3.5/5 ★ – DaysposableHero's review of Into the Breach.

Have you ever been playing a turn-based tactics game - say XCOM or the Banner Saga - and thought to yourself how much you would absolutely own the bad guys if you knew what they were going to do next? Enjoy a little power fantasy about being an omniscient, unbeatable tactician? Well, Into the Breach disabuses you of that particular fantasy right away. In Into the Breach, you take control of a time-traveling squad of human mech pilots who are the last line of defense against an invading bug army. Want to know more...? So would I. The narrative of Into the Breach is minimalist. Some lines of (repetitive) dialogue from the various human leaders still in charge, a sense of the personalities of some of the pilots as they comment on their continuous cycle of rebooting the timeline. But as for how and why the world in Into the Breach is the way it is? I suppose that's not the point. Or perhaps I wasn't patient (or skilled) enough to see the game far enough to encounter the narrative meat of the thing. The bugs you're fighting in Into the Breach aren't particularly intelligent. In fact, one of the main lines of play in the game consists of arranging things such that the bugs attack and destroy one another. This is accomplished by giving the player an unprecedented level of knowledge about the upcoming turn. All enemy attacks are telegraphed, displaying their direction of attack and the distance, as well as how much damage they're going to do. Your job is to issue commands to your three-mech squad to move, attack, shield, shove, and otherwise manipulate the battlefield such that you protect the buildings that contain the scared, vulnerable, squishy remnants of humanity. Let too many of these buildings be destroyed, and the human defenses go down, forcing your chosen mech pilot to abandon this particular timeline, and to try again to save humanity from the very beginning. On the other hand, win enough battles, take back enough territory from the bug army, and you can embark on a final mission to destroy the bugs from inside the hive, eliminating the threat to humanity once and for all. I beat this "final" mission a few times, with a few different squads, and each time my pilots time-jumped to a fresh timeline to re-engage the insectoid enemy from the beginning. While a sufficient narrative justification for the game's rogue-like loop design, it did manage to keep the game's "ending" from feeling very satisfying. After all, you're not really destroying the bugs forever. Just these particular ones. And then you're back, quite literally, at square one to do it all over again. To be fair, this is a criticism of the rogue-like genre, which I'm lukewarm on, not of Into the Breach itself. But one does begin to wonder, after the third or so "victory", what exactly one is doing this for. What is being accomplished here? Obviously, this is the type of game that you play for the moment, not for the end, and that's just fine. Into the Breach is quite hard, no doubt about it. Your battle mechs aren't particularly more survivable than the bugs, you'll almost always be outnumbered, and each mech squad you unlock has its own particular strengths and weaknesses. And as you level up your mechs through each timeline, the bugs grow in strength and ability alongside you, never really giving you a feeling like you're gaining on them. You do have one thing going for you, however, and it's maybe the holy grail of military operations: complete and accurate information about the enemy's capabilities and intentions. All of the bugs' next moves are indicated on the field, and it's up to you to figure out the optimal strategy to stymie the insects. Additionally, you can hover over the bugs' icon and see exactly what its abilities are, its movement radius, damage, etc. Which sometimes makes it even more frustrating when you just can't see how to "solve" the scenario. With procedurally generated combat arenas and rogue-like gameplay loops, each new "timeline" has major and minor differences that make it fresh and unpredictable each time through. But that same procedural generation and unpredictability left me wondering: is it always possible to win? Or are some scenarios just rolled against you such that even the most optimal move set results in damage to your buildings or your mechs? If it's the latter, that's disappointing, as Into the Breach plays almost more like a puzzle game than a turn-based tactics game. A puzzle ought to have a solution - and if some of Into the Breach's combat scenarios lack an "optimal" move set, then the bugs have RNGesus on their side after all. At the end of the day, Into the Breach is a fun game. It had me sending my mech squads up against its arthropodal kaiju over and over, with me being sure that "this was the run" each time. Spoiler alert: it almost never was.