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Impression: Into the Breach
There are few things that prime the pump more than hearing “from the creators of FTL.” That was one of those games that seemed to come out of nowhere with a simple-yet-actually-brutally-complex system wrapped up in a sweet indie game package and threw me for a loop. It was ultimately a good loop, but a loop nonetheless.
Despite all that, I had hitherto heard about, got excited for, and then completely forgot about Into the Breach. Until I realized it was on the Xbox Game Pass… and leaving shortly.
Into the Breach is essentially a puzzle game. You command three time-traveling pilots who are trying to protect the remnants of humanity from the Vek by piloting giant mechs. Each turn, the Vek (e.g. aliens) will move around the grid-based map and telegraph the actions they are about to take. During your turn, each mech can make one move and one action to try and foil the Vek’s plans before it occurs. While killing the Vek will cancel their action, the primary mechanism is typically “pushing” the Vek out of place on the grid.
As a general example, the default mech can perform a punch that deals 2 damage and pushes the target back 1 square. Many Vek have 3 or more HP, so this attack by itself will not kill a Vek that is about to attack a skyscraper full of people. But instead of attacking the skyscraper in front of it, that punched Vek will move 1 square away and instead attack whatever is in front of it in that new square. If it’s another skyscraper… well, oops. It could be empty air though. Or even another Vek, if you are clever enough. Or if the Vek was standing next to water/a giant pit/the telegraphed impact location of deadly lightning or whatever, it will die instantly. If the square is blocked, the pushed Vek will take an extra 1 damage and deal 1 damage to whatever blocked its path.
The default squad is the punching mech, a tank that deals 1 damage from range in cardinal directions, and artillery that deals one damage at a location and pushes everyone in cardinal directions 1 square away from the impact. If you successfully clear islands, you can spend reputation points to purchase additional items that can be equipped to give your mechs different abilities. For example, the punching mech can get a shield that makes the Vek turn around instead of pushing them, the artillery unit can get shells that light squares on fire, and so on.
If you cannot tell already, the gameplay ends up both simple and complex at the same time. Victory occurs when X number of turns complete, so you don’t really need to kill every Vek on the screen. Missions always have bonus objections which can complicate things. Incoming Vek reinforcements are telegraphed, and they can be prevented from spawning if their square is blocked – it will deal 1 damage to your mechs, or another Vek if one is pushed there.
Having said all that, this game can also be brutal. The Power Grid represents your life total of the run and it carries over through every mission. Vek destroying 1 building results in 1 less Power Grid for every mission thereafter. While you can take on missions that grant replacement power, that comes at the opportunity cost of missions that reward more reputation, which you spend on buying gear to enhance your team. Your own mechs have HP that is repaired between battles, but losing your HP in a battle will kill the pilot, which results in all their unlocked abilities going away.
I got super frustrated at one point until I realized… this is a puzzle roguelike. Some situations will go south fast with nothing you could reasonably do. Sometimes the Vek will “waste” all of their attacks on your mechs, which you can simply walk away from. Other times the Vek will spread out and attack buildings everywhere. In a worst case scenario, you can abandon the timeline you are in and take one pilot with you into a fresh game.
Ultimately, Into the Breach is a decently fun puzzle game. It’s no FTL, but it’s in the same quadrant. I just wish they would port this game to mobile, where it would be a perfect fit IMO. Between this and a mobile Slay the Spire, I might never be productive again.
Dungeon of the Endless
I was in a mood for a new roguelike for those times when you want to play something for 10 minutes (but end up spending 2 hours), so I picked up Dungeon of the Endless. After finally completing the first ship on Too Easy mode – having died a dozen times in frustrating ways on Easy mode (only two options at the start) – I’m not sure that I’m up to playing any more.
No, no there is not.
The core mechanics to this game are actually really novel and layered. The goal is to open new rooms until you find the exit, then move the crystal to said exit. Each time you open a door though, you trigger a Tower Defense-esque round where enemies may or may not pour from every unpowered room that you have discovered (unless characters are parked in those rooms). You can power and unpower rooms at will, but are limited to a certain number of powered rooms based on your Dust level. Dust is discovered by opening rooms and killing enemies.
Additionally, each door that gets opened gives you X amount of Industry, Science, and Food, which can be augmented by building components in powered rooms. Oh, and there are defenses you can place, new tech to research, items to equip, your characters can level up by using Food, and so on.
If it sounds complicated… it actually isn’t, amazingly. While you can order your characters (up to four) around, you can only tell them to go to given rooms; they attack automatically. Eventually you can unlock extra abilities, which generally last less than 10 seconds and thereafter take 2-3 rooms to recharge. You can sometimes get clever combos going, but it’s mostly panic button stuff.
What ends up being frustrating though, is how the game sorta becomes more of a Press Your Luck game than roguelike. Your accumulated resources carry over to each new floor, so there is always a tension between placing defenses (which cost Industry) to be extra safe, and/or just going for the exit, and/or opening a few more rooms to get some more resources/items. You can sometimes get screwed going the extra mile with Binding of Isaac or FTL encounters, but for the most part your twitch gameplay skills can save you. With Dungeon of the Endless though, there is a thin margin between being okay and getting slaughtered. Since everything is practically automated – you cannot choose which alien your characters shoot at – there isn’t much you can do when you get a gang of suicide enemies amongst cannon fodder or tanky enemies.
Hell, I’ve played the game for 10 hours now and I don’t know what the suicide enemies look like. This is definitely one of the those “discover on your own look up everything in the Wiki” games.
I dunno. I may play a little bit more to see if I’m just not grokking the experience. With Binding of Isaac and especially FTL, getting that “Aha!” moment was both sudden and mind-blowing in terms of how much further I could go. I’m not sure the same is possible here, but we’ll see.
——-
Since writing the above, I played for another 5-10 hours and my conclusions are basically the same. I feel like I understand the essential essence of the game… but there isn’t anything I can do when things like this happen:
Oh, hey, I lost the dice roll four times in a row.
Opened 23 doors, still didn’t discover the randomly placed exit. GG. Since monster waves get worse and worse the more doors you open, there was literally nothing I could have done here. Other than chose to go south and west first, back when my map was blank.
Play perfectly and still get randomly screwed? Yeah, welcome to roguelikes. But in most other ones, I feel like you have room to improve your own skills. In this instance, my RNG was the only meaningful skill I was lacking.
This game is definitely going straight in my Steam graveyard category.
Over the Hump
Okay, so maybe things aren’t looking all that grim after all.
Just like with FTL, and just like with PlanetSide 2, I have gotten over the WoW “dissatisfaction hump” to emerge on the other side. I am still annoyed with the pitiful AH situation and Blizzard’s related policy of indefinite realm life-support, but I am (finally) having some – dare I say it? – fun. It was a close thing, though. In fact, I feel somewhat guilty for rewarding game design that contains dissatisfaction humps at all.
As mentioned before, I started out playing my namesake paladin in Ret leveling mode. The rotation seemed unbearably clunky, and I wasn’t having fun. Indeed, it was not until yesterday that I started feeling comfortable hitting Exorcism on cooldown, instead of the much more elegant proc-rotation that Exorcism was tied to back in the day.
With that feeling “off,” I tried to transition to my Elemental shaman, mainly because she is my resource toon (Herbalism + Mining). The Elemental rotation hasn’t changed much, but Blizzard increased the missile speed of Lightning Bolt and somehow that was throwing me off all goddamn day. Well, that, and the fact that mobs were no longer dying in a single LBx2-FS-LvB rotation, meaning that I ended up having to hardcast several Lightning Bolts into mobs’ faces.
In a fit of desperation, I settled for my warrior, as she was the Blacksmith and thus the only toon capable of making some blue weapons.
Oh. My. God. Was this where Blizzard was hiding all the fun?
Simply put, the warrior was amazingly fun. Every 90 seconds I was rounding up 5+ mobs and Brostorming (ah, memories) them all to death. Even when I didn’t have the cooldowns up, I would frequently round up at least three mobs at a time because why not? Impending Victory, just like Victory Rush before it, turns the Hybrid Tax on its head with a cheap, 20% HP heal every mob death leading to an unending chain of corpses that ceases only when the zone is depopulated. Nevermind Charging every 12 seconds. Or how the stance redesign means you don’t have to worry about weaving stance requirements into all these cool buttons.
Hrgh. I kinda want to start playing right now…
At the moment, I am back on the paladin simply because that character is my historical main. And, you know, I was informed about all these new BoA heirloom weapons and Az is the only toon with 500+ Archaeology. In fact, that is sort of where I am right now: spending probably 3 minutes reading about WoW for every minute playing. Which, of course, is exactly how I played the game for 4+ years.
Review: FTL: Faster Than Light
Game: FTL: Faster Than Light
Recommended price: $9.99 (full) / Bundle
Metacritic Score: 83
Completion Time: ~2.5 (or 25) hours
Buy If You Like: Harsh roguelikes, micromanaging space ships, indie games
This happened during the FIRST BATTLE in one of my playthroughs.
FTL is absolutely one of those games which, had I not forced myself to dig beneath the brutal, unforgiving crust, I would have written off as awful after the first four hours of playing. While this may have been par for the course for roguelikes, I had hitherto been spoiled by The Binding of Isaac, which not only had a more generous feeling of incremental progression, but a more direct correlation between skill and outcome. With Isaac, awesome twitch-skills is nearly enough by itself to propel you to success. With FTL, success is largely determined by how many coin-flips you win early on.
At least, it seemed that way at first.
…actually, no, coin-flips are still pretty important.
The basic premise is that you are a Federation ship with secret knowledge trying to outrun the advancing Rebel army. Each “turn” you move to an unknown point on the star map and either encounter an enemy ship, a text scenario of some sort, a Store, or possibly nothing at all. Combat takes place in real-time, although you can pause as much as you like. When attacking, you can choose specific ship systems like Weapons or Shields to disable them, or perhaps continually attack their O2 rooms to suffocate the enemy crew. Meanwhile, the enemy is doing their best to repair your damage and blow you up in turn. Some encounters can take place with environment hazards like asteroid fields, solar flares, or ion storms. Defeating enemies randomly gains you Fuel, Missiles, Drones, Scrap, or even ship components. While combat is pretty nuanced and skill-heavy, the text scenarios are the coin-flips where you either win needed materials, or lose big, without much room inbetween.
Once I realized that the game is meant to be played on Easy instead of Normal though, FTL blossomed like an origami flower. Getting more Scrap (upgrade currency) and less ridiculously-armed enemy ships granted the breathing room necessary to learn about juggling power supply, the importance of simultaneous weapon fire to pierce shields, which weapons can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, and so on.
I also was able to get a handle on which events were riskier than others, and how many of them can be mitigated with certain ship upgrades or items. Since failing (i.e. losing the coin flip) events typically results in losing a crew member, I began to understand that outside the beginning few levels (where restarting is less painful), it just wasn’t worth the risk. But it was that precise lesson in risk management that eventually started turning every Easy run into a full clear, and then doing the same in Normal.
Blue options are always better.
At the time of this writing, I have 45 hours logged in FTL. Part of what keeps me coming back is the cohesion of the overall package, from the 16-bit graphics to 16-bit sound. A bigger part is the very randomness I despised originally. When you start the game, you have access to just a single ship. Getting 2 out of 3 ship-specific achievements will unlock a different configuration of that ship type; these alternate ships not only have different room layouts, but also different starting crew races and weapon loadouts. Entirely new ship types, each with their own alternate layouts, are further unlocked via gameplay. There are a total of 9 different ships, which means 18 different configurations.
What all of this combines into is an extremely slick, subconscious form of progression. Your games with the Engi’s drone-focused ship are going to be much different than your Rockmen’s missile-focused ship. While most ships are going to look basically the same upgrade-wise by the time you get to the final encounter – the ridiculousness of the flagship sees to that – the getting there becomes a game unto itself.
That is sort of the whole point of roguelikes, of course.
Will I make it? Spoiler Alert: Yes, because I’m awesome like that.
Ultimately, I am recommending this game at full price or Bundle price because it comes down to how much early frustration you are able to handle before giving up. You have no idea how close I was to uninstalling after I died in the screenshot at the top of the review, for example. If scenarios like that make you leery, I suggest waiting for FTL to hit Humble Bundle or Indie Royale as it inevitably will.
If, however, you are the type of person willing and able to muscle through rough first impressions to get at the delicious marrow in the bones of your enemies, buy FTL right now. Not only will you be getting a pretty ridiculous hour-per-dollar gameplay ratio (get 240 hours from a $60 game lately?), but you will be supporting one of the first indie game Kickstarter successes.
Breaking the Magic
For the first time in almost four weeks, I played a different game. This is bad news for ArenaNet.
Okay, maybe not really.
I have mentioned before that I dislike playing multiple games: my M.O. is to spend my entire focus on one item, suck all the marrow from its bones, complete it, and then move on. Part of the reasoning behind this behavior is that I have zero expectations I will play a game again. And the reasoning behind that expectation is that much of the fun I derive from playing a game is conquering its systems/logic and experiencing its story, neither of which usually holds up past initial completion. And where am I getting all this replay time anyway?
There are exceptions of course, the Fallouts and the Skyrims and FPS games. Some games I play for the visceral joy of it too. For as much as the hotkey MMO combat style is derided, I do generally find it entertaining. In fact, I would suggest everyone has to on some level right? How else do you stomach 200+ hours in these MMOs?
Anyway, I had wanted to spend some of my gems on Character Slot expansions to give the Warrior and Necromancer another shot. Nope, the AH was down. Again. I almost logged off for the night right then. Instead, I set my jaw, and did my level best to go through the motions. The moment I got my Daily Achievement or whatever it is called, I logged off.
Slouching back in the computer chair, staring at the empty computer monitor, what I was feeling was this:
A clear sign one’s (gaming) dosage needs increased.
Then I realized: “Hey, I have plenty of other games that actually feel meaningful to play.”
Existential crisis averted.
Of course, a roguelike is perhaps not the best rebound game, especially as brutal as FTL can be. Nevertheless, sixteen hours later, I am feeling pretty good about completing Easy four times and moving back to the most misleading “Normal” difficulty ever designed with a straight face. And after that? Plenty of indie games, Battlefield 3 just released their Armored Kill mini-expansion, and hey I bought Borderland 2 for like $36 before it came out. Maybe I should get to downloading that, eh? Guild Wars 2 will merely be the background flavor at best, as I continue slogging my way to 80 and through what passes as a story so I can say I did so.
Although Mists is penciled in on the To Do list, I won’t be there on Tuesday. Probably not. No, no, definitely not. Well… ugh. We’ll see. Best time-frame I can give is: Soon™.
In An Age 
Questionable Space Battles
Feb 27
Posted by Azuriel
Sometimes I find myself inexplicably drawn to building spaceships and watching them explode. With Steam having a 75% sale on the Gratuitous Space Battles DLC this past weekend, it seemed as good a time as any to try and get that fix.
The problem is that I am having a hard time convincing myself that the game isn’t complete bullshit.
You can read my original review here, but suffice it to say, GSB is essentially a game about building spaceships and nothing else. I think one of the DLCs or patches gave you the ability to change orders mid-battle at the cost of high score tracking or whatever, but under normal circumstances you design ships, give general orders, and let’em go. I mentioned in the review that I quickly came across a strategy that essentially wins 100% of the time – basically missile spam with occasional target painter that makes missile 100% accurate – but it seems clear to me now that it has been nerfed to oblivion. Anti-missile tech existed in the vanilla game already, e.g. guidance scramblers and Point Defense batteries, although it seems much, much stronger than it ever was so many months ago.
It is fine having counters to things, whatever. When I was looking at alternatives to missile spam though, I kept running into problems with the ship building aspects. As you might imagine in these sort of games, you have to juggle each component’s energy usage, crew requirements, weight, and so on. Except… all roads lead to the same max-level components and heavy mixing of weapons. It feels… banal. If I want an all-beam ship, let me build an all-beam ship without gimping on shields or armor. The weakness of specialization is supposed to be being vulnerable to counters, not it being nigh-impossible to actually specialize.
Or maybe I’m just all sour grapes because this happened:
Was totally wiped out, killing zero enemy ships. They all had ~20% HP or less.
I will continue plugging along with Gratuitous Space Battles for a while longer, but in the meantime, if you have any suggestions for spaceship designing/battle games, let me know in the comments below. I was obsessed with an ancient game called Stars! back in the day, and spent 40+ hours most recently on Space, Pirates and Zombies; dunno if FTL really counts, but I spent a lot of time with that one too. It can be a 4-X game, it can be FPS, it can be whatever it is, as long as it has a ship-designing component. And, preferably, no bullshit.
It just can’t be EVE. I have little interest in experimenting resulting in the destruction of weeks of game time.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: 4-X, Bullshit, EVE, FPS, FTL, Gratutious Space Battles, Missiles, Sci-Fi, Ship Building, SPAZ