Considering that Subset's last game, FTL, handed you an entire galaxy to knock about in, Into the Breach might strike you as being a little cramped in its opening minutes. This turn-based tactical battler likes to drop you into snug maps of eight squares by eight. You never have more than a handful of turns to worry about on each mission, and you have just three units to control as standard. What's worth remembering, though, is that FTL may have been set in the vast reaches of space, but it found its most frantic entertainment in the compact and claustrophobic arrangement of rooms that was your spaceship. This is a studio that understands panic and understands the power of confinement. FTL is a classic - and Into the Breach may well be even better.
The question with any turn-based tactical game is: what kind of game is this really? Once you take away the mechs and the super-soldiers, is this Chess again? Is it American Football? The easiest answer for Into the Breach - and it's not a complete answer because Into the Breach is not an easy game to get your head around - is that beneath a veneer that invokes the likes of Front Mission and even Advance Wars, this is billiards. By which I mean your shots matter, but victory lies in understanding where the remaining pieces are going to come to rest afterwards.
This is doubly true because so much of Into the Breach isn't merely concerned with blasting away at mutant hordes with your guns and missiles and lasers. It's concerned with doing all that while shoving them too. Shoving them into the sea where they drown. Shoving them onto a dangerous tile that is about to drop into the earth or be hit by falling magma or be engulfed with the burning fumes from a rocket launch. Missiles and lasers and guns are great, but you learn to look through the weapons you're given along the course of an adventure and cherish the ones that have drag or knockback powers. Again: it's not how much damage you do in a round, it's what the board looks like once the round is finished.
0 comments:
Post a Comment