Breachway Early Access review: Not quite faster than light

Great combat slowed down by dull space travel

Edgeflow Studio / Hooded Horse

If you’ve heard anything about Breachway, then it’s probably a description likening it to a fusion of Faster Than Light and Slay the Spire – and for good reason. It’s an apt way to describe what you get from this roguelike deckbuilder in space.

In fairly typical genre fashion, you’ll travel between different nodes, which contain encounters with enemies, events, space stations, and so forth, and customize your deck of cards along the way with the goal of beating the final boss and reaching some sort of sci-fi MacGuffin. At the moment, this traversal layer feels like the weakest part of the game, despite some notable differences from most other genre representatives.

For example, there is a political layer to the star map. Each planet is controlled by one of several factions, which all have a certain relationship with you. The initial relationship depends on the ship you start your run with and can then evolve throughout the campaign based on decisions you make during certain events. Arriving over a hostile faction’s planet will almost certainly end with violence, while a friendly planet owner may provide you with supporting fire in battle or have a good trade deal for you – it’s a neat way of connecting event decisions with the map, allowing you to weave a narrative.

You'll make your way through star systems like this one in each run. / Edgeflow Studio / Hooded Horse

Unfortunately, Breachway lacks the necessary event variety and engaging writing to really make that its advantage. I can’t really bring myself to care about why I’m making this journey, who the different factions are, and what my crew members think about the decisions I make. It’s just all very generic – ‘We’ll pay you 150 space dollars if you defeat three enemy ships’ or ‘There is a rescue beacon on this specific planet, so go and check it out.’ Been there, done that. ‘Oh look, something happened and now you have a disadvantage for the next three encounters’ – uh, thanks, but it’d have been cool if you gave me some sort of choice or agency, even if it’s a choice between two negatives.

This is an aspect that will surely improve over the course of Early Access as Edgeflow Studio adds additional content to increase variety and maybe spice things up a bit, but it’s certainly a drawback at the moment.

Most of the nodes lead to combat anyway, so at most, you need to consider your fuel usage – there are two types of space lanes and only one uses fuel – and if you need to get to a space station for repairs or shopping. So far, Breachway’s space travel simply isn’t very engaging. It fails to tell a story in the same way FTL does, which always makes you remember certain stops simply due to the ace gunner you named after your childhood buddy being the former prisoner you rescued from that slaver ship you challenged.

There is a decent amount of ship customization to be had. / Edgeflow Studio / Hooded Horse

That lack of variety expands to the meta progression as well. Though you can unlock ships and some alternative upgrades for them by reaching certain milestones, finishing a few runs without having much to show for the invested time isn’t the most amazing feeling – where is that typical constant progression that keeps players invested into a roguelike? Where is the cool pirate ship to unlock by winning a run while completely antagonizing the faction throughout? Paired with the dull traversal layer, the somewhat stunted roguelike mechanics definitely lessened my motivation to keep going for more runs – but what kept me in it was the tactical depth of the space combat.

Being a deckbuilder, the factor of randomness in card draw can always screw you big time, but in general I found the combat to be very intricate and plannable. 

Like in FTL, your ship in Breachway consists of different modules, such as laser arrays, rocket launchers, shield bays, and so on. Each of these modules is associated with certain card types – naturally, a laser array will give you access to all sorts of laser-based attacks. Equipping your vessel with new modules thus expands your potential card pool and opens up new playstyles – that feels like a pretty straightforward and good system.

Managing your energy, heat, and card pool as well as reacting to enemy moves makes for great tactical gameplay combo. / Edgeflow Studio / Hooded Horse

Cards, naturally, have certain resource costs associated with them, so managing your three energy types is key. You can decide how much of the energy produced by your ship’s reactor each turn is converted to each of the three resources, giving you another way to specialize as well as adapt on the fly. This system does a really good job at translating the typical ‘Lieutenant, divert all our energy to the shields!’ moments from heated space battles to the game.

However, energy is not everything. Cards all have a cooldown associated with them, so they don’t immediately return to your draw pile. Instead, they go into the cooldown pile first. This pile, in turn, is connected to the heat mechanic. Weapons like lasers can deal heat damage to ships in addition to regular damage and some support cards may produce heat as a side effect – all these heat points may lead to your ship getting overheated, which may not only cause damage to it, but prevents cards on your cooldown pile being moved over to the draw pile. Once again, a neat connection between theme and gameplay that really enhances the strategic aspect.

Take something like shields. While they don’t immediately disappear like block or armor do in most other genre entries, their strength halves after each turn – so it’s not viable to play your shields whenever you get them. At the same time, you don’t want all of your shield cards blocking all the card slots on your hand, because that prevents you from attacking. Once you factor those cooldown mechanics and potential heat hijinks into the equation, things can get quite complex. You can even target individual modules on enemy ships, focusing down their weapons or defensive modules.

Battles come down to a single HP sometimes. / Edgeflow Studio / Hooded Horse

Aside from classic weapons like lasers, missiles, and shields, there are rail guns, flak guns, hacking systems, point defense cannons, and a variety of support systems with cards that manipulate aspects like energy generation and firepower. Where the variety is lacking in the roguelike layer, there’s tons of it in the deckbuilding. 

Planning out your turns around energy, cooldowns, and what the enemy is doing is really fun – and yes, you’ll curse your rotten luck sometimes, because you’re not getting that crucial card and your flak attack did the least amount of damage it could have done, but that’s life.

An additional factor in combat are your crew members. While you don’t see them running on the ship and manning stations like in FTL, each of your crew members brings a special ability to the module they’re overseeing – stuff like making the next attack card free, gaining a certain type of energy immediately, or doubling the next shield card’s strength. These are all cooldown-based on top of using a resource that’s limited for each encounter, making them crucial aces up your sleeve that need to be played at the right moment.

Breachway’s visuals and sounds fully support this immersive and thrilling combat experience, though the Early Access status certainly is felt here still as well – some animations are not yet implemented, for instance. On the technical side, there are some noticeable hiccups and frame drops even on high-end systems for things like the ship explosions concluding skirmishes.

Edgeflow Studio has managed to create an immersive deckbuilder that really knows how to make use of its setting and connect it to the gameplay. This quality greatly enhances the heart of the game, which is the thrilling and intricate turn-based space combat that’s already fantastic in Early Access. The same can’t be said for its roguelike layer, which requires more variety and incentives to become similarly engaging. Breachway is not quite Faster Than Light, yet.

Platform tested: PC (Steam)