Into The Breach

For tactics on an entirely different scale, I cannot recommend Into The Breach enough. Another all timer, Into The Breach may look deceptively small, but it’s actually massive. You play as a mech squadron sent back from the apocalyptic future to combat an alien threat. While the action is rendered on what appears to be a tiny grid, the mechs and aliens are actually engaging in ruinous kaiju-style combat. Knocking back an enemy into a mountain, for example, threatens to make it crumble, and because of how powerful every unit is, Into the Breach feels way more like a sweeping tug-of-war than an all-out display of strength. If you were to wield your power incorrectly, you could threaten the surviving cities of humans on the map, which provide energy to the mechs.

I really love the clever engagements that arise from the fragile conditions of the world and the limitations of your units. For example, it may be advantageous to bombard a city in order to push away an alien that’s going to destroy it, or push one of your own mechs in the way of a projectile to spare a factory or a time pod with a recruitable unit. Manipulating factors of the environment, like forests that can be set on fire or dams that can be destroyed to make rivers, is key to surviving, which is often the real goal of Into The Breach rather than conquest. Ultimately, it spins a simple power fantasy into a game that calls into question the efficacy of that dream, while simultaneously creating novel and dynamic struggles to overcome and providing a whole new playbook of solutions. Into the Breach is one of the very best there is, and it’s all yours for $7.49 on GOG.