Breach & Clear (2013)

Having played Breach & Clear for about three hours, I was wondering why I wasn't particularly engaged with the game. On paper, the game looks like a good idea - a turn-based strategy game with realistic military engagements. But the implementation of that idea is pretty lackluster.

Breach & Clear can be examined at two levels - the gameplay itself, and all the supporting elements around that gameplay. In terms of core gameplay, you are tasked with the management of a four-man squad. Primarily, you'll be moving these characters around the map, taking down enemies as you go. Guns are fired automatically. There are also a few supporting abilites: grenades, flashbangs, suppressing fire etc. The objective is to clear all enemies on a map while minimizing the number of turns, and limiting the damage taken by your soliders.

The problem with this gameplay is that it feels very shallow, compared to something like XCOM. Each man can only take one action per turn, so a basic two-step move like 'move-to-cover, fire' or 'throw flashbang, fire' feels unnecessarily complicated. Speaking of cover, I've found that finding good cover and a good firing angle is pretty much impossible, most of the time. Because of the tight quarters, you usually need to charge headfirst into a firefight. Another problem is range. It's indicated that different weapons have different effective ranges, but it's hard to see the effect of that on the battlefield. Weapons aren't indicated on the HUD as well, so if you assign a shotgun to someone, you'll need to remember the name of that soldier.

Beyond the core gameplay, everything is implemented as a marketplace. You get stars and money as you complete missions. Collecting a number of stars will unlock something in the marketplace, like a gun, an attachment, a consumable item, or something cosmetic. You'll then need to spend money to buy them, usually one for each member of your team. In my playthrough, I was averaging about 800-900 as the reward for each mission. One of the better guns I unlocked had a cost of 2500. So to equip my 4-man team with those, I would have to play at least 11-12 missions (or one mission 11-12 times). That's just a level of grinding I'm not willing to do. I was wondering why this felt so grindy, so I looked up and found more information. Apparently, Breach & Clear was originally designed as a mobile game, and was then ported to PC. So the marketplace is a vestige of that design, where you could pay real money to have things unlocked.

In the end, Breach & Clear is defined by a shallow gameplay loop that is a coupled with a grindy marketplace. It demands a lot of time from you, but isn't interesting enough to hold your attention for that same amount of time. I'm putting this one on the 'abandoned' pile.