiny maps, from the creators of FTL: Faster Than Light. You control 3 mechs, and battle against aliens called Vex. There are some Vex initially placed on the map, with more spawning each turn from the ground.
There are 4 continents, but you only need to complete 2 to be able to go to the final battle. In each continent there are several regions with a battle in each. You need to complete most of the regions before fighting a special battle which includes a boss Vex.
With each battle, you are required to survive several turns before the Vex flee. You need to protect the buildings, with each damaged building costing you power. If you lose all your mechs or if you lose power, then it is game over. “Power grid” level is global between levels; it doesn’t reset, although some battles give replenish it as a reward. Just like FTL, the game is designed to be played repeatedly.
You can move your mech then either attack or repair. The Vex telegraph their attacks so you always know which tile they are attacking. If they are attacking your Mech, then maybe you can simply move away. If they are attacking a building, then you will either need to defeat them or strategically attack them to move them away.
There are multiple sets of mechs to unlock, and you can customise your own squad or choose a random selection. Each set follows the same template but have variations on their attacks and bonuses. The standard set features a mech with a melee attack, a tank with a ranged attack, and artillery with a ranged attack which also pushes surrounding units.
In fact, the standard attacks of the other mechs both damage and push back which gives you an extra aspect to think about. Even when you purchase different weapons, they are always a blessing and a curse because you could damage your own units, buildings, or knock units to disadvantageous positions.
If a Vex is about to attack a building, you shouldn’t attack it from the opposite side, because you will push the Vex into the building and damage it. The benefits of being able to push the enemies means you: can hit them from the side to push them away from the buildings; could strategically push them into other Vex to additionally damage both Vex; push Vex so they will attack another Vex on the next turn. I found I was mainly using the artillery to intentionally miss enemies, because it was more beneficial to move the Vex rather than hit them for 1 point of damage. You can even kill non-flying enemies by pushing them into water.
If you move your Mech then change your mind, you can click the Undo Move button. If you attack and change your mind, then you can Reset Turn, but can only do that once per battle. If you realise you have messed up on a previous turn; there’s nothing you can do except carry on. Losing the battle means you have to start the game again. You can save the game, but it’s “iron man” style so you cannot reload to a previous save.
In each battle, there are a couple of optional objectives like: to protect a certain building, protect units, destroy something, collect something, meet a damage target, meet a kill target - and these award you with stars. When you complete a continent, you can then spend your stars on weapons or energy cores to upgrade your mechs.
Your mech pilots level up with experience which unlocks a couple of extra perks..
Some maps have interesting aspects to them. There may be a “tidal wave” that shrinks the battlefield by one row each turn. Similarly, certain squares may collapse. Volcanic eruptions damage tiles around the map. Some maps have mines and enemies love suiciding onto them.
On normal difficulty, I found most battles challenging, but I found certain maps having too many enemies or the types of attacks they had would mean it would seem impossible not to lose buildings or mechs. Knocking the difficulty down to easy lowers the spawn rate so it seems much more manageable.
There’s a special Vex that doesn’t attack but adds a buff to the Vex on the battlefield. One version increases the health by 1. Another makes all Vex explode on death. This means you are basically forced to go after these Vex first.
However, if there are 3 other Vex attacking buildings, and you only ever have 3 Mechs at most, then is it possible to deal with that scenario? Sometimes you can deal with it because you may be able to knock Vex so your artillery can knock back 2 Vex in one shot; but most of the time you cannot do anything about it. The exploding Vex are a particular problem because if you kill them while they are next to a building, then the explosion will harm the building.
You can prevent Vex from spawning by covering the square with your Mech, or alternatively pushing a Vex over the square. Instead of the Vex spawning, the covering unit takes 1 damage. Sometimes 3 Vex will be spawning so it’s almost impossible to cover all spawns, and when you have current Vex to deal with, it might not even be an option to cover the spawns.
When you fail, you can choose one of your surviving mech pilots to take to the next run. I don’t think this makes a massive difference because you don’t take your cores, so you start off with the standard mech anyway.
I really liked the idea of a small-scale strategy game, and you really do feel smart when you completely turn the situation around and protect all your buildings. When the spawn rates are higher, I was convinced it was skewed a bit more towards luck. It’s definitely fun on the Easy difficulty, and there’s plenty of Mech combinations to experiment with, so the replay value is high. You can easily get 10 hours from it across repeated runs, but fans will play for far, far longer.