hey, angie here, i decided to write a steam review for into the breach, which i think is still my favorite tactics game. it's a long one, so it goes below the cut.
This game was a paradigm shift in the genre when it came out. Every gamedev making tactics games, including me, played this game and immediately started taking notes. In the years following its release, "Breachlike" has become a popular subgenre. Between Demonschool, Metal Slug Tactics, and The Hundred Line, squad-based tactics games where the numbers are small and attacks never miss are here to stay. Now I like a lot of these games, they feel good to play, put their own unique spin on the gameplay, and often have a good storyline to go with them.
But as a tactics game, Into the Breach beats all of them.
Let me start with the basics. Just about every tactics game has some form of basic attack. You know, select an attack, select a target, do some damage. You can tell a lot about a game's priorities by seeing how an attack works. ITB's starting punch mech does 2 damage and pushes the target one tile forward. Simple enough, right? Well here's some of what you can actually use that for. -Punching forest to set it on fire and inflict a burn on anyone who steps in it -Punching sand dunes to create a cloud of smoke that prevents attacking -Punching a mountain to turn it into walkable land -Breaking a frozen ally out of their ice at no damage to health -Pushing an enemy away from where they're going to strike -Pushing an enemy into another enemy's firing range to block a shot -Pushing an enemy into another enemy, or into a wall to deal extra damage -Pushing a grounded enemy into water or chasm to instakill them no matter what their health is -Pushing an enemy onto an upcoming spawnpoint, preventing the spawn and dealing damage to the one blocking -Pushing an enemy into one of the buildings you're trying to protect, which is almost always a bad idea but in awful situations it might be the best option
Because Into the Breach isn't just a tactics game about finding the most efficient ways to kill. It's a systemic game, a simulation even, where killing is only secondary to the actual goal. Terrain and weather are neutral entities, and allies follow the same rules as enemies. The game never feels like it's handing victory to you, even though I know from listening to the GDC talk that Subset put a lot of work into making sure the game is never unfair. But your victory is always yours, even when you feel like you lucked out.
But that does come with some drawbacks, if you want to call them that. I would call Into the Breach a "sharp" game, and it cuts both ways. When you're playing at your best, you hold the blade, cutting through the noise to find the perfect set of actions to make each turn go without a hitch. But if you let go for one second, you (or at least I) feel every inch of the knife piercing your foot. Mistakes feel awful, and worse by the fact you can't rewind from them. If you take grid damage, or lose a pilot, or miss out on a perfect clear, you have to hold that. And that can feel terrible. Speaking as someone with OCD, this game is very soothing until it very suddenly becomes painful. That doesn't mean you (or I) shouldn't play the game, but that it's probably a poor choice for comfort media, you know?
But, you know, it's probably good that Into the Breach is a game you can never get too comfortable in. Because while this game isn't what Steam would call "Story-Rich," it is legitimately doing things thematically. If you stop and pay attention to what is actually going on (which a lot of people don't), you might just find that there's more than an excuse narrative here. This is a future dystopia where all that remains of humanity are a scant few small islands run by CEOs. One of those CEOs has made it their mission to make their island as unhospitable as possible for the war effort. One of your optional missions on that island is to terraform newly growing grassland back into desert. You do this using a terraformer that shapes a swath of terrain and kills everything on it. And it feels so satisfying to use. But you are still destroying grassland, and mountains, and living things, as a bid to delay the end for a bit longer. Whatever. Once more into the breach.
There's so much more I could say about this game. Like the way every weapon, way beyond the simple punches, is creative in a unique way. The way that the narrative framing of time travel works as both justification for and commentary on being a roguelike. The way that the (free!) advanced edition actually puts in a lot of the ideas that got scrapped for being too complex for launch, but gives you the keys to decide whether they're used. But I'll end with this: I talked at the start of this about how many games are inspired by Into the Breach. And these games are good, sometimes really good. But they're also, WE'RE also, chasing a trend. And eventually that trend will get stale, and people will get tired of the Breachlike as a cultural object. But I don't want people to forget how fucking good the game is that started this trend. I don't want us to forget why we cared in the first place.
















