The beauty of cards is that they can be anything. You can create a working game with them in minutes. Take 12 blank spaces, draw some faces and landscapes, and you’ll have a procedural narrative generator. Make some duplicates, come up with some rules and you have systems.
Conversely, the great disadvantage of cards – especially in the roguelite deck builders that people have been using since Slay The Spire – is that everything can be boiled down to them. For example: I was playing Fungi with my partner last night. Fungi is an adorable tabletop foraging simulation where you collect delicious chanterelles and porcini mushrooms from the forest floor. This morning I resumed playing Breachway, currently in early access, in which you guide a spaceship through a series of war-torn solar systems, with battles taking place in a turn-based exchange of cards corresponding to the ship’s components.
Putting together a delicious pan of puffballs isn’t like organizing a rocket salvo, but when cards are involved, there’s a risk of interchangeability. It’s all just accumulating number cards and multipliers at opportune times, right? What is a corvette but a different type of mushroom? Fortunately, Breachway has created its own deckbuilding format. In fact, a massive part of the fun is watching him find ways to re-characterize the synergies of familiar card games to make them consistent with the damp dream of creating your own Enterprise, Battlestar, or Sulaco. It started off well in Early Access. Still – at the risk of making my decks even more confusing – I think it could do with an extra twist.
The problem isn’t the card game, but the roguelite element surrounding it. Each solar system is a network of hubs for battles, refueling or repair opportunities, space stations where you can sharpen your warp core, and story events that sometimes include quests – all leading to a boss encounter at the other end. The overall goal – as outlined in the tutorial’s prologue, which can be turned off once you’ve completed it – is to track down one of many science fiction anomalous signals, but there are also a few factions to be reckoned with along the way.
As you travel, you’ll make or lose friends while pursuing your own interests, gaining or losing reputation points with each side, which determines whether you’ll be met with open arms or torpedoes a few nodes away. Apart from the temptation of looting (novel cards and credits to spend on ship upgrades) or the need to patch up the hull, your movements are little regulated by your fuel reserve. They’re only consumed when you travel through tangent, yellow-tinted star lanes – a somewhat forced way to maintain the branching structure of the roguelite and ensure you can’t simply loot every node of the map at your leisure.
Sounds solid, right? Strong as a freshly picked bouquet of enoki, sizzling over a campfire with a bit of cider and butter. Ah, but so far I’ve found the journey through the solar system to be pretty dehydrated. The star map presentation is lukewarm, and the events and quests are typical sci-fi, made even more dreamy by the repetitiveness of the roguelite – go and fight X and Y ships, decide whether to respond to a distress signal, try to scrape some extra credits from the wreckage. The game’s miniature variety of mission types might seem more enticing if the writing were flashier, but it all reads like a codex of marginalia: trimmed world-building material with some reluctant licks of humor. It works well enough as a roguelite – each run of the system is about customizing your ship to match the boss, without too much wear and tear along the way – but it doesn’t have quite the richness and tension you’d get from, say, the fallen roads and landmarks of Darkest Dungeon 2, even at the same stage of her early access career.
If the roguelite element and narrative backdrop are dreary, card-based ship encounters and the resource systems that support them jolt Breachway out of the doldrums. Once again, the game did a wonderful job of distilling the basic concept of dealing and playing cards into a believable approximation of spaceship anatomy. Each turn you get a random handful depending on your reactor’s performance (upgradeable). Each card requires one or more of three types of resources: ammunition, energy and mass, which are generated turn-by-turn according to the reactor configuration. Your opponent also draws cards from the deck in an unpredictable manner, but each card fills with seeds to show you when he is ready to play. This allows you to anticipate attacks, target faint spots and avoid battleships, which should technically make you hit the bull’s-eye.
The cards cover a familiar set of attack, defense, support, and resource management skills, but each lends itself to a specific tactic, and combining them is rewarding. Different types of pulse lasers can be fired sequentially, for example reducing the cost or increasing the damage of the next blast. As precision weapons, lasers can also be used to target individual ship components – turn them into scrap and your opponent will lose access to some parts of his deck for several turns.
Anti-aircraft guns are more about momentum between turns; they deal random damage within range, but become more deadly as each pile of anti-aircraft shells grinds down the target’s hull. Ion rounds destroy shields and fill victims with inert electricity, ultimately causing systems to malfunction. Missiles can be devastating, but on your turn, cover the distance between ships and when fired, they disappear from the deck. Therefore, they should be written down and timed with cards with immediate effect.
In terms of defensive play: one of Breachway’s most crucial tricks is that shields quickly dissipate when raised, halving their power each turn, meaning you have to treat them more like a parry. The same goes for using enemy shields, though some bosses will happily turn into bullet sponges with more advanced cards unless you shoot and sabotage the appropriate pieces.
Occasionally, the general rhythms of the deckbuilding format dominate all this Star Trekery nonsense. Chew through a lot of shield cards in one turn and you won’t draw many more until you empty your discard pile, but is it worse to keep them in your hand and have no room for novel offensive cards? It’s great to see the game go from thinking like a card game to thinking like a spaceship strategy game. And the script, so faint when it comes to its roguelite elements, does a great job here of dramatizing the effects of each card, transforming them into elements of battle scenes that can be recognized from countless films.
That said, there are times when the game’s desire to keep its deckbuilding consistent with its shipbuilding feels like a limitation. Or rather, the specific tone of the harder science fiction in question limits how adventurous Breachway can be with its design possibilities. In addition to acquiring novel cards, you can augment and reorganize reactor power with credits and plug in subsystems that act as modifiers, but the evolution of your ship – there are currently four varieties in the early access version – currently feels quite neat and decisive. It has none of the sheer eccentricity of Cobalt Core.
Still, you may prefer this mode, and Breachway has “about a year” left in early access, which is enough time to rescue exotic alien tech from the wreckage and transform it into a galactic legend. The massive challenge again is to diversify the roguelite layer or perhaps reduce it even further to the most crucial parts. If Breachway can handle this, it will satisfy me more than any chanterelle.
