Into the Breach review: Starship Troopers meets chess in a tactics masterpiece

Enlarge / Sorry to disrupt this dystopian landscape from the game Into the Breach with our praise. But we didn't want you to miss how much we love this game. (credit: Subset Games / Aurich Lawson)

My favorite games-video, board, outdoor, whatever-stand out because of the stories they inadvertently rope me into. And I don't mean pre-written ones. At their best, these games combine otherworldly, world-saving stakes with wild challenges, reasonable ways to overcome them, and a sprinkling of come-from-behind momentum shifts on either side.

I have had the unbelievable pleasure of playing Into the Breach, the newest game from the makers of 2012's indie hit FTL, for a few months. That span of time has been littered with holy-cow story moments in which I was nearly a guardian of the ga... er, universe. I have failed, again and again, to save humanity from an alien-bug scourge. I have clumsily sacrificed dozens of my own robo-suit soldiers by issuing a range of idiotic orders. And I have torn the fabric of time to rewind and try again, always feeling one step closer to mastering this galactic-scale war.

But it's not just the "I can't believe I pulled that off" factor that drives me to recommend this just-one-more-game approach to tactical combat. Into the Breach is just as charming for boiling down similar thrills found in FTL and making them work for pretty much any experience level of computer gamer.

Call it a Starship Troopers version of chess-to describe the delectable future-soldier combat and the way its approachable pieces and systems evolve into something much greater.

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