In the distant future, mankind is on its last leg, threatened by gigantic alien creatures known as the Vek that breed beneath the Earth’s surface. Your mission is to defend civilization from these monsters with small squads of mechs. If you fail, you must travel back in time to try again.
That’s the story of Into the Breach, a new Advance Wars-like microstrategy title from the creators of the smash hit Faster Than Light (FTL). It’s a stunningly innovative take on grid-based strategy that comes to Steam on February 27.
The biggest charm of Into the Breach is how it maintains a steep level of challenge on a very tiny scale. Maps are usually no bigger than eight tiles by eight tiles and levels can sometimes be over in a matter of minutes – but that doesn’t mean they are any easier than a game with a map ten times the size. You might die tens of times when trying to conquer one of these tiny experiences.
Unlike other strategy games, Into the Breach doesn’t rely on any level of random chance, instead laying everything out in front of you before it happens. While that may seem like it goes against the idea of a challenging strategy game, it really emphasises the layers of detail and information that you need to digest. Each small map is filled with environmental hazards, structures you need to protect, and a selection of enemies whose movements are also mapped out for you ahead of time.
It can seem like a lot to remember as you analyze a map for the first time, but once you’ve gotten into the flow of the game it feels like a natural challenge. Each individual level – they are sorted into different continents that provide different types of terrain – has specific victory requirements that get more complicated as the game goes on.
What’s interesting is how different this experience is from Subset Games’ previous title. FTL was another strategy game that relied heavily on chance and random factors that could influence the outcome of each run. The creators say that many of the decisions around Into the Breach were made through lessons learned while creating FTL, ultimately leading to a more focused, strategic experience. Keeping things simple was key.
“We're simply a very small team with two primary developers; we try not to tackle design problems that we cannot solve ourselves,” says designer Justin Ma. “We prefer experiences that are trimmed down to have the most streamlined and clear game mechanics as possible.”
In order to be in control of so many factors, Ma and fellow developer Davis had to scale down the scope of each level significantly, which led to the minimalist design with its very small maps. This small scope is the glue that holds Into the Breach together; making the maps any larger or adding any other factors that affect the battlefield would only bring countless more possibilities for the developers to consider.
Like most games, Into the Breach looked a lot different when the team was in mid-development. Ma and Davis had a larger vision of what the game could be when they set out on a new project. “The strategy element of the game had a much bigger role during the first few years of development – we tried managing a city, maintaining multiple squads, and other things,” Ma says. “However, over time we narrowed the game scope to be as tight as possible, eventually resulting in the final game structure.”
And though that scope is fairly tight, Into the Breach is still a complicated game. You need to consider friendly fire, collateral damage, your own energy levels, and a number of other elements that aren’t as straightforward, such as how an enemy with flight capabilities won’t be affected by seismic activity.
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Every death can be chalked up to a mistake you made; nothing is left to luck. That design decision comes primarily from Ma’s own philosophy. “If you can blame the game for a bad outcome, there's less opportunity for growth as a player,” he says. “You can't be certain if you made a tactical mistake or if you made all of the right choices but still failed due to chance.”
Losing a round in Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, or X-COM due to an enemy's lucky critical hit or an unlikely miss by one of your units is one of the most frustrating aspects of modern grid-based strategy titles. The worst part of scenarios like that is that there is nothing learned from them; you can’t always prepare for the chance that a computer-controlled enemy might skirt by on luck alone.
“If developers entirely avoid random chance in their games, the result of every outcome can be more clear to the player, meaning they have no one to blame for their failure but themselves,” says Ma. “Not every player likes this type of game, but I generally only dedicate a significant amount of time to games where I feel I learn something every time I play.”
You’ll still die repeatedly as you try to conquer the Vek – but hopefully you’ll get better with each death.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK