Into The Breach - GotY 2018 @ PC Gamer

The GotY 2018 for PC Gamer is the tactical roguelike Into The Breach:

Ultimate Game of the Year 2018: Into the Breach

The creators of FTL brought us a tactical roguelike masterpiece.

Having already reached number four in our Top 100 list earlier this year, we're delighted to name Subset Games' Into The Breach our Ultimate Game of the Year for 2018, joining past winners like Divinity: Original Sin 2, Dishonored 2, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, and Alien: Isolation. Check out the now-completed list of GOTY awards and personal picks.

Tom: Into The Breach shows that you can create tactical intrigue without force-feeding the player a 100-page manual. This game gives you an eight-by-eight grid, a few enemy types, and squads of cool mechs with different attacks and… that's it. It even tells you exactly what's going to happen next turn, and it's still a fascinating tactics game that you can enjoy in snackable short sessions. It's elegantly designed and accessible enough to appeal to people that might not think of themselves as strategy gamers. Battles feel like emergent puzzles rather than serious tests of martial skill, but it's still quite hard, particularly when parts of the arena start flooding, or collapsing away completely.

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As much as i wanted it to be, this wasn't as good as FTL for me, Still looking forward to what they do next.

Still have to play this game as I loved FTL by the same developer.

Dafuq?
Well, at least it ain't Narnia forced mmo within MGS5.

Originally Posted by joxer
Dafuq?
Well, at least it ain't Narnia forced mmo within MGS5.

Nah PC Gamer's just trying to be edgy like RPS.

They usually pick a game that not many would pick as GOTY.

I can already see the staff wearing monocles & drinking champagne. While calling us all unwashed poor pc gaming plebes with no taste for not agreeing with them.

Well at least it's not RDR2 or Assassin Creed Odyssey.

Trolling the very same community they're persuading into buying i9 CPU? They could have been more effective by crowning FF15 pocket edition Chibi version not available on Steam but on Microsoft Store instead.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Well at lest it''s not RDR2 or Assassin Creed Odyssey at least.

Can't be RDR2 as it's not available on PC and even if it was, from videos I've seen it's the same GTA5 boredom in another setting.
Odyssey is a fantastic game, but comes with bundled microtransactions hell so… No. Pretend money store of the year yes, ultimate goty no.

Originally Posted by joxer
Trolling the very same community they're persuading into buying i9 CPU?

Exactly just like how RPS picked Sunless Sea a few years back calling it the best original game they ever played. Anyway as I always said most GOTY lists are pure crap.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
…I can already see the staff wearing monocles & drinking champagne. While calling us all unwashed poor pc gaming plebes with no taste for not agreeing with them.
…

Monocles? They are British? :-)

I wonder is anybody here played this game. Honestly, first I argued I was waiting the Mac release, then I finally bought it, and now I wait an appeal to play it.

I watched quickly a let's play, and I wondered.

But I doubt it's a better reason that pushed PCG name GOTY Divinity Original Sin.

At end it's better that people try look smart than when they are sheep and wonder what to quote to not look like idiots.

Originally Posted by Dasale
Monocles? They are British? :-)

It's a reference to a learned man looking down on someone in a superior way.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
It's a reference to a learned man looking down on someone in a superior way.

Yeah, that's what I wrote, British people, well a century ago, or those still swimming in illusions of grandeur. :-)

Happy new year to all British people, sorry but as a faithful French, I had to start the year with a little pun to British, and ok I should have write English, everybody agree on that.

Was a "good" game. But far, far less good than FTL imho.

That said, the amount of awesome games I played this year is also tiny. Rimworld was awesome. But that's it. Others were good at best.

Yeah I liked the game but it was no FTL. The problem for me was the difficulty level. On normal it was too easy and I'd win almost every campaign. On hard it was too difficult and I wouldn't make any progress. There needed to be a better middle ground.

Agreed. I liked it and will replay it again, but it didn't compare to FTL for me.

Originally Posted by fadedc
Yeah I liked the game but it was no FTL. The problem for me was the difficulty level. On normal it was too easy and I'd win almost every campaign. On hard it was too difficult and I wouldn't make any progress. There needed to be a better middle ground.

Yub, absolutely.
Which is also problematic because there was no real incentive to play on hard mode. In the contrary: While FTL offered very different playstyles which 1. were very well balanced against each other and 2. also were balanced when mixed, the balancing of Into the Breach was somewhat mediocre. Some squads were much worse then others and if you wanted to play them decently you basically were pushed to play on a lower difficulty, which offered exactly the same (which is ok for an RPG but not for this type of game).

Good game, but was missing the magic of FTL. I can't quite pin it down, except to say it felt repetitious for some reason, which is ironic.

This game and dev is a typical example for the arguing about the positive or negative from crowdfunding.

Into The Breach, no matter how fun it is to play, is typical lack of ambition game. And indie dev have probably not much other choices. But it's the problem, indies struggle to bring anything to video games.

First game done by non pro team, or half pro team, those is one thing, this involve a lot of burden. Pas that, most indie dev have to restrict their plans and restrict their ambitions.

Crowd Funding changes this balance deeply, it opens a lot indie dev ambitions, it is also used to get an evaluation on how high the budget could be. And then it allows a lot more ambition then creativity on the crowd funding side than it would with a pure indie approach.

That said, it's clear that crowd fund a turn based game when dev did a hugely successful RTS, it was probably impossible.