Into the Breach: tactics in which you cannot miss

Into the Breach launched on 27 February 2018 for Windows, reached macOS and Nintendo Switch that August, Linux in 2020, and phones on 19 July 2022 alongside the free Advanced Edition update. It was made by Jay Ma and Matthew Davis, the same two who made FTL. At The Game Awards 2018 it won Best Strategy Game.

It is chess with mechs defending cities from things that live underground. The board is eight squares by eight. A mission lasts a few turns. A run lasts about an hour. And all of it is organised around one decision that separates the game from the rest of its genre.

No hidden information

At the start of the turn you see exactly what every enemy will do: where it will strike, which tile, with what force. Not a probability, not a range, not a hit chance — the specific tile. Misses do not exist. Random damage does not exist. Everything that will happen at the end of the turn is shown to you in advance.

Only one form of play follows from that: you are not trying to beat the enemy, you are trying to move it. Your mechs shove enemies one tile, swap places with them, lift them into the air, drop rocks on them. A creature that was about to hit a building hits the creature next to it instead. A turn in which you killed nobody but redirected four attacks into empty ground is a perfectly played turn.

By removing randomness from tactics, Subset Games also removed the excuse. A loss here is always yours: the information was all on screen.

You are not defending yourself

The second decision matters just as much. The bar you watch is not your mechs' health but the island's power grid. Buildings take damage, the grid loses segments, and when the segments run out the campaign is over. A mech, by contrast, is expendable: losing a machine hurts but survives, whereas letting a blow land on a residential block does not.

Hence a choice no other tactics game offers: put your own machine in the path of a strike to shield a building. The game is built so that self-sacrifice pays — and that changes the whole register. You are not a commander preserving an army, you are an emergency crew.

What does not work

The campaign is short and repetitive. There are four islands and roughly a dozen mech squads, and after twenty hours you have seen every situation the game knows how to build. The Advanced Edition added pilots and weapons but did not change the structure.

Second, the phone interface. The precision here is absolute; a finger is not. On a small screen a mistaken tap costs the run, and the game offers no undo.

Third, the story. The inter-mission text is well written, but campaign events are barely tied to it, and after two or three runs you are skipping past.

Why 9.0

The nine is not for scale but for the absence of a single unnecessary part. Eight by eight, a handful of turns, no fog of war and no dice: this is the most honest tactical system I know, explainable in full in two minutes and worth taking apart for years. The point comes off for a short campaign and repetition. Everything else is a model of design with nothing left to discard.