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The beauty of cards is that they can be anything. You can slap together a working game with them in a couple of minutes. Take 12 blanks, doodle some faces and landscapes, and lo, you have a procedural narrative generator. Make some duplicates, invent a few rules and lo, you have systems.
Conversely, the great drawback of cards – especially in those roguelite deckbuilders people have been churning out since Slay The Spire – is that everything can be reduced to them. For example: last night, I played a round of Fungi with my partner, Fungi being a charming tabletop foraging sim in which you gather scrumptious chantarelles and boletus from the forest floor. This morning I resumed playing Breachway, out now in early access, in which you guide a starship through a series of wartorn solar systems, with battles unfolding as a turn-based exchange of cards corresponding to ship components.
Piling up a delicious panful of puffballs is not much like organising a missile volley, but when cards are involved, there’s the risk of interchangeability. It’s all just hoarding number cards and multipliers for the opportune moment, right? What is a corvette, but another kind of fungus? Thankfully, Breachway makes the deckbuilder format its own. A huge part of the fun, in fact, is watching it find ways to recharacterise familiar cardgame synergies so that they’re consistent with the sweaty daydream of crafting your own Enterprise, Battlestar or Sulaco. It’s off to a fine start in early access. Still – and at the risk of getting my decks even more mixed up – I do think it could do with some additional flavour.
The problem is less the cardgame than the surrounding roguelite element. Each solar system is a web of nodes for battles, refuelling or repair opportunities, space stations where you can give your warp core a haircut, and storylet events that sometimes involve quests – all of it funnelling towards a boss encounter at the far end. The overall goal – as described in a tutorial prologue that can be disabled, once you’ve completed it – is to chase down one of sci-fi’s many anomalous signals, but there are also a bunch of factions to reckon with enroute.
As you travel, you’ll make or lose friends while pursuing your own interests, accruing or losing reputation points with each side, which dictates whether you’ll be met with open arms or torpedoes a few nodes along. Aside from the lure of plunder (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-tinted starlanes – it’s a slightly forced way of preserving the branching roguelite structure, and ensuring you can’t just loot every map node at your leisure.
Sounds robust, yes? As robust as a freshly plucked bouquet of enoki, sizzling on the campfire with some cider and butter. Ah, but I’ve found solar system traversal quite dry so far. The starmap presentation is tepid and the events or quests are pedestrian sci-fi fare, rendered all the sleepier by roguelite repetition – go and fight X of Y ships, decide whether to answer a distress signal, attempt to scrape some bonus credits from a wreck. The game’s small variety of mission types might feel more inviting if the writing were sparkier, but it all reads like codex marginalia: clipped, world-buildy stuff with some reluctant stabs at humour. It functions well enough as a roguelite – each run at a system is about tailoring your ship for the boss, without taking too much attrition on the way – but there isn’t nearly the richness and suspense you get from, say, the woebegone roads and landmarks of Darkest Dungeon 2, even at the same point in its early access career.
If the roguelite element and the narrative backdrop are dreary, the card-based ship engagements and their supporting resource systems jolt Breachway out of the doldrums. Again, the game does a wonderful job of reworking the base conceit of dealing and playing cards into a plausible approximation of a starship’s anatomy. Each turn, you’re dealt a random handful based on your (upgradeable) reactor output. Each card requires one or more of three resource types, ordnance, energy and mass, which are themselves generated turn by turn according to how you’ve configured your reactor. Your opponent also pulls cards unpredictably from a deck, but with pips filling up on each card to show you when they’re ready to play. This allows you to anticipate attacks, target weaknesses and puzzle your way past dreadnoughts that, schematic for schematic, ought to have you bang to rights.
The cards span a familiar assortment of attack, defence, support and resource management abilities, but each lends itself cleanly to certain tactics, and there is a gratifying emphasis on chaining them together. Different species of pulse laser can be fired in sequence, 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 – reduce them to scrap, and your opponent will lose access to certain parts of their deck for a couple of turns.
Flak cannons are more about momentum between turns; they inflict randomised damage within a range, but get deadlier as each heaping dollop of flak abrades the target’s hull. Ion bolts knock out shields and suffuse the victim with static electricity, eventually causing systems to misbehave. Missiles can be devastating, but take a turn to cross the distance between ships, and are gone from your deck once fired. As such, they should be saved up and timed to coincide with instant-effect cards.
As for defensive play: one of Breachway’s most important gambits is that shields swiftly dissipate once raised, halving in power every turn, which means you have to treat them more like parries. The same is true of enemy shield usage, though certain bosses will happily turn themselves into bulletsponges using more advanced cards, unless you snipe and sabotage the relevant bits.
Periodically, the generic rhythms of the deckbuilder format assert themselves over all this wanton Star Trekery. Chew through a lot of shield cards in one turn, and you won’t draw many others till you clear out your discard pile, but is it worse to keep them in your hand and not have room for new offensive cards? It’s lovely to watch the game move between thinking like a cardgame and thinking like a spaceship strategy experience. And the writing, so lacklustre when it comes to the roguelite stuff, does a nifty job here of dramatising each card’s effects, reframing them as battle scene devices you might recognise from myriad movies.
All that said, there are times when the game’s desire to render the deck-building consistent with the ship-building feels like a constraint. Or rather, the specific tenor of harder sci-fi invoked here limits how adventurous Breachway can be with its build possibilities. Aside from acquiring new cards, you can increase and reorganise your reactor output with credits, and plug in subsystems which act as modifiers, but the evolution of your ship – there are four varieties in the early access build right now – currently feels quite trim and decided. There’s none of the sheer eccentricity of Cobalt Core.
Still, you might prefer it like that, and Breachway has “around a year” ahead of it in early access, which is plenty of time to salvage some exotic alien tech from derelicts, and transform itself into a galactic legend. The big challenge, again, is spicing up the roguelite layer, or perhaps thinning it even further back to the parts that matter. If Breachway can manage that, it will satisfy me more than any chantarelle ever could.