Into The Breach - Best Roguelike Ever

A screenshot from the game showing a mission where 4 Vek conveniently lined up for a single laser attack to kill them. Also Spider Boss keeps spawning a lot of spiders eggs each turn, and 3 more Vek are trying to get out of the ground. Best of luck defending that tower.

It's a very information-rich interface.

I wrote the explanation what's a Roguelike and what isn't for a reason. That reason is Into The Breach - possibly the best game I found this year. By the way for some other great game recommendations, check this out.

Overview of a Playthrough

Each playthrough represents a timeline of a fight between humans and Vek (insect aliens).

You start with a time-traveler pilot and a squad of 3 mechs, getting some upgrades on the way. There are 4 corporate islands you try to liberate in whichever order you choose. After liberating 2-4 of them, you can attack the final hive volcano island.

Every corporate island is 4 randomly generated battles (you have a bit of choice which battles to take), and 1 slightly less random final battle. Hive volcano islands is a 2-part special battle.

In other words, it's a Roguelike dungeon of 12-22 levels.

Difficulty is adjusted sensibly, so whichever island you pick first will be easiest, and difficulty of the final hive volcano fight increases based on how long you waited to fight it. You get upgrades (pilot xp, new time traveler pilots, extra mech reactors, new weapons) at about the rate aliens get their upgrades, but it depends on your squad and on how well you play if game gets a bit easier or a bit harder as it progresses.

The whole playthrough takes about 1h (for 2 islands) to 2h (for 4 islands), but it depends on how long you spend thinking. There's no time pressure, except for one achievement.

Metacampaign

Playthroughs are short, but there's a lot of metagame. There's 18 time traveler pilots each with special skill. There's 8 squads of 3 mechs each. You can also play as a random squad (you can reroll any number of times before pressing start), and you can make a custom squad of your choice from unlocked mechs.

You start with just 1 pilot and 1 squad unlocked. There's 3 achievements each for every one of 10 squads, and 25 achievements you can get as anyone. Achievements are currency you can use to unlock more squads. Pilots are unlocked by meeting them in the game - either rescuing them from a time pod, or getting them as a reward for perfectly finishing a corporate island.

Achievements, especially squad specific achievements, are generally great at guiding you towards interesting things you can do, and don't feel like stupid gimmicks or puns at all.

Once you finish, by winning or losing, all surviving pilots time travel to different timelines, and you can follow one of them. In such case, you'll start next campaign with a levelled up pilot. Or you can pick up any other pilot but they'll start at lowest level.

There's also Secret Squad you can get if you get every achievement.

Arguably your starting pilot is the worst of all pilots, but your starting squad is probably second best, so nothing ever feels like "grinding".

Defensive Game

So far it probably sounds pretty whatever, but here it gets interesting. Battles don't need you to kill the Vek. What you need to do is protect buildings connected to the power grid. You can have at most 7 power, and any time a building gets damaged, your power grid takes 1 or 2 hits. If you survive 5 turns all remaining Vek run away.

Each mission has some other objectives too, and you get a bonus for every objective fulfilled. A lot of objectives are also defensive in nature - including the infamous train defence, generally considered the most difficult mission of all, but which mission is easy or hard depends on your squad a lot.

I think that's the first game I've seen which focuses on defence this way. Usually your goal is destroying all enemies, and usually timers go against you, not for you.

Any damaged mechs get automatically repaired for next battle, so taking hits to save buildings or other objectives is expected. If mech gets fully wrecked, it also kills the pilot, so next battle it will start without any of the pilot bonuses, but it's not a huge deal, and you can find replacement pilots as you go.

Fully Deterministic Game

Beyond defensive game, Into The Breach does something even more unique. Your turn is (almost) completely deterministic. Structure of each turn is:

• Vek move and prepare their attacks
• you move and attack with your mechs
• Vek attack and environmental effects happen in predefined order
• more Vek spawn

There's no RNG for movement or attacks - you know exactly how much damage will happen. This leads to some amazing gameplay, as you know where Vek is trying to attack, but many of your attacks push instead (or in addition to) of damaging. So you can push Vek out of the way so it attacks empty space, or other Vek, getting some ridiculous blowouts.

A small exception is that buildings have small random chance of resisting damage. Authors say this was added to avoid player paralysis, as without it pressing "End Turn" sometimes means unavoidable loss, so players would spend forever on their losing turn. The chance is very low (starts at 15%, gets into about 25%-ish eventually), and I'd recommend not relying on it, but maybe it's the only way.

While your one turn is nearly deterministic, the whole battle is not. For most missions, you know where Vek will spawn each turn, but you don't know which kind exactly (every island has a bunch of possible types by some procedural generation). You don't know where Vek are going to move and what they'll try to attack. You have to respond to such challenges a few times in each battle.

Difficulty Level

The game is pretty good at not throwing "RNG says fuck you, so now you lose" moments at you like many other Roguelikes (including FTL by same authors).

If your playthrough is going well, you get more upgrades, so it gets a bit easier. If you barely squeeze by, you get fewer upgrades, and it gets a bit harder. The difference isn't huge - early losses do not generally snowball.

In each battle, if you eliminate Vek very quickly, more Vek will spawn, and if you do it slowly, fewer Vek will spawn. This is pretty much necessary to balance squads which try to kill Vek with squads which try to just get them out of the way.

Game has huge number of mechanics with complex interactions, huge diversity of enemies, a lot of mission types, a lot of different mechs, weapons, and special pilot skills. It's going to take a long time to master this. It's quite good at explaining everything in-game, but even 80h+ in I kept discovering unexpected interactions.

There's "normal" difficulty, which I strongly recommend not playing at. Play on "easy" at least until you get decent and unlock all squads. There's also "hard", which I played once to get that achievement, and barely managed to win. You can unlock all achievements playing on easy on your own pace just fine. Exceptions are achievements for winning campaign on hard, and one for winning two corporate islands with Blitzkrieg squad in under 30 minutes, which were my last two achievements to get.

AI

The Vek are pretty dumb by design. Each of them does something totally reasonable individually, at least it would be if you could just stand still for a moment. They don't coordinate in any way whatsoever, and they like attacking buildings (which you generally need to save) and your mechs (which can often move out of the way) about equally.

Basically if you have 3 mechs, and there's 3 Vek attacking building or other objectives, dealing with them is usually straightforward enough. There will usually be more than 3 Vek at time, and often more than 3 attacking buildings - it's bigger challenge to have one mech deal with more than one Vek with one move. Or sometimes a Vek immobilizes a mech somehow, usually with a web, complicating your life too.

The challenge is mainly in the numbers. Now this is just vague estimate, but let's say Normal has about 1 extra Vek at each time compared with Easy, and Hard has 1 extra Vek compared with Normal. That doesn't look like much, but 3 vs 3 is usually straightforward, while every further Vek requires more and more complex strategy, so difficulty ramps up a lot, and you have lower margin for mistakes.

Graphics

It's all nice retro pixel art. The interface is really good at showing everything that's going on, even when there's a lot going on. There's a few minor issues like tiles affected by multiple effects often show just one (you can mouseover for others), but these are very rare.

tl;dr

10/10 Must Play

It's a strategy with reasonable playthrough time. It's a roguelike without bullshit RNG. It became a classic the moment it got released.

You can get it for £11.39 or regional equivalent.

Vanquish - the game Doom tried to be

This picture of armored dude shooting while sliding on rocket boots is very representative of what kind of game Vanquish is

I finally have a bit of free time to play games from my list. Most of the games are fairly whatever, but sometimes I find a real gem.

One such really fun game is Vanquish. To be fair, I might be biased, as I absolutely love first person shooters (and third person shooters are almost first person shooters), but Vanquish has very positive reception everywhere.

So it's a shooter, but instead of tactically running from cover to cover, it's just stupid fun all the way. You get rocket shoes, slow motion mode which triggers automatically when you're screwed, good deal of armor, nice variety of overpowered weapons, and a lot of enemies to kill. There's good variety of enemies, and a lot of bosses on the way. Controls are a bit nonstandard (you don't have to skip the tutorial), but movement feels really smooth.

Apparently this game was released on consoles back in 2010, but who cares, amirite? Graphics aren't anything amazing, as can be expected from a port from previous generation consoles, but everything is fast paced enough it doesn't matter all that much.

Doom tried to be this game

There was a fairly similar game, the rebooted Doom. It also tried to move away from cover based shooters, and get something more close and personal. In my opinion Doom failed miserably at it, while Vanquish utterly succeeds.

So combat in Doom and Vanquish is a lot of fun, no question about it. The difference is that Vanquish goes from combat to combat, with just a bit of breathing room and some mild cutscenes, while Doom would force the player to waste half an hour of their life wandering around the damn dungeon looking for some key card, or turn into a damn platformer. I'm pretty sure I died more often to fall damage than to enemies, and had to alt tab to find where those damn key cards were quite a few times before dropping Doom in disappointment.

The idea was probably to introduce some breaks between combat, but what Doom introduced weren't short breathers, it was pointless frustration and waste of time. By the time next combat happened I was more likely to be fed up with the game than excited.

Games are not movies

Anyway, even disregarding awful execution, the whole idea of breaks between fun sections is bad. Movies have them, because they last 3 hours without breaks, and watching action into action without any breaks gets tedious after a while. Participating in action does not - people often play games for whole nights.

Players also are far more in control than movie watchers. If you need a break for a snack, bathroom, cigarette, or whatever, just pause anytime, then get back to the action. Need a longer break? Quit or alt tab, and come back to it next day. It's nothing like the passive cinema experience. You don't have to play the whole game in one sitting.

Forced boredom sections in games are just a horrible idea. Stop treating games like movies.

And actually, while Vanquish doesn't have long breaks away from actions, it has so much diversity in kinds of action, with just the right amount of short breaks and short cutscenes, that it never feels monotonous.

tl;dr

Vanquish - 8/10
Doom (2016 reboot) - 4/10

You can get it from Steam for £15 or regional equivalent.