INTO THE BREACH

Developer/publisher Subset Games Format PC, Switch

When you boil them down, turn-based tactics games are just series of dynamic puzzles. Can you hack that workstation this turn? Can you prevent Donnel from being killed and take out that enemy mage? But there’s no tactics game that expresses this idea more vividly than

Into The Breach. Its large-scale battles between giant insects and towering mechs take place on intimate eightby-eight tiled boards and across just five turns. Your job is to stop the insects, the Vek, from destroying your cities, but you’re pitilessly outnumbered. Your three mechs will face swarms of acid-spitting, web-slinging, spider-birthing bugs, and any one of them is capable of demolishing a city in a single blow.

If you’ve played Subset’s previous game, FTL, the ever-yawning pressure will feel familiar. But Into The

Breach adds a wrinkle: you’ll be shown exactly what the bugs will do on their next turn, and in what order. Your turn, then, is all about disrupting their plans, turning their attacks against each other and deflecting their strikes against what’s most important. Mechs specialise in different ways of fighting the Vek – shifting them, dealing damage, shielding targets, moving position – and over the course of a campaign you’ll steadily outfit new weapons and increasingly skilled pilots, honing a toolkit good enough to face the final battle.

You’ll spend tens of minutes per turn figuring out how to save a city while keeping your mechs out of danger, preventing more Vek from arriving, blowing a dam, pushing a Vek into the path of a falling meteorite. There’s always a way to mitigate the worst, and there are few more satisfying moments than when you discover a way to do better. Through intricate sets of abilities and by giving you prescience, Into The Breach procedurally generates some of the best puzzles in all games.