#Ftl faster than light walkthrough movie

It deftly flicks tiny switches that have huge effects upon a constant refrain of kill bugs > keep your mechs alive > don't let civilian buildings be destroyed in the process. Small maps, total unit counts that rarely reach double figures - a small and repetitive thing, surely.Īnd that's the alluring genius of Into The Breach. I rifle through my folder of screenshots to illustrate this post, and without the context of the robots I cared about, the buildings I was terrified might collapse, the victory I was jubilant about pulling off against seemingly impossible odds, they all look meaninglessly interchangeable. There's an argument to be made - a very superficial argument - that Into The Breach is effectively always the same, that it has too few moving parts, that random map layouts can't save each mission from being, at most, a palette-swap made up of the same few, recurring elements. Skill and equipment unlocks, meanwhile, do play an occasional part, but they're infrequent and subtle enough to never steal focus from the core objective - to win (or, at least, don't die). The entirety of every map is visible from the first turn and the length of it can be crossed in two turns. Optional objectives never divert you from primary objectives, but instead ask you to fold in an extra element of risk as you pursue them. Mission briefings and debrief are never more than a couple of lines of instant text either side of a mission. You don't control buildings or support units, just a squad of three very different mechs that attack with chess-like specificity. It's just that Into The Breach has aggressively removed all distractions. Yet this is not because everything happens at speed - in fact, every mission, hell, every action in every turn of every mission feels momentous, with every action and reaction entirely transparent. An entire campaign takes about as long as a single mid-game XCOM mission if you're lucky (and a lot less if you aren't), while a freshly-brewed pot of tea will still be steaming hot after a single battle. Anything that does not specifically and immediately play into where you're going to move your three units and what you're going to make them punch, shoot or shove has been excised. This is all presented as a small-headcount strategy game that's leaner than Mo Farah on a gluten-free diet. Meeting certain in-mission objectives can replenish losses, but the balancing act is so delicate that one bad turn can erase all gains - and more. If too many buildings fall across the course of a campaign, so too does Earth. Simply slaying every bug that spawns on the map would be relatively straightforward, but preventing them from levelling a clutch of buildings in the process is where the real challenge lies.

#Ftl faster than light walkthrough movie

You've got a team of hot-shot soldiers and you need to make 'em go splat the aliens - it's a familiar theme, obviously sipping from an XCOM vein, but giving it a bit of a Japanese monster movie or Pacific Rim remix, thanks to a choice of scale that casts the goodies and baddies alike as beings the size of nearby skyscrapers.Īnd, crucially, those skyscrapers must be protected, for within them live the last dregs of humanity in this timeline. In practice, that's a great conceit that has very little bearing on proceedings, outside of choosing which one of your mech pilots you can carry over to your next attempt at saving the world.

Survivors from the future develop a double-whammy of time-travel tech and giant mechs, enabling them to journey back to the days before total destruction and seek to prevent the bugs from wiping out the last of humanity. Big ol' space-bugs killed almost everyone years ago. But this particular end of the world is a glorious one, and one I will happily keep experiencing for years to come. In other words, you've only got yourself to blame for the total wipeout of humanity. There is no calamity here that cannot be traced back to your own actions. Yet the really startling change is that, unlike FTL, Into The Breach is rarely a game of chance, of random, cruel loss or sudden fortune, but instead is almost pathologically fair, even if it often doesn't feel like it. It has moved from space-bound chaos to ground-based decisions, from spaceship crew management to mech vs horror-bug warfare, even from real-time to turn-based combat. Though they share a soul of permadeath and moment-to-moment dilemmas, entire limbs have been lopped off and casually thrown aside, teeth and hair uprooted and plugged back in at strange new angles, eyeballs moved to places that were never designed to have eyeballs. Look not to what high-speed, turn-based, sci-fi strategy wonder Into The Breach shares with its timeless predecessor FTL: Faster Than Light, but instead to how aggressively different it is.