A Tiny, Terrific Mech Tactics Game Is Free Now On Amazon Prime

Time is running out, but you’ve got all the time in the world. That’s the nature of time travel stories, where the urgency of getting everything right in this instance clashes against the reality that you can try as many times as you need to succeed. Right now, you can get one of the best turn-based strategy games ever made for free, and it happens to be one of the best time travel games, too, grappling with the paradox of time that’s both infinite and precious.

Some strategy games opt for maximalism, giving you fine control over the working of an empire, with complex tactics playing out on massive battlefields. Into the Breach takes the exact opposite approach. Played on tiny grids with just a handful of units facing off against each other, the sci-fi tactics game pares the genre down to its very essentials. While that might sound like it would limit its strategic depth, it instead makes every decision count even more, turning every short battle into a tense, cerebral clash with next to no room for error.

In Into the Breach, Earth is under attack by insectoid aliens, and your crew of mech pilots is the only chance to repel them. In your campaign against the bugs, you’ll choose missions from a world map, each with different objectives and potential rewards. From there, you deploy just three mechs against the invasion. Your goal isn’t to destroy every bug you come across, but rather to protect the last remaining humans and the power plants that keep civilization running. Battles end in just five turns, and if you can outlast the invaders for that long, you win, gaining upgrades and other potential bonuses like new pilots for your efforts.

As dire as the situation is, you have the power of time travel on your side to help even the odds. Every turn, you can see exactly what your enemies are going to do, giving you the opportunity to stop them. If they’re going after civilians, you can jump in their way. If they’ll finish off a damaged mech, you can move them to safety. If they’re repositioning to another tile, you can set it ablaze before they get there.

Into the Breach is a game all about acceptable losses. You’ll rarely escape a battle unscathed, but it’s up to you to decide what consequences you can live with. Maybe sacrificing a power plant is worth saving a mech. Maybe giving up on rescuing a new pilot is worth it if that lets you win the mission. In just about every turn, you’ll have to choose what damage you’re willing to take to achieve your ultimate goal. But since you can see what enemies do ahead of time, you can also force them to attack each other or block shots from their allies, using attacks meant for you to further your campaign.

Operating at that level of deep, moment-to-moment strategy already makes Into the Breach brilliant, and its focus on protection instead of destruction lets it go truly wild with its mech designs. You start off with predictable abilities like artillery strikes and rocket powered punches, but more interesting strategies arise when you start recruiting mechs with more off-kilter attacks. Some set the ground ablaze while others freeze enemies in place. Others focus on moving foes around instead of attacking them directly, and an electrified team later in the game lets you use your own mechs as links in a circuit to spread damaging lightning bolts across the entire map. As you get better at Into the Breach, you can move from finding the most efficient way to win each level to devising the most creative way to get the job done.

Because its battles are so short, Into the Breach also avoids the strategy game trap of demanding a massive time investment. You can knock out a battle in a few minutes if you’re quick, but it’s nonetheless a game you may find yourself playing for hours on end simply because it’s too good to put down. Into the Breach has been out since 2018, but if you’ve yet to pick it up, it’s about time you see what you were missing out on.

Into the Breach is available on Nintendo Switch, PC, Android, and iOS.