‘Into the Breach’ Is the Best Game I’ve Played So Far This Year

The best kind of fun new game is the one you weren’t expecting. I’d heard of Into the Breach, but the strategy game from the makers of breakout indie hit FTL: Faster Than Light was largely off my radar for the past few months. With no hype in my brain, playing it for the first time was a revelation. Into the Breach is a spiritual successor to Advance Wars—an old strategy game I loved but haven’t played in a decade.

Advance Wars was a turn based strategy game on Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. I took control of an army and took turns exchanging fire with rivals on a tiled map. Into the Breach takes the same concept, but—instead of an army—I controlled a squad of mechs fighting to keep giant bugs from trashing the planet. The matches take place on randomly generated tiled map. Different mechs and bugs move and attack in different ways and one of the game’s many joys is learning the different ways they interact.

The Earth has a health bar and the game is over when it’s depleted. Each attack against a civilian building depletes that bar, and healing it is harder than never letting it take a hit in the first place. When I booted up Into the Breach the first time, the game told me I’d already failed and that the only thing to do was go back in time and try again.

The bugs are such an overwhelming force that I had failed before they’ve even started. It’s an important lesson for people who want to play Into the Breach—you’re going to die a lot. Half an hour into my first playthrough, the bugs had destroyed so many apartment blocks that I lost. But the end of the Earth isn’t the end of the game. I ripped a hole in time and went back to a slightly different timeline—the maps and encounters are randomly generated—to try again.

Into the Breach is hard, but it’s the good kind of hard. I died a lot, but every death taught me something about the game. The bugs are often so overwhelming that I spent a lot of time deciding which building or mech to sacrifice for the greater good.

Because the civilian centers are the game’s health bar, it’s often better to use a mech to take the hit because the mechs heal between missions and the Earth doesn’t. But the mech pilots level up, gain new abilities, and can travel to new timelines. When their mech dies, so too does the pilot and more than once I found myself abandoning a timeline so I could save one pilot that I’d leveled up. It’s a brutal calculous that makes for an entertaining game.

Steam is littered with games that look and play like Into the Breach but aren’t as good. Into the Breach’s matches are fast and frenzied, the music is top notch and Chris Avellone—the guy who wrote Planescape Torment and Tyranny—wrote its story and dialogue . It’s the kind of game where losing just makes you want to play another round.

Into the Breach is available on Steam for $14.99.