Into the Breach review – an impossibly elegant sci-fi strategy game

PC; Subset Games
Pitting giant mechs against alien bugs, this winningly focused post-apocalyptic spree eschews resource management in favour of living moment by moment

Post-apocalyptic chess with time travel, collapsing worlds and tanks the size of skyscrapers: any summary of Into the Breach makes it sound like the most over-complicated game in the world. But remarkably, this lunch break-friendly and charmingly chunky turn-based war game strips away so much of the stuffiness and over-complexity of the strategy game genre, without sacrificing what makes pitching armies against each other in the comforting blue glow of a monitor so endlessly tense and captivating.

Your "army" in this case constitutes three "mechs" (gigantic assault vehicles), facing down about a dozen similarly oversized alien bugs on each mission. These invaders nearly destroyed a future Earth, but survivors from the even further future were able to send an assortment of war machines back through time to reverse the apocalypse. Lest that sound like overwrought Terminator vs Pacific Rim fan fiction, rest assured the storytelling is kept to a brisk minimum. It's there to prop up robot-bug brawls and to ingeniously justify restarting after a failed campaign; the survivors simply send back more mechs and try again.