Into the Breach — MyerByte

If you’re the type of person that froths at the loins for giant robots and insect eradication then I would highly suggest checking out Into the Breach [1]. From the makers of Faster Than Light [2], Into the Breach is a turn based strategy rouglite where players mitigate risk by balancing resources through the embodiment of giant mech robot bodies. Combined with a light story and easily interpretable UI, you have a nice pixel-art bug squashing package!

The game drops the player into an apocalyptic Earth-like world where subterranean bug creatures, known as the Vek, have emerged from the bowels of the planet’s surface to ruin the lives of everything that doesn't have an exoskeleton. Opting out of surprise genocide, humanity's biggest corporations engineered mech warrior combat suits to aggressively recommend the Vek should stop existing. However, the Vek deduce humanity’s wannabe Gundams don’t mean shit, and proceed to destroy city after city. Staring off into lifeless ruins of one such city, one playable character does not admire the rolling hills of rubble and decides to go back in time (because apparently that is a thing large corporation can do) to try and stop the giant bugs from bugging up the world.

And that is where the game starts off! Although minimalistic, the story provides just enough context to why bugs are evil more so than they already are. Strategic combat is the centerpiece of the game with hefty sprinklings of resource management over the long and short term. As one Day9 [3] viewer described the game, it is like playing Chess against the Kaiju [4].

Players invade different regions of the world without government contention and take turns against enemy AI to defend emplacements within a small 8x8 grid. Grid Power, aka the lives of civilians, is the persistent resource the player must protect to save humanity or they will face the dreaded Game Over screen. Everytime a building is destroyed, the player will sustain damage to the grid as represented by a blocky bar at the center top of the screen. Ultimately, this is the only resource that matters. Matches usually have a turn limitation that results in the player’s victory when the limit is reached. The player just has to survive with at least one magnitude of grid power to complete a zone. Despite its importance from a game mechanics perspective, grid power is not the most desirable resource to the player.

The game really becomes a treat when you have to balance multiple objectives within a zone while sustaining grid power. As savior of not-Earth you will often find yourself in a situation where you will have to sacrifice some resource to reduce risk of the match spiraling out of your control. Shorter term resources in this game primarily consist of: mech health, mech actions, primary/secondary objectives or map control. Map control might seem like a stretch but strong map control expands the possibility space your own units can act within. In ideal situations, spending movement actions for better map positioning can later be exchanged for devastating combos or objective security.

Unfortunately, the Vek are very adamant about armageddon because they will do everything in their turn-based moveset power to crush the player. All units on the board have an amount of health, a movement action and a mech action.

After the bois choose where to drop, each opposing force will have the opportunity to move each unit and perform an action. The game displays what a unit does and how it can move in addition to the order of operations (thank you Aunt Sally), These facets provide near perfect combat information to the player which can be used to make informed decisions to survive combat. Understanding the game’s combat system allows the player to exercise their bug crushing abilities through impactful combos.

But choosing to execute a “fuck that bug in particular” strategy can quickly endanger other resources. Even though my mech was a badass in stomping bugs, this was the turn that immediately followed:

Positioning and grid power often play inversely over the course of a match. And because the game provides near perfect information, losing a building is deterministic. Depending on the situation, players may find it less risky to lose grid power hindering their survival to the end of the game in order to secure a bonus objective for mech upgrades or other goodies.

The game is balanced so that the player will not be able to save everything. Sometimes it may be best to exchange the loss of a building for greater positioning and opportunity on future turns. Losing lives is not a swell thing, but in the context of the game, losing buildings limits avenues of attack. And because enemies will spawn in every round, it is relatively easy to have a match snowball undesirably. If sacrificing a building will ultimately make future rounds easier, let there be building rubble!

Bad positioning will frequently lead to a mech pilot’s death which is far greater setback if the civilian mortality rate can handle another spike. Losing a mech pilot creates a lasting effect throughout the entire timeline (Remember time travel is a thing? That will come up later… or before. Timey wimey becomes all wibbly wobbly when you can time travel). Mechs with vacant pilot chairs will not grant the player any perks that pilots possess. In addition, the mech cannot gain experience desired for later more difficult battles. When a pilot is killed in a battle, their mech becomes deactivated, reducing it’s combat effectiveness to that of a colossal toaster oven. It reduces the number of actions the player can perform that for that battle. In these scenarios, the Vek will have no problem using their icky bug parts to create a death spiral of bad situations and difficult turns.

Unless the player forgets an aspect of the game’s combat system, the question of “Will my mech get boned if I do this?” is answered within the game’s UI. But when there’s a bajillion Vek on screen, it’s difficult to evaluate outcomes of all possible combat decisions with the ol’ noggin. The only times I felt a feeling of surprised dread were situations like “forgetting the order when lighting damage is applied” or “realizing a missle launch insta-kills any adjacent units.” Unfortunate surprises like these cause the player to reevaluate their understanding of the game (and most likely start a new timeline because of that bullshitery), but all of this information is still given to the player. Unfortunate events like these are acceptable because the world itself is always consistent. Even though you might have not known/forgotten about when fire will kill your units, next time around you will know for damn sure when fire damage takes effect.

As the player comes to understand these systems, greater evaluation of decisions can be achieved. Similarly in Chess, a player may find worth in sacrificing one of their own units to reduce the potential risk of a worse position in the future. And most of these “sacrifices” in Into the Breach are for the player’s long term survivability in the timeline rather than and exchange of board pressure. I find myself more willing to sacrifice grid power if means a higher possibility that all mech pilots will survive to the end of the battle, thus gaining experience and the other rewards that might inhabit that zone.

The balancing of short-term risk versus long term survivability is executed very well within the game. A big part of optimizing decisions is risk evaluation, and it is engaging that there's still risk of uncertainty despite providing near perfect information to the player. The player can inspect each enemy to look up attacks and damage amounts, the player knows the turn order, the player knows how the status of their resources, the player knows where these resources are placed, and the location of all the tiles on the map. The player really is only left in the dark about what upgrades will appear in the store, which tiles the next wave of Vek will spawn, and the enemy’s intentions.

Compounding multiple Vek units with the game’s minimal randomness provides plenty of variability to keep battles interesting like an insectile Conway’s Game of Life [7]. While it may be enjoyable to watch Conway’s cells slither or twirl around in the abyss, watching Vek overtake a city is not quite as pleasurable. As the game progresses, more and more Vek spawn into battle adding tension and complexity. Because of the snowball nature of the game, Into the breach relieves this tension by having combat zones only last 5 rounds. The player only has to survive to the end of the last round to achieve victory. Or if things really go south, you can restart the timeline with your strongest bloke.

I wish I could reset the state of the universe everytime bugs invaded my home.

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[1] Into the Breach

https://subsetgames.com/itb.html

[2] Faster Than Light

https://subsetgames.com/ftl.html

[3] Day9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKsPc8vNwJU

[4] Kaiju

http://pacificrim.wikia.com/wiki/Kaiju

[5] Does Into the Breach Have perfect Information

https://youtu.be/PNFURLFsd2E