Into The Breach patch fixes false victories, adds initial touchscreen support
Pacific Finger
While we're all distracted by BattleTech's intricate and ponderous mech warfare, the polar opposite, lightning-quick approach to turn-based giant robo-combat has been busy too. Into The Breach's latest patch quietly fixes a dozen-odd problems I doubt many of us even noticed this ridiculously slick game ever had, including one that meant getting your whole team killed in the final mission didn't always mean a game over. Me, I'm happy because this patch marks Into The Breach's first step into ultimate perfection - becoming a game I can play while lying down.
Now, patch 1.0.22 sadly doesn't herald a full touchscreen UI for Into The Breach, but it does make the difference between touch-unplayable and touch-playable for folk who own fancy finger-poky laptops such as Microsoft Surfaces, Lenovo Yogabooks or certain Dell XPSes, amongst many others.
Notes Subset designer Matthew Davis here, "We have not created a full touch friendly UI, as that would take months. But I have improved general capabilities along with some touch friendly improvements so it's all very playable using nothing but touch on tablet PCs like the Surface. Ultimately I would like to design and include a full touch UI for the game, but there is no time line on that. This is just a stop gap measure."
Nice to know it's on their radar, though - ITB's predecessor FTL never got any real touch support on PC, despite having a fully finger-friendly iPad edition. I've just give the patch a quick spin on my Surface Book 2 (review), and it's mostly fine during battles. Where before there was a lot of double-tapping and unrecognised input with a finger, now I can do my bug-squishing fairly freely. However, there is some jank - I need a mouse or keyboard to select options from the main menu, for instance. A big improvement though. I don't feel that I need new icons or anything like that, but a bit of refinement would be welcome.
As for the other fixes, here's yer list, or browse'n'discuss 'em all over on the ITB forums. I don't think I've encountered even a single one of these, although if I had ever run into a situation wherein the game let me win the final mission despite getting all my pilots killed, I probably wouldn't admit it here.
- Better support for Touch Screen / Tablet PCs (See note below)
- Viscera Nanobots will now trigger on minor enemies (Spider Eggs, Blobs, etc.)
- Deadly Environment / Unit effects are made more clear to the player
- Potential fixes for some system compatibility issues
- Satellites are now immune to Smoke effects
- Fixed rare bug where a single game could be stuck resisting every Grid Damage
- Fixed some rare token failures in pilot/CEO barks
- Fixed bug where Mechs without weapons could become inactive
- Small changes to the save backup system to prevent corruption
- Phase Cannon will no longer damage buildings on the edge of the map
- Mech falling down a hole will now negate the "Perfect Battle" achievement
- Fixed various strange behaviors that can be triggered by the Blob Boss splitting
- Unstable Mechs will no longer explode incorrectly if using the Psionic Receiver
- Archimedes/Rong save and reload exploit fixed
- Mission where Vek spawn from ACID tiles will no longer spawn units on Frozen ACID tiles
- Losing every Mech in the final mission will correctly result in a Game Over
- Viscera Nanobots will no longer revive units that fell down holes
- Fixed: Info Overlay hotkey sometimes displayed wrong enemy unit info
- Fixed: Rare bug where a repaired unit lost its weapons
- Fixed: Secret Pilot / Ralph pilot skills could be attributed as "environment" for xp
- Fixed: Health bars with 10 (or more) won't look ridiculous
- Attack Order UI fixes
- Minor art/UI/animation fixes
- Minor text fixes
It is a damn-near perfect game, it really is. Here's my Into The Breach review on why that is, if you missed it.