Into the Breach

Takes turn-based strategy like Advance Wars and condenses it into an 8x8 grid with three units. This takes a larger and more epic experience and creates miniature versions that feel like what would be a skirmish or an early level in a game like Advance Wars. I like it a lot, with an asterisk. Rather than a more symmetrical format where you and your opponent have access to the same units and have the same goals, here you are given access to three mechs with lots of abilities, and the opponents have lower-powered units that do one thing each. This moves it more towards fire emblem territory. Another comparison with fire emblem, you upgrade your units between fights, although unlike fire emblem the upgrades you can get are randomized. This works well and adds a lot of variety to a playthrough. However, unlike either of those games, you can see enemy intents a-la slay the spire. In this way it becomes more of a puzzle than a strategy game, although you still need to strategize several turns ahead of course. And even in advance wars and fire emblem the AI enemies always have the same reaction to your moves, so really this just gives visibility to that dynamic. Still, I wasn't sure how I felt about that whole thing in the beginning. That isn't the INTENDED experience in advance wars, it's supposed to be like chess. You're supposed to bait and predict, if they could make the enemy react less predictably they would have. The point is not to save scum to see how the AI will play and then play perfectly against it. That is optimal of course, Into the Breach just facilitates that playstyle. It isn't "cheap" or anything, because the games are still fun if you play that way. And since this is built around that playstyle, no fights are invalidated or made easy by the player having that information. That was always kind of a problem in AW and FE for singleplayer so deciding to balance around that was a good decision I think. Now for the asterisk. Something I actually don't particularly like in Into the Breach is the rougelike format. I had the same problem with Hades. We have this move in gaming right now towards short procedurally generated experiences in lieu of longer epic stories. You can finish a run of Into the Breach in one sitting. You build your three mechs and get them all powerful and fun for the last island, and then the game ends and you have to start over. This is of course the Rouge format, and it isn't a BAD format, I love traditional rougelikes. But I can't help but wonder how much more fun I might have with Into the Breach if a campaign was four times as long and I got to recruit two or three more mechs along the way and keep playing with my powerful builds for the majority of my playtime instead of being underpowered for 80% of it. I LIKE being able to play for two hours on one day and then come back the next day and continue the same campaign for another two. That break keeps me thinking about it in between. With Into the Breach, I play for one session and then I win or I don't and tomorrow I forget about it for another six months. If my 50 hours had been five ten hour campaigns instead of fifty-ish campaigns with ten wins, I think I would have connected with it more emotionally. I might have played for a hundred hours by now, and I'd have been very happy about it. And I DO NOT BELIEVE that it is "harder" to make games like that. Skill issue. This is a choice of format and structure, not of adding a bunch of additional content. There is still a GIANT amount of content in this game, WAY more units and abilities than in advance wars. And the combat is more complex than advance wars. But an advance wars campaign is much longer. I'd almost say advance wars has more gameplay variety, because although all the generals use the same units, their abilities change the basic units' strengths and weaknesses, and all they all have totally unique supers that recontextualize entire battles. Any two generals can fight on any map. There are even four-player maps. Plus, since it's much more symmetrical, you can play as the opponents after you beat the game with orange star. The hardest battles in advance wars can take up to an hour, so each campaign could take you like six to ten hours to clear, meaning to totally clear with every general you could be playing for hundreds of hours. But you don't HAVE to do that, the game doesn't expect you to. You could just play through one time and have fun. Plus, this also facilitates multiplayer. And since it's turn-based, you can play advance wars PvP on one gameboy. Each army has three generals. So you have twelve different generals with different playstyles, literally thousands of possible matchups on a couple dozen maps. I'm not gonna do the math, but it is just asymmetrical enough that there are probably millions or billions of starting positions that create totally unique PvP matches. It's a legendary strategy title. Why am I talking so much about advance wars in this review? I LIKE this type of longer-term gameplay. This is what I want out of into the breach that I don't get. These short bite-sized experiences are fun, but they often leave me hanging at the end. I long for the days when I could really really connect deeply with a game. There is no reason you couldn't take the exact gameplay of Into the Breach, just let me clear ALL of the battles on each island instead of ending it after three, add one more island, split one or two of the mech factions and add their mechs to the other factions, and build up from two to five mechs over the course of a campaign. Have a mode where you fight the OTHER mech faction at the end or something. This would take the same exact mechanics and content and re-contextualize it into a longer and more engrossing experience. When I play Into the Breach, that is what I feel like I want. But I don't get it. It annoys me when I see people talking about how they like short stuff they can finish in two hours because they don't have time to play videogames. And then there's the reviewers who play videogames for their job instead of to enjoy them, so they want to be able to finish and get on to the next one on the stack. Okay so we're catering to people who don't like videogames enough to play for more than two hours? I play videogames nearly every day. Why does that guy's opinion mean everything has to be watered down at the expense of my experience? Can't you focus your attention on something for three days instead of one? And when I say "everything is watered down" I'm only being a LITTLE hyperbolic. There are so many things these days that could be longer but have to be short now to put the marketable steam tag on them. It's either rougelike packed with content or empty open world and barely anything in between. I know this sounds strange coming from someone who played for fifty hours anyway, and I fully intend to keep playing in the future. But Into the Breach CLEARLY took HEAVILY from Advance Wars. Advance wars came out for GBA in 2001 and I still play it sometimes. All I'm saying is I like ItB but if it wasn't so dedicated to being a rougelike version of AW and cutting you off from playing all the content in one run, I would like it more. It might even go from the ol' IGN standard "Good, 7.5/10" to "Legendary off-the-scales I can't even give it a rating" game for me. Still, buy it now, full price, great game. Please play Advance Wars too though.