Picked up Into the Breach a couple of days ago.
Loving this game. It's from the makers of FTL, and is a turn-based strategy game where you control three giant mechs and have to fight off aliens on a grid-based map. The gameplay is simple but a hell of a lot of fun. You have an energy bar, and every time the aliens do damage to a building on the map, you lose one to two bars of energy. Lose all the energy and it's game over. Energy carries over from fight to fight, so if you complete a fight with only two energy bars left that's what you'll have when you head into the next fight. You can raise it by accomplishing optional objectives on some maps, or by buying it at the end of each island (there are four, plus the final fight), but it's very much a finite resource.
What this does is add a lot of strategy to each fight. You're constantly juggling keeping your mechs alive with keeping your energy high. If your mechs are killed in combat, their pilot dies. Pilots level up and gain perks as you play, so losing an experienced pilot or one with some great perks really hurts. Maps also often have optional objectives to keep in mind, like killing a certain number of enemies before the end of the map, protecting units or a specific building, or blocking enemy spawns. Enemies emerge from undergound, so you can stand over them, take a hit of damage, and prevent the spawn, or knock enemies on top of spawn points and let them soak up the damage instead.
I'm really enjoying it because every single round of each map feels like a puzzle, and often there's only one solution to completely avoid damage. Sometimes there aren't any, and then it becomes a matter of deciding where getting hit hurts the least. I played through the game first on Easy. FTL on Easy was still really fucking hard, so I expected the same here. However, success in this game isn't nearly as dependent on RNG as FTL was, so on Easy I beat the game pretty handily on my first try. Normal mode is considerably more difficult. There are more enemies, they tend to have a bit more health, and more spawn in each round of the fight. However, Normal feels a lot better balanced, which makes it a change from FTL where even Easy felt impossible if the game decided you weren't going to win.
You can also unlock additional mech squads by completing in-game achievements, both general ones and ones specific to each squad. I've unlocked a few of them now and each squad completely changes how you're forced to play the game and deal with problems as they pop up.
I'd definitely recommend this one to anyone here who like turn-based games. It's great, has awesome music, and is just very well designed.
