Article on the interface design

Into the Breach is a game about using a team of three mechs to stomp giant bugs (‘Vek’) which are attacking your civilisation. Your power grid (functionally your hit points) decrease whenever a building is hit, and when they reach zero it’s game over. Crucially, your power grid is persistent between missions. The game is classic I-go-you-go with rounds alternating between the player and the bugs. After the bugs have performed their actions for the turn, they move and indicate in what attack they’ll perform in the next round. This attack will occur no matter what’s in the target square when their turn comes around, which opens up some delicious opportunities at times.

The tools you have as a player depend somewhat on the team of mechs you’ve picked, with more being able to be unlocked with points that you earn through achievements. For example, one mech might have a giant laser cannon that shoots in a straight line through friend and foe alike, a second mech might launch giant boulders in an arc that stay behind when they don’t hit anything while pushing away anything in the squares adjacent to the point of impact and a third mech might exchange its position with another target’s. How you use these tools to deal with the Vek threat is up to you, and yields some wonderful ‘aha!’ moments as you decide to approach a round from a different direction and execute an elegant manipulation of the enemy and the battlefield. Of course, not thinking things through properly might then end up in disaster as well, and the game’s low spatial and hit point resolution makes any action or error weigh quite heavily.

Into the Breach is one of the most elegant distillations of tactical combat I’ve ever played, with only Hoplite being a real contender (but one marred by its rather uninteresting early game). This elegance is amplified by the crystal clarity of the user interface, and the way it always makes it entirely obvious what is going to happen on the next turn. The 8 by 8 grid is just the right size for the scale of the actions the player and the bugs take.

I find it interesting that two of my favourite recent games (this and Slay the Spire, though the latter isn’t technically out yet) rely strongly on giving the player an unambiguous challenge to deal with every turn. The two games also share a strong constraint on what the player can do in a given turn (ItB: you only have three mechs; StS: you only have three energy points by default, and a limited hand of cards). This series of micro-puzzles gameplay is extremely attractive to me, and I will probably be coming back to both games for quite some time to come. Although they don’t use the standard ‘character with abilities and levels’ design, the way that both games manage to make decisions important and meaningful despite each individual run not taking very long (under two hours) gets at what I love about the roguelike genre in general.

Into the Breach is also interesting because it is in many ways something I’ve always wanted someone to make: a simple roguelike version of XCOM, or at least of squad-based combat. The trend over the past couple of decades where XCOM-likes are concerned has been of long periods of equilibruim, where the complexity is at a certain level, until a game with a fresh new perspective comes along and simplifies things. That’s what the modern XCOM remake did with its two-action system, and it’s what Into the Breach does again with its drastically simplified maps and one-move-one-action (and only in that order) per mech.