The beauty of cards is that they can be anything. You can put together a working game with them in minutes. Take 12 spaces, draw a few faces and landscapes, and voila, you have a procedural narrative generator. Make some copies, invent a few rules, and voila, you have systems.
Conversely, the biggest downside of cards – especially in the roguelite deck builders people have been popping up since Slay The Spire – is that everything can be reduced to them. For example: last night I played a round of Mushrooms with my partner; Mushrooms was a fascinating tabletop foraging simulation where you picked delicious chantarelles and boletus from the forest floor. This morning I continued playing Breachway, which is currently in early access; Here you pilot a starship through a series of war-torn solar systems, and battles unfold as a turn-based exchange of cards corresponding to ship components.
Piling up a delicious panful of wolfballs isn't quite like orchestrating a volley of missiles, but when cards are involved, there's a risk of interchangeability. It's all about stacking number cards and multipliers for the opportune moment, right? What is a corvette, another type of mushroom? Luckily, Breachway makes the deck builder format its own. In fact, much of the fun is watching it find ways to redefine familiar card game synergies in ways that are consistent with the sweaty dream of creating your own Enterprise, Battlestar, or Sulaco. We're off to a good start in early access. Still – and at the risk of further confusing my decks – I think it could add a little more flavor.
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The problem is less the card game itself and more the roguelite element of the environment. Each solar system is a network of nodes for story events that include battles, refueling or repair opportunities, space stations where you can give your warp core a haircut, and sometimes missions—all leading to a boss encounter at the far end. The overall goal is to chase one of sci-fi's many anomalous signals – which, as explained in the tutorial's prologue, can be disabled once you've completed them – but there are also a number of groups to be reckoned with along the way.
As you travel, you make or lose friends in pursuit of your own interests, accumulating or losing reputation points on both sides; this determines whether you will face open arms or torpedoes across several nodes. Aside from the temptation of loot (new cards and credits to spend on ship upgrades) or the need to patch your hull, your movements are lightly governed by your fuel reserve. This is only consumed when you travel along tangential, yellow star stripes; This is a slightly forced way of maintaining the branching roguelite structure and ensuring that you can't loot every map node at your leisure.
Sounds solid, right? As solid as a bouquet of freshly picked enoki, sizzling over the campfire with some cider and butter. Ah, but so far I've found the solar system transit pretty dry. The star map presentation is cold and the events or missions are pedestrian sci-fi fare made even more sleepy by roguelite repetitions – go and fight X of Y ships, decide whether to respond to a distress signal, try to get some bonus credits from a wreck. The game's small assortment of quest types might feel more inviting if the writing were more polished, but they all read like codex marginalia: world-building stuff clipped with some half-hearted stabs of humour. It works well enough as a roguelite – each run through a system is about tailoring your ship for the boss, without too much wear and tear along the way – but it doesn't have nearly the richness and tension you'd get from, say, woeful paths. and the highlights of Darkest Dungeon 2 are at the same point even in its early access career.
If the roguelite element and narrative backdrop are bleak, card-based ship skirmishes and their supporting resource systems save Breachway from boredom. Again, the game does a great job of reworking the basic idea of dealing and playing cards into a reasonable approach to the anatomy of a starship. Each round, you're randomly dealt a handful based on your (upgradable) reactor output. Each card requires one or more of three resource types (ammunition, energy, and mass), which are produced sequentially depending on how you configure your reactor. Your opponent also draws cards from the deck in unpredictable ways, but the pips on each card fill to show you that they are ready to play. This allows you to anticipate attacks, target weak points, and outrun dreadnoughts, which should cause you to get it right from schematic to schematic.
The cards cover a familiar range of offensive, defensive, support and resource management abilities, but each clearly lends itself to specific tactics, and there's a welcome emphasis on chaining them together. Different types of pulse lasers can be fired in sequence, for example reducing the cost of the next blast or increasing the damage. As precision weapons, lasers can also be used to target individual components of the ship; if you scrap them, your opponent will lose access to certain parts of their deck for several turns.
Flak balls are more about momentum between spins; They deal random damage within a certain range, but become more lethal as each stacked AA round wears down the target's hull. Ion bolts disable shields and flood the victim with static electricity, ultimately causing systems to malfunction. Missiles can be devastating, but take a turn to cross the distance between ships and once fired they disappear from your deck. Therefore, these need to be recorded and timed to match the immediate effect cards.
As for the defensive play: one of Breachway's key gambits is that shields quickly dissipate when raised, halving power at every turn; This means you need to treat them more like parries. The same goes for enemy shield usage, but some bosses will happily turn themselves into bullet sponges using more advanced cards, as long as you don't sabotage them by cutting off the relevant bits.
Periodically, the general rhythms of the deck builder format show up in all this debauched Star Trekery. If you trample too many shield cards in a turn, you won't be able to draw others until you clear your discard pile, but is it worse to keep them and leave no room for new attack cards? It's cool to watch the game transition between thinking of it like a card game and thinking of it like a spaceship strategy experience. And the writing, which is so lackluster when it comes to roguelite stuff, does a nifty job here of dramatizing each card's effects, reframing them as battle scene devices you might recognize from countless movies.
With all this said, there are times when the game's desire to make deckbuilding consistent with shipbuilding feels like a limitation. More accurately, the particular tone of harder science fiction invoked here limits how adventurous Breachway can be with its production possibilities. In addition to acquiring new cards, you can boost and rearrange your reactor output with credits and equip subsystems that act as modifiers, but your ship's evolution (there are currently four variants in the early access build) is looking pretty neat and settled at the moment. There's none of the sheer eccentricity of the Cobalt Core.
You may still prefer it that way, and Breachway has “about a year” to go in early access; That's plenty of time to rescue some exotic alien technology from derelicts and turn himself into a galactic legend. Again, the biggest challenge is coloring the roguelite layer or perhaps thinning it further down to the important parts. If Breachway can achieve this, it will satisfy me more than any chanterelle ever could.