Breach & Clear (iOS, Android) is a joint effort from first-time publisher Gun and developer Mighty Rabbit. It is a tactical strategy game that puts you in command of a four-man special operations team. It features a depth of strategic options and squad customization, but the gameplay itself is tightly focused on the titular task of breaching buildings and clearing them of hostiles.
The game boasts a high level of realism, informed by actual special operations soldiers from around the world who served as consultants. The available tactics and strategies are designed to reflect military-accurate close-quarters battle. The gear and weaponry you can equip your soldiers with is based on real-world gear.
When you start the game, you’ll first need to create your squad. This includes choosing which special operations force your squad is a part of. Currently, you can choose between the US Navy SEALs, US Army Rangers, US Army Special Forces, and Canadian JTF2. Each group has slightly different stats, but they’re all pretty well-rounded so it doesn’t matter much. You will then add four soldiers to the squad by selecting their name, portrait art, and class. There are six available classes, each has a special role in combat and can gain six unique perks.
The core gameplay is simple. You are trying to breach and clear a single-floor building. You can see all of the rooms inside, but not the enemies randomly placed throughout. You assign each of your troops to an exterior door to enter during the initial breach (you can split them up or keep them together). You must then assign where each of your troops will walk to and which direction they will face (players of Frozen Synapse will recognize that mechanic). When you press the “Breach” button, the lead squad member will kick open the door and your soldiers will proceed to their assigned locations. If any enemies are encountered, they will be engaged automatically in realtime firefights. After about 5 seconds of realtime, the action will freeze and you can give your soldiers assignments again.
The game’s tagline is “Own Every Angle”, and that really covers your goal well. For your soldiers to survive, you must ensure they have cover from the environment and their teammates. You must also make sure they are facing the right direction to take on enemy threats. The core gameplay of selecting your soldier’s positions, then their facing angles, then executing your commands is solid and the bulk of what you’ll be doing. Fortunately, managing your troops is fun and, frankly, if you’re going to be playing a modern combat game on your phone, touchscreen controls work much better for troop management than they do for first-person shooting. I really admire how the combat has been distilled into this simple core of move and aim, breach and clear.
Of course, there are several more advanced actions and class skills that add some complexity to the mix. They make the game less elegant, but make up for that with a big boost in tactical and strategic depth. Making your soldiers move at half speed or giving them square-by-square movement and facing angle gives you extra control over your squad’s spacing and coverage, when you need it. The class skills are more useful but can only be used a very limited number of times per mission. These include abilities like using suppressing fire to prevent enemy fire for one round, wedging a door so enemies can’t open it from the other side, and sprinting.
There are a lot of ways you can customize your squad, starting with choosing the members of your squad and their classes. Beyond that, each soldier can be outfitted with a gun, a helmet, camo, a patch, and two consumable items. The gun can further be customized with seven different types of add-on. As your soldiers level up, they will gain new perks periodically and 5 attribute points per level that you choose how to distribute. Equipment stats are pretty balanced, with the pieces that give big bonuses also giving penalties to other stats. For example, one of the best scopes significantly boosts your accuracy, but it also makes you less mobile. It keeps your soldiers feeling realistic instead of super-powered.
The game handles being realistic well. It wholly embraces its realistic nature as long as it benefits the game, but the developer has done a really good job of not letting the realistic stuff get in the way of good gameplay. There aren’t energy shields or super armor, so combat is short, which keeps the focus on the strategy (most enemies will only last one or two rounds in a firefight unless they’ve got really good cover). The use of realistic weaponry, gear, and military combat tactics is cool too. At the same time, unrealistic features and skills like instant healing, shooting through walls, and turning invisible for a turn keep the game interesting and add depth to the different classes as they reach high levels. The leveling and attribute point system is a little silly, but it lets your squad grow (so you can adapt it to fit your strategy) and gives your squad a feeling of continuity between missions.
In its current state, the game only has 15 missions (more are promised). There’s still quite a bit of replayability, as each mission has 5 difficulties and the enemy positions are randomized every time you play a mission. Each difficulty of each mission has 5 possible stars to earn, based on how many turns it takes for you to clear the building. Stars serve to unlock new missions, locations, difficulties, and guns. My biggest gripe is that clearing a mission on a higher difficulty does not earn you the same number of stars on a lower difficulty. I can’t imagine anybody who plays through the game on the Standard difficulty first will want to go through it two more times on Beginner and Novice.
The game says “Coming Soon” in a few places. When you go to the mission select screen, there are tabs for two game modes that are currently unavailable. On the tab that is available, you have access to three of the five locations shown (with the other two marked “Coming Soon”). I’m sure the “Coming Soon” label is to assure people that more content is on the way, but it kind of just makes the game feel unfinished. Don’t get me wrong — the gameplay itself is very solid. There’s just a bunch of promised content that’s not here yet. That content includes a promise of more special operations forces, gear, and missions with every major update. They’ve also said head-to-head multiplayer is in development, which I’m certain will be excellent.
Mid-development, Breach & Clear was switched from a free-to-play game to a premium game. The team realized they were making decisions to drive in-app-purchases instead of to drive good gameplay. In-app purchases are still present, but the game has been rebalanced so they are completely unnecessary. I’ve got to agree here, they don’t feel necessary at all. There are your standard bundles of in-game currency (silver, in this case). The bang for your buck ramps up very quickly, with the $9.99 purchase essentially buying all the silver you could ever possibly need. There are also two doublers, one for experience and one for silver, priced at $1.99 apiece. Finally, there are a couple of patches for $0.99 each that give your soldiers a very minor stat boost. These are actually pretty cool little purchases because 100% of the proceeds go to charities for injured soldiers (Operation Ward 57 and the Yellow Ribbon Fund). Honestly, the in-app purchases here are really just to support the devs as they make more content for the game and to speed it up a little if you want to. Even if you bought a huge bundle of silver, its use would be limited as guns cannot be purchased until you have enough stars to unlock them.
My biggest complaint is that there is some deep strategy here but no documentation to help you implement it. Robert Bowling, the game’s executive director, said that a conscious decision was made to minimize the tutorials and UI pop-ups so that the game could be accessible to casual players and explored by the players who are interested in diving deeper. I appreciate that the game can hit that “easy to learn, hard to master” quality that makes it attractive to all kinds of gamers, but I don’t get why I have to explore to find out how basic mechanics even function. The documentation could be entirely optional so that only players who are interested in diving deeper need to read it. This is needed — before a certain tip showed up on a loading screen, I had no idea what determined how many stars I earned for a mission. I also want to know exactly what the soldier stats do, how should I balance Evasion and Health for maximum survivability? What does Intuition do? I feel silly dumping any points into it because I honestly have no clue. I can’t make good strategic choices if I don’t have enough information!
Smaller complaints include some camera trouble and a couple of crashes. I like the 3D buildings, but you have to frequently manipulate the camera to give orders to all your troops. The camera is pretty easy to rotate and zoom, but its tedious to have to do it so much. A button in the bottom-left corner switches the camera to a top-down view that makes it much easier to see everything, but it’s a less exciting camera angle (I expect this is not much of a problem on an iPad screen). I experienced two crashes on my iPhone 4S. It was never during an actual mission, but if you’re rocking a device that’s not the latest and greatest, be aware that you might experience some crashes too.
Breach & Clear is on sale for half off right now, so if you’re interest is piqued, you should really pick it up now. Also, if you grab it before its first update, you’ll have an exclusive golden M4 available in your gun shop.
Overall, Breach & Clear feels like a lightweight XCOM, and I mean that in a good way. It’s a great buy at a fraction of the price and it’s different enough that it’s still fun even if you already have XCOM. The simplicity of your objective and core gameplay makes it markedly lighter, but that makes it a better fit for mobile and there’s still plenty of strategy to keep hardcore gamers interested. I actually really appreciate the elegance and that I can finish a map much quicker than I could in XCOM. The UI design is very good and great at communicating everything you need to know about your squad and the environment around them. Breach & Clear delivers long-term strategy through squad customization and short-term tactical decisions that require plenty of brainpower. It’s a lot of fun and I recommend it to anybody who likes tactical strategy games.
Note: The game is both available on the App Store and Google Play.
iTunes Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/breach-clear/id655749677?mt=8
Google Play Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gun.bnc&hl=en
