Breach Preview PAX West 2018
Good free-to-play games aren’t as hard to come by anymore, but that doesn’t mean they’re a dime a dozen. Breach, the upcoming title from QC Games, promises a multiplayer co-op where you fight, not only against terrible demons spilling through to the modern world but against another player fighting on the side of the monsters. Their hands-on demo at PAX West showed off a fun, potentially addictive take on modern fantasy and gameplay.
With a team including former Bioware devs, they freely admit to having pulled from many different sources for their game, and it shows by creating a vibrant atmosphere with a variety of classes to choose from and dynamic combat to engage in once you’ve done so. In the demo I played, I picked a heavy hitting tank and so had a fairly easy time adapting to the gameplay, which wasn’t so different than other popular multiplayer shooters that I could name. However, for me, the ease of picking up the gameplay made it instantly fun, and I enjoyed dashing around the Tokyo map with my impromptu team as we felled monsters and demons. Every session is about fifteen minutes long, and as you continue playing, you develop your highly customizable class into something uniquely yours.
Lots of Choices, Lots of Story
The RPG influence isn’t lost on the game, either. The story revolves around the idea that, until 70,000 years ago, humans had a much larger amount of genetic diversity—scientists still don’t know why that disappeared (this part is scientific fact). The game takes the idea that this is because, until then, humans shared the world with a plethora of what we now consider to be mythological creatures, which were especially good at killing humans. A benevolent deity separated the two worlds until he realized that, considering recent events, maybe he should have let humans die. He reversed the veil he put up between the worlds, and the rest is history. Also, there’s a secret order of wizards, but what with the Illuminati, we have that in real life too.
That’s a lot of story for a co-op game where the main point is to kill mythological creatures you’d barely heard of (I’d love to take a go at Baba Yaga, if they give me the chance), but there’s more to the story as you play through it, combining the influences of shooters and multiplayer with the famed Bioware focus on storyline. In the moment-to-moment action of the demo, I found the action compelling and fun, although I did have a couple of minor issues—my team kept losing to the Veil Demon (the name of the role the player antagonizing the main team takes) but I wasn’t entirely sure why, and by the time I tried to figure that out, we were onto the next objective.
The game isn’t perfect yet, but it absolutely has the potential to draw in a huge crowd. Based on the demo, it’s fun, easy to get into, and has a storyline that makes it more than just another shooter in an oversaturated market. Breach is worth watching out for as it makes its way towards its 2019 launch.
