This game is inherently depressing. You're playing a team of time travellers trying to undo an alien bug invasion. You go back, and try to retcon events, but you must do so perfectly. Inevitably, you make a mistake, and it snowballs into human extinction. So you try again, in a different timeline. The reality you find yourself in is similar but different. Geography has changed, the procedurally generated scenarios have rolled up something new. You don't get to relive that moment, that mistake that killed everyone remains. You will, at best, save a bunch of people uncannily similar to those you lost. More likely, you will fail again, damning another iteration of humanity to extinction. There is no hope, only the terrible certainty of each and every action. A deterministic hell, where being technically able to save scum history just sees you reliving failure after failure.
Fuck me.
Now, you may think I'm being dramatic, but that's story that ITB tells. Gameplay mechanics and battle chatter hammer this home, and by the second day of ownership the tone of the game was unavoidable. This wasn't a good thing for me, as I'll admit to it being 2020 when I wrote this, but it is it what is. What is it otherwise? Well, it's made by the people whom did FTL: Faster Than Light, a highly regarded rogue-lite and Kickstarter success story. ITB inherits similar themes and gameplay features, although it's more of a turn based strategy game. You have three dudes in high tech warmachines, one of which is likely a giant robot, and you Pacific Rim your way through the game. The main gameplay innovation is that it provides concise information on basically everything that happens in an easily grasped visual manner. You always know what the bugs are, what they are going to attack, and what the consequences will be, with the same for your own actions. This makes the game more like a puzzler than a wargame, because everything is known to you, and outcomes are resolutely predictable. While initially fascinated by this, I eventually found this to be restrictive, and the game in general to be repetitive.
ITB offers a lot of robot punching, but it does not offer variety in that punching. A mission will often feel like there is either only one solution, or you've made a mistake that will cripple you in future missions. I find it misleading to call this a strategy game as you don't strategise as such. It's more crisis management, or tower defence. Experimentation almost feels discouraged for the same reason, while the mechanics introduced in later levels don't add much variety. All this aggravates my perfectionist tendencies while not allowing me creativity in my solutions, which I'm not a fan of. And I have some nasty suspicions about the ending, should I reach it...
Into The Breach is a well-made, innovative game. Unfortunately, after a good first impression, I don't like it.
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