Into the Breach

Into the Breach is a turn-based strategy game where you and your squad of mechs are humanity’s last hope against an army of giant insects known as the Vek. Each of the game’s short, procedurally generated sci-fi campaigns consist of a series of grid-based battles that task your outnumbered team with outlasting the enemy. As you will rarely be able to destroy all enemy units outright, each turn becomes a puzzle that requires you to take advantage of the battlefield and use your mechs’ abilities to manipulate the Vek’s own power against them.

Each encounter pits your three mechs against a horde of Vek on an 8x8 grid populated with vulnerable city tiles, which provide power to your units. The goal of each encounter is to protect these cities from enemy attacks until a specified number of turns have passed. If a city is hit, you will lose a bar on the “Power Grid” meter that serves as a running tracker of city health and carries over to future encounters. Should that tracker ever reach zero, the campaign ends and humanity is doomed, so it is crucial to mitigate damage.

New campaigns begin by choosing a preset squad of three units with distinct abilities. While most mechs have a weapon of some sort, many of the best tools at your disposal can move Vek around the board. This can be used defensively to move enemies away from cities, but clever planning opens new opportunities of Vek disposal, such as knocking them into chasms or moving one enemy to destroy another. Each squad’s playstyle is different, but once you’ve learned to harness the synergy between the abilities of your units, you’ll be able to set up devilishly clever maneuvers.

Much of what makes Into the Breach’s encounters feel so puzzly is the fact that your enemy’s attacks are telegraphed at the beginning of each of your turns, allowing you to make informed decisions about the best course of action. While these procedurally generated encounters never have a unique solution that could be enacted step-by-step, access to complete information removes guesswork and keeps this tough game from feeling unfair.

Over the course of a campaign, you will make your way across several “islands” consisting of four battles each. Completing each island grants opportunities to upgrade your mechs, buy new weapons, and hire pilots with special abilities, which gradually prepares you for one final battle at the Vek stronghold. While it is possible to fail a campaign, each run lasts no more than a couple of hours and you will walk away with a lesson about how to improve your approach next time.

This description was written by Andrew Nicholson and edited by Oriane Tury.