FTL: Faster Than Light - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alec Meer)
This is perhaps a slightly perverse offer, seeing as so many folks who have been jonesing for Into The Breach have the jitters and the sweats specifically because it’s the follow-up to the revered FTL.
However, if you’ve managed to come to this backwards, i.e. got all hot’n’bothered about Into The Breach’s ultra-deft, ultra-lean apocalyptic turn-based strategy without ever having played its brutal star-trekking predecessor FTL, good news! If you buy Into The Breach via Humble or GOG (and the former delivers you a Steam key, FYI), you’ll get a free copy of FTL.
Intro the Breach, FTL developer Subset Games' latest, is finally out, and it's fantastic. The tiny little tactics game scored our first 90 of the year, and for good reason: Alex called it an exacting, agonizing, ever-changing challenge in his review. It's singing a different tune than FTL, but the same level of care has gone into it.
If you're interested in playing both of Subset's greats, you can get FTL's Advanced Edition for free if you purchase Into the Breach from GOG on or before Tuesday, March 6. It's $15, and if you already own FTL, you can also get a gift code for a friend.
For more on Into the Breach, check out composer Ben Prunty's deep dive on how he scored the game.
Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.
FTL: Faster Than Light - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alec Meer)
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. 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. Not in merely superficial ways either. 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.
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. There is no calamity here that cannot be traced back to your own actions. In other words, you’ve only got yourself to blame for the total wipeout of humanity. But this particular end of the world is a glorious one, and one I will happily keep experiencing for years to come. (more…)
Considering that Subset's last game, FTL, handed you an entire galaxy to knock about in, Into the Breach might strike you as being a little cramped in its opening minutes. This turn-based tactical battler likes to drop you into snug maps of eight squares by eight. You never have more than a handful of turns to worry about on each mission, and you have just three units to control as standard. What's worth remembering, though, is that FTL may have been set in the vast reaches of space, but it found its most frantic entertainment in the compact and claustrophobic arrangement of rooms that was your spaceship. This is a studio that understands panic and understands the power of confinement. FTL is a classic - and Into the Breach may well be even better.
The question with any turn-based tactical game is: what kind of game is this really? Once you take away the mechs and the super-soldiers, is this Chess again? Is it American Football? The easiest answer for Into the Breach - and it's not a complete answer because Into the Breach is not an easy game to get your head around - is that beneath a veneer that invokes the likes of Front Mission and even Advance Wars, this is billiards. By which I mean your shots matter, but victory lies in understanding where the remaining pieces are going to come to rest afterwards.
This is doubly true because so much of Into the Breach isn't merely concerned with blasting away at mutant hordes with your guns and missiles and lasers. It's concerned with doing all that while shoving them too. Shoving them into the sea where they drown. Shoving them onto a dangerous tile that is about to drop into the earth or be hit by falling magma or be engulfed with the burning fumes from a rocket launch. Missiles and lasers and guns are great, but you learn to look through the weapons you're given along the course of an adventure and cherish the ones that have drag or knockback powers. Again: it's not how much damage you do in a round, it's what the board looks like once the round is finished.
Into the Breach - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)
From a conclave of Earth nations comes the order: DESTROY ALL MONSTERS. Such is the way of Into The Breach, the kaiju-fighting turn-based tactical game from FTL studio Subset Games. Everyone at RPS who has played Into The Breach–let’s call them ‘the jerks’, for simplicity’s sake–has raved about fighting monsters with warbots through its small, focused battles on little grids in only a handful of turns. It’ll launch tomorrow but the launch trailer is here today, so let’s have a look at what the jerks have been playing. (more…)
Into the Breach is a subversive "micro-strategy" game (that's actually surprisingly deep, so says our Steven) from Subset Games, the creator of 2012's FTL: Faster Than Light. It's filled with powerful mechs and hostile aliens and has an awesome soundtrack. It's out tomorrow and now has a launch trailer.
Here's that:
Beyond its 16-bit era aesthetic, Into the Breach's most interesting quirk is letting players see their enemies' moves—and letting them respond to them—before they've had a chance to make them.
On the face of it, this doesn't sound plausible—however here's Steven putting the Mystic Meg of strategy games through its paces:
Earlier this month, Subset's Justin Ma and Matthew Davis gave Steven exclusive access to a prerelease build of Into the Breach. I found the following extract particularly interesting, as FTL's risk/reward balance often pushed my buttons:
It took me dozens of hours to beat FTL on easy difficulty, and even after sinking in dozens more, I’ve never beaten it on normal. According to Davis, that’s pretty standard for most players. But I was almost shocked when I beat Into the Breach on normal on my third attempt.
"The game is slightly more solvable than FTL as once you get a hang of it, you’ll be getting to the end far more often," Davis says. "We intend for people to finish the game and then go back and explore new options and let the randomness drive its longevity. You’re always coming across new combinations that are fun and unique. I'd describe Into the Breach as something more like a board game. It’s not that you beat a board game, but you take it out to play for an afternoon and then you put it away and come back and play it again. It’s not something that you beat and then never touch again."
This departure from the punishing difficulty of FTL is going to be contentious, both developers suspect. There’s no big bad boss battle waiting at the end of the game to completely vaporize all the work you’ve done building your squad. But there’s a greater sense of joy to be found in each battle and the surprising ways they can unfold.
I recently finished the soundtrack for Into the Breach, Subset Games' follow up to FTL: Faster Than Light. Into the Breach is a turn-based strategy game about giant mechs, the apocalypse, and time travel. You can read more about it here. Making the soundtrack was a huge challenge, as the style was pretty far outside my comfort zone. Because of this, I thought it would be interesting to share some key parts of the creative process. Here are some of the decisions involved in making a game soundtrack.
Discarding the obvious
Let's compare it to FTL as an example. Like FTL, we decided that the soundtrack for Into the Breach should be something different than is expected for the genre.
Thanks to Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, media that takes place in space is often associated with music from a large, bombastic orchestra. We decided early on to simply not have any orchestral elements in FTL. After all, how could we even compete with the likes of The Empire Strikes Back or the Star Trek films? FTL's music featured smooth, melodic synths, lots of reverb, and a general sense of melancholy. This was apparently so unexpected that some early reviewers were put off by the style and recommended listening to orchestral music instead while playing. These days FTL's music has a pretty great reputation, so I'd say we made the right choice.
When the time came to decide what Into the Breach would sound like, we approached it with the same mindset. Into the Breach has thoughtful, turn-based battles, giant monsters destroying cities, and apocalyptic themes. 'Desperation' was a word we used as a guide for many creative decisions. So what does this sound like?
As a group we decided to throw out the idea that strategy game music should be quiet
Sometime in the last decade or so, Hollywood decided somber folk music was the official soundtrack of the apocalypse. I'm not entirely sure what kicked that off, but since it's the expected music for that kind of setting, we discarded it from our potential concepts. Of course, deciding what something isn't only gets you part of the way. You still need to figure out what it is.
This turned out to be difficult. First I tried a lo-fi electronic ambient sound, with synth drones, white noise, and almost no melodies. This actually made it sound a bit like a horror game. It did kind of fit the feel we were going for, but none of us liked it very much. I then made a few quiet, somber ambient tracks, more melodic, with some cello thrown in for a more human feel. I was operating under the assumption that music for turn-based strategy games should be quiet and unassuming. But none of the team, including me, really liked the new tracks either.
Finally Justin, Subset Games' artist and co-designer, shared this video with me, and suggested I use it as inspiration.
These two cellists take Hans Zimmer's Inception score and put their own spin on it. The result has an incredible energy. It was essentially the antithesis of everything I had made so far. So I took that concept and ran with it, making a track that would eventually end up as music for Into the Breach's very first trailer:
As a group we decided to throw out the idea that strategy game music should be quiet, and for each new track I just kept iterating and refining the concept I built with the trailer music. I kept it more energetic, and stopped relying on synthesizers. We finally had a style for Into the Breach.
Adding guitar
The style I had put together worked well enough, but I still felt like it was lacking something. Lately I've been teaching myself to play guitar. I have a Fender Stratocaster HSS and I love it. While I still consider myself a beginner guitarist, I found that muted rhythm guitar was something I was decent at, and I loved the sound. For one of the tracks, I tried playing a little muted rhythm part over what I had written. Suddenly the whole piece came together in a way I wasn't expecting. The riff I wrote for that one song became the defining sound of the entire soundtrack. It shows up everywhere.
I've isolated the guitar part from one of the tracks so you can hear what I'm talking about. There are three different guitar parts playing at once, with some delay effects added on top. Once you know what to look for, you'll hear it all over.
The art of implementation
One important thing I learned while transitioning from 'game music fan' to 'game music professional' is the importance of implementation. It's not enough to make good music, you also need to know exactly how to present the music. Where the music is placed, how it starts, how it stops, how long the silence is between tracks—it all has an impact. Even the best music can be placed wrong. For a perfect example of wonderful music that's poorly implemented, go punch a mudcrab in Morrowind.
While you're placing your mechs, you hear only the ambient sounds of the environment. There's a tension now; the mission has started but there's no music yet.
In the beginning, we just had music playing pretty much constantly. Menu music would fade to battle music when the battle started, and would fade back immediately when the battle was over. This seems intuitive, but in practice it doesn't sound very good. Constant music can fatigue the player.
Here's one subtle but important change we made. In the game, the player chooses a mission from the map screen, clicks Start Mission, and then the mission starts. Simple, right? In the original implementation, the battle music would start the moment the player clicked that Start Mission button. Again, this seems to make sense, but I didn't like it. I felt that some of the drama and excitement of starting a mission was missing. So I came up with a new way for the music to start.
There's a moment in the beginning of every mission where you're placing your mechs in their starting positions. With the updated implementation, the menu music fades out when you click on Start Mission, but no other music replaces it at first. While you're placing your mechs, you hear only the ambient sounds of the environment. There's a tension now; the mission has started but there's no music yet.
Once you've decided your unit placement, there's an animation of your mechs dropping from the sky and slamming on the ground, and the music starts at the exact moment the last mech lands. It's a strong, dramatic start to the fight. The tension built by the silence is released. This all makes the previous implementation feel lifeless by comparison. And that's just by changing when the music starts!
Making the music for Into the Breach was a long and difficult process, but in the end we got something that I think is pretty unique and personal. I learned a lot from it. I’m excited to finally share it with the world. I hope you enjoy what we've put together! Let me know what you think of the game and its music on Twitter.
VIDEO: Our senior reporter, Steven, takes a quick 10-minute look at Into the Breach, the new strategy game from the makers of FTL.
Into the Breach might look like a 16-bit turn-based strategy game from the Game Boy Advance era, but beneath that cute exterior is one of the most innovative strategy games I've played. Unlike FTL, the first game from developers Subset Games, Into the Breach is all about deterministic strategy. Not only will attacks always hit their intended target, but you can even see and respond to enemy attacks before they happen.
That doesn't sound like the formula for a rich strategy game, but Into the Breach uses that conceit to do some brilliant things. Each battle is a tense stand-off to survive a certain number of turns while swarms of insectoid Vek storm the field. Outnumbered and outgunned, your best approach is to mitigate incoming enemy attacks rather than fight fire with fire.
But describing Into the Breach isn't easy, which is why I've recorded 10 minutes of a new campaign to show off how the turn-based battles work and how each mission plays into the overarching campaign. The video above will give you a basic insight into Into the Breach and how it separates itself in a competitive genre.
The good news is that, if you like what you see, Into the Breach is out February 27 on GOG and Steam and is only $15. Check back next week for our full review.
