Into the Breach Review

Hiding information is how most tactics games create tension, and this one refuses to do it. Every enemy telegraphs exactly where it will strike next, so a turn is never a gamble, it is a puzzle with a single best answer that you may or may not find. Because your win condition is protecting buildings rather than killing everything, pushing a bug into another bug, dropping one into water or simply standing in the path of an attack are all legitimate plays, and a mech dying is an acceptable cost while a lost power grid is not.

Eight squads with entirely different toolkits turn the same campaign into eight separate games, and the time travel framing makes failure into progression by carrying one pilot forward. It is small on purpose and that is the honest complaint: a full run takes under an hour, the island generation can hand you an unwinnable opening, and once you have solved a squad's puzzle there is little left to discover in it. The presentation is functional rather than beautiful.