This is one of those games I keep going back to. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s “Zen” for me, but it’s never not fun, and it’s not demanding. I fail, a lot, and I’ve got one pilot maxed out who’s been through like 10 timelines. But it’s just always fun to go back to. I really like the mechanic of moving units around the map, pushing them into pits, etc, as well as just dealing damage.
Also, I found it in the Google Play Store as NETFLIX Into The Breach. It’s downloading now.
It might be out but impossible to find: looking up “into the breach” gave no results, while looking up “netflix into the breach” did.
Ridiculous.
This is a good point… explains why the game didn’t click for me. Though, to be fair, I never gave it much of a chance.
Yep, it came up on a search but I had to scroll down. Ridiculous, indeed
Anyway, this game is as awesome on mobile as I always knew it would be. Hope it escapes the Netflix shackles someday.
Crushed the first island on Hard with the bomby guys… on to the desert island…
is it fair to say that you are so good at this game?
he’s just a guy
standing in front of some bomby guys
asking them to blow shit up
had no idea there was a free update - nice!
Though, man, but my skills are all rusted. Doesn’t help that they’ve added in a bunch of new guys/abilities/foes…and did i suck with the bomber crew. Doing better with my arachnobuddies though
I’m liking the game more this second time. It has a nice amount of variety before, but now it’s really amped up. So many things can happen in any given turn.
One thing I don’t like is the progression to unlock the squads. There are some hard to get challenges to get stars, and the other (main) way to get stars is to win a campaign with different squads and number of islands. And that’s the issue, I don’t like how you can play for 150 minutes, die on the final fight or close to it, and win zilch after that effort. A more normal progression, with a campaign xp bar which would take in account number of enemies defeated/objectives done in total (say, like in Monster Train) would have been preferable.
I get that our brains are designed to give us dopamine when we get tossed rewards, but I’m also okay with the fun of playing the game being the reward.
The other thing is that most games do unlockables in a stupid way. You play the game a bit, you lose, then you get “rewarded” by part of the game that was locked off being opened up to you – and it’s a card or a unit that was much more powerful than what you already had, and guess what, you were never going to win a run without that unit or card. You were given a gimped-ass game from the jump.
Into the Breach does unlockables the right way. You start with the most powerful squad, the Rift Walkers. Each new squad you unlock is harder, in a new way.
So if you’re having difficulty unlocking more squads, you’re probably not ready for them yet. Those squads are just harder modes. If you weren’t already winning, you definitely won’t win with those new ones. You have to git gud!
But I also do realize that even though the other squads are harder, our brains are ALSO wired to appreciate variety so we want to try them before we’re ready.
Into the Breach is so flawlessly designed that it’s giving us exactly what we need. Not what we think we want. It’s like that Rolling Stones song.
(I can’t get no) mecha faction?
You can’t always get what you want.
I’m playing it on Easy on the iPhone and enjoying it a lot more than I did at launch.
So i’ve had a lot of success with the arachno crew - once you get that spider-flinger the +1 damage upgrade, he’s money. I’ve had a few goes with the fire crew, and they’re a little different, but i think i can make them work. I bounced off the bomb crew pretty hard, and the smoke crew even harder.
What’s the difference between easy and normal? Fewer enemies? Do I miss out on anything by selecting “easy”?
Netflix Into the Breach? Well this is some kind of bullshit - I need a Netflix subscription to play this game on my phone??
Easy is “Reduced enemy spawn rates. Score is reduced by 50%.”
I got like five crews deep originally but haven’t played in about three or four years so I just started from scratch again. Such a great game. Shocking that they added so much, so late. Props to the creators.
Why does Ralph look so much like Abraham Lincoln?
Yeah, sucks. Fortunately my girlfriend has an active subscription so I can play, but :P
Most of your post has been written with a premise I don’t think it’s true:
Rift Walkers are a good squad, yeah. But mostly, they are solid and straightforward, while later squads can more more tricky or gimmicky. But most of them aren’t “harder”, except a few. Some are as good as Rift Walkers, and others are imo stronger, once you spend 30 minutes to get to know their tricks.
I already won with Rift Walkers, so I guess I’m ready for the later squads? That doesn’t have anything to do with what I said, that it was more related to the pace of unlocking squads. It’s slow, and it can be frustrating because what I have mentioned.
This is the thing that people who write things like this don’t get: I don’t want to git gud!. I want the gameplay variety of having more squads, that’s what I want.
Again, it’s a question of pace. I could spend 30 hours in getting ‘gud’, but by that time, I will be tired of the game. So if I unlock 3 new squads when finally reaching the end of the process of getting good, it will be too late already, because I will be uninstalling the game by that time and i won’t try them.
There are 13 squads in the game. What I want, ideally speaking, is to play each squad once, making a total of 13 “four islands” runs of the game. Maybe repeat with my two favorite squads an extra run. 130 minutes per full run * 15 = 32,5 hours of very varied gameplay. That’s the platonic ideal.
I feel the progression instead has been designed as if I was going to play 70 or 80 hours of the game. You have to get three victories with a given squad (2 island goal, 3 island goal, 4 island goal) to get three stars. Getting three victories need 6 runs with the same squad, if your win ratio is 50% (in practical terms it will be less as you will get some of the challenges, sooner or later), that gives you 3 stars to get a new squad (although the new squads more more expensive!), and repeat the process with it.
It’s a common flaw, all game designers want to believe it’s going to be their game that is going to get players addicted and wanting more, so of course the players are going to play 80 or 100 or even more hours. They fear if they frontload too much the unlocks in their games, hardcore players that play those number of hours won’t get any new toys in the 50th or 60th hour, but this is a tradeoff, as explained, there are people like me that will get penalized.
It’s all a question then of how you distributive the unlock/new toys over time. Do you think your player average time will be 30 hours? if you have 10 unlocks, then you design it for the players to get a new one every 3 hours. If you think they are going to play 60 hours, then you reward them every 6 hours, etc.
In any case this is all having fun doing some armchair designer talk about progression, the game itself is great and it’s easy to unlock everything editing a file
An example of a game that did this right was Slay the Spire. The unlocks are fast early on, giving you fast rewards and a feeling of progress a while learning, and mitigating being too overwhelmed by the size of the card pool. Then you have increasing levels of difficulty if you finish all that and you want to master the game.