Stellar turn-based strategy Into the Breach getting free Advanced Edition update in July

Four and a bit years after its initial launch, FTL developer Subset Games is revisiting its stellar turn-based strategy game Into the Breach, with a much-expanded Advanced Edition update for existing platforms that’s set to release on 19th July.

Into the Breach’s Advanced Edition update – which will be free to all existing owners on Switch, Mac, and PC – introduces new squads, weapons, pilots (with new pilot abilities), enemies, bosses, missions, and new music from Ben Prunty. It’ll also include a new, more challenging difficulty mode, plus support for seven new languages.

Alongside the update for existing platforms, Into the Breach will also be making its iOS and Android debut on 19th July. This version will include the new Advanced Edition content and touch-screen support, but will only be available to Netflix subscribers as part of the streaming service’s gradual move into gaming.

Into the Breach was, of course, already quite the treat even before its Advanced Edition promises. Set in a far-flung future where humanity must stave off the advances of giant monsters known as the Vek by deploying powerful mechs, it’s an elegant, wonderfully refined turn-based strategy game writ miniature.

“Alongside being billiards and Whack-a-Mole and chess and American Football and all the rest of it, Into the Breach is also FTL, in its delight in the glinting clockwork of failure, in its fascination with difficult choices, in surprising victories, in drastic variation that works its strange magic within tight restrictions,” said Christian Donlan in his Recommended review in 2018. “And all of these games come together to make Into the Breach, which is precise and brutal and complex and dizzying and utterly thrilling – and Into the Breach is, somehow, entirely its own thing too.”