Tag: indie games

Into the Breach

Live, Blast Kaiju, Repeat

As someone who’s eyes light up at the sight of a grid-based battlefield populated with adorable 2D combatants, I was predisposed to give Into the Breach a chance. If you’re not like me, and don’t instantly fall in love with anything that bears even a passing resemblance to Shining Force III or Final Fantasy Tactics, you might glance at the relatively small battlefields and limited number of units on show and decide to give this one a miss. I’m here to politely request that you reconsider that decision, as you’re missing out on a gem! A bastard-hard and thoroughly depressing gem, but a gem nonetheless.

Despite this guy’s confidence, you won’t be able to save everyone.

This indie-developed, mech-on-kaiju strategy game has been around since 2018, but I recently picked up the physical copy on Switch, and have found myself thoroughly absorbed into its time-bending, apocalyptic world. Your job in Into the Breach is to command a small squad of mechs as they attempt to defend the world’s population and infrastructure from an onslaught of giant bugs known as the Vek. Already on its last legs due to various natural catastrophes, civilisation has been brought to the brink of destruction by the marauding kaiju, and humanity’s last hope comes in the form of a group of time-hopping mech pilots.

The main aim of the game is to protect buildings and facilities from monster attacks, as these locations provide power to your power grid, and if your power grid fails, the timeline you’re in is fucked and it’s time to bail out. If this happens, your pilots will use their timey-wimey powers to zap themselves to a different timeline and try again. Each pilot is scattered across different timelines, too, so you can only keep one of them, and if you mess up and one of your mechs gets destroyed, the pilot is (usually) gone for good. Just don’t get too attached to these guys, okay?

While Into the Breach has a lot of the gameplay and strategy you’d expect from comparable modern retro tactical games like Triangle Strategy and Wargroove, there are a few mechanics that handily set it apart. One is the previously-mentioned timeline shenanigans, which lends itself to roguelike-style progression where repeated failures result in you being slightly better-equipped to take on the next timeline. Another mechanic that sets Into the Breach apart is the fact that it will clearly tell you exactly what the monstrous Vek are planning to do in the next turn, and will allow you to plan and manipulate them appropriately.

Chemical pools and conveyor belts are just a couple of the environmental hazards you’ll be dealing with. Oh, and see that knobbly squid thing in the bottom row? Take that out first.

It may sound like being able to accurately predict the AI’s every move would make a game like this pretty easy, but this is not the case. In fact, it’s this mechanic that takes Into the Breach further into board game or puzzle game territory. This removal of random chance or behind-the-scenes calculations makes Into the Breach pure strategy, akin to Chess, and will lead to difficult decisions aplenty. Expect to find yourself staring at the screen for minutes on end, sighing and rubbing your chin as you attempt to run through sequences of moves in your head to get out of a seemingly impossible situation you’ve found yourself in. You’ll often find yourself played into a corner where you’re forced to sacrifice something, and making the difficult choice between the mission objective or one of your experienced pilots is sure to produce lots of curse words and require a cup of tea or two. You’ll need a strong stomach, thick skin, and a really, really big brain to master this one.

The final goal of the game is to defeat the Vek at their hive, which is an area that opens up after liberating two of the four available islands. The difficulty scales as you progress through the islands, so taking the Vek hive out after island number two is your easiest option, but successfully completing a four-island run is a much more difficult goal. It’s a tough ask, and only letting you take one pilot with you to the next timeline feels harsh to the point of being insurmountable. Perseverance, experimentation, and the ability to stay calm and look for options under pressure are your best weapons to get there.

It’s often better to let your mech take a hit, rather than lose some of your power grid. Even if a pilot is killed, the mech’s AI will bring it back for the next mission. You’ll probably feel bad, though.

Once you’re up and running, understanding and upgrading your mech’s abilities, manipulating the Vek into harming each other, and successfully shielding civilians from kaiju attack becomes extremely satisfying. You’ll feel like a legendary commander when you pull it off, and you’ll become more confident as you start to understand the game’s way of thinking. However, Into the Breach is always capable of surprising you, and a power grid failure that results in hordes of titanic bugs burrowing out of the Earth’s crust to overwhelm the planet’s last defenders is always only a mistake away.

As alluded to earlier, Into the Breach can initially seem limited. The maps are small, you’re usually in charge of only three units at a time, and there are only five different environment types to do battle in. However, its difficulty, ingenious mechanics, variety of environmental effects and open-ended nature make for an incredibly deep experience that will keep throwing up new problems for as long as you’re willing to solve them.

The game does its best to make you remember that there are lives at stake. Try to focus on the mission, okay?

Tough, tense, and hugely atmospheric, Into the Breach is a strategy game for big time players. Great pixel art and some fantastically appropriate musical pieces all add to a high quality strategy experience, with unlockable mech squads and pilots, and additional, advanced options allowing experienced players to tweak gameplay to their heart’s content.

Climb into your mech, steel yourself for the horrors you’re about to witness, and give this strategy gem the chance it deserves. After all, you can always abandon this timeline and jump to the next if things don’t work out.

RimWorld – Impressions

The Harrowing Trials and Tribulations of the Potato People

I held off on playing RimWorld for years after it first started showing up in my Steam discovery queue and my suggested YouTube videos. In terms of gameplay and premise, it was right up my street, but the visuals always turned me off. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some shallow ingrate concerned only with aesthetics, but a large part of the appeal of sim games for me is the visual interest of watching your settlement, theme park, zoo or other grow, and viewing the interactions of the denizens within. I can while away hours watching a junction in Cities: Skylines, for example, just observing as the traffic builds up, then filters through, then builds up, then filters through. Edit a junction or change a stretch of road, watch how it changes the flow. Watch the traffic build up, then filter through. I have a full and productive life.

Anyway, it was the hilariously and informatively presented videos of a YouTuber called ambiguousamphibian that finally caused me to take the plunge. 30 hours of gameplay later, here are my initial thoughts.

I really don’t like the visuals. Nothing has legs or arms, and everyone looks like a little potato person. Sometimes a colonist will have interesting hair, giving them some visual character, but then they’ll immediately put a hat on so that they look like a little potato man again. When they get shot or stabbed or scratched by cougars, cuts and slashes appear on them, giving the disturbing impression that they’re potatoes that bleed. I understand that the graphics are representative, and that rendering arms and legs would be quite an undertaking considering your colonists can and will lose limbs and then replace them with bionic implants, but I find it difficult to get attached to the little potato people, probably more so than if they were represented by icons or text.

If you can’t make out the text there, it’s saying that Cauchois’ brain is a mangled scar thanks to a shot from a revolver. This has … slowed her down somewhat. She used to be my finest builder.

The environment textures are very lacking as well. I immediately downloaded a mod that sharpens up the textures but you’re still going to be looking at basic, bare minimum visuals for the entirety. It’s fine, it is what it is, I wish there was a more appealing visual solution for a million-selling game, but I signed up for the addictive progression-based gameplay, the situations that can arise, and the stories that can play out.

RimWorld nails all of that stuff, especially if you’re brave and play on the harder difficulties. It’s the sort of game that generates water cooler talk. If you’re lucky enough to have a pal who also plays the game, you’ll be regaling each other with tales of tribal raids, cold snaps, giant insect infestations and killer guinea pig attacks for months to come.

A few years back, my wife and I used to play The Sims 3 a lot. We had completely different play-styles. She would create the perfect Sim, take total control of their lives, get them to work every morning, and try to make them as happy and fulfilled as possible (that’s if she ever got past meticulously creating said Sim’s perfect abode with the infinite money cheat). I would create a household of three or four, give them a mixture of good and bad traits, give the AI the maximum amount of control and just let events unfold, only intervening if I absolutely needed to.

There was another guy in this colony called Hella, but he died when a cougar bit off his arm. Said cougar ended up as lunch for the other colonists. It’s a harsh world sometimes.

RimWorld really rewards players who are somewhere in between the two. You’ll have to be in control to ensure your colonists survive the raids, harsh winters and other such dangerous occurrences the computer will throw at you, but rolling with the game’s mischievous tendencies to throw seemingly insurmountable odds at you is essential to really experiencing what RimWorld has to offer. It’s a story creator, and sometimes said stories may be tragic or hopeless, but they’re always fascinating. If you’re the type of player who would quit and reload if your favourite colonist got his arm ripped off by a passing warg, then this game isn’t for you. You’ve got to accept the rough as well as the smooth to get the ultimate RimWorld experience, and you’ll probably need lots of time to spare, too.

At only thirty hours and three colonies deep, I don’t really feel qualified to review RimWorld. I’ve not come anywhere near the endgame, and have barely scratched the surface of what this indie gem has to offer. However, I can say some things for certain already; this game is meticulously crafted, addictive, near-limitless in breadth, often melancholic in tone, and chock full of little potato people. It’s definitely got a-peel.