Breach & Clear: DEADline (PC)

Developer:

Mighty Rabbit

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Release Date:

2015

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Systems:

Win, Linux, Mac

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This month on Super Adventures, I'm playing Unity 5-powered special forces sequel Breach & Clear: nFΛnLINԷ. Uh, I mean Breach & Clear: DEADline, or perhaps just Breach & Clear: Deadline; I'm getting conflicting information on that and as usual the logo's in all caps so it's no use.

As the name hints, this is the follow up to tactical counter-terrorism game Breach & Clear, though I'm sure it has very little to do with tactical counter-terrorism game Deadline, and I'm doubly certainly there's no connection to "authentic hotel maintenance simulation" Breach & Clean. I can detect a little Call of Duty influence though, as the game's gone from modern warfare straight to... hnng... zombies.

Zombies man, it's always the fucking zombies. Why is it never wizards? Breach & Clear & Dragons: Origins, it could totally work!

I'm coming into this entirely blind, as I've never seen the game, I didn't play it in Early Access, and I know next to nothing about it. In fact I went to do my normal research, looking for some stuff to write up here, and it seems that neither Wikipedia or MobyGames have an entry for it. So if you've ever wanted to add a game to either site and leave a semi-permanent mark on history, now's your big chance!

But one thing I do know about the game, and this is something you should definitely be aware of, is that a friend of mine worked on it. So I can't promise I'll be entirely fair in my assessment of the game. But this site's about showing games off as much as it is about my opinions, and I can still do that while being biased. So if you decide to carry on reading, keep repeating to yourself "This guy's predisposed to be nice to the game," in your head the whole time, and then ignore all my conclusions.

(Click any screenshot to expand it to twice its current size!)

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I chose to play the prologue level first and there's actual dialogue here this time! Breach & Clear's plot was entirely limited to a couple of lines in the level descriptions, but this has a story going on. It doesn't have voice acting for it though, as the conversations are text only.

I've seen enough 'Battlestar Galactica' to know that "Actual" means the commanding officer of whatever's on the other end of the radio, so sadly I'm not really taking orders from a guy called Vergil Actual. But if I was, then Mr. Actual would've sent my special forces unit to this sci-fi looking bio-chemical facility to investigate why the emergency line's gone dead.

Oh damn, this is real time now? Breach & Clear is a turn based game but here I'm controlling a character directly with the mouse, with the other three following close behind. It's all getting a bit Syndicate.

Holding left mouse makes the characters walk towards the cursor, holding right mouse makes them turn to face it, but I'm getting tempted to switch to keyboard or controller instead. If they're not going to automatically walk to the place I click on, I'd rather use a thumbstick.

This prelude is a tutorial, so I pressed (B) on the door to set a breaching charge as instructed (the game likes to mix up its keyboard and controller instructions to keep things interesting), and my operators automatically got their asses out of the way of the explosion. So that's encouraging.

Oh, now it's paused the action and activated command mode, which switches back to the old Breach & Clear style and adds a really terrible looking static effect to the border which makes it look like I'm loading a ZX Spectrum game.

Here I can select each of my operators and click to give them waypoints (with their paths marked by the coloured lines). I can also set their field of view, marked by the red cone. The big difference from Breach & Clear is that instead of taking simultaneous rounds, I hold a button to advance time precisely as much as I want to. So it's basically a 'real-time with pause' system, except backwards. Plus this time I can target specific enemies instead of leaving that to my soldiers.

Another difference to Breach & Clear is that I'm being attacked by zombies! So why I'm cowering behind cover for an automatic armour bonus I don't know. These guys are slow moving and unarmed, so it seems that walking away from them while I shoot might be the better option.

Once the immediate zombie problem was resolved I was told to move to this next room and bring up the radial menu for tactics training.

It took me a while though, as the buttons I need to press change depending on whether I'm in action or command mode, and the instructions they're giving don't seem 100% accurate. Or maybe I just didn't move to the correct place first, I dunno. Either way the game's still a bit confused about whether I'm using the mouse or an Xbox controller, so I'm kind of holding both right now. It's not ideal.

Anyway I did what it said, telling my weapons sergeant to suppress the zombies and then having the explosives expert throw a satchel bomb in the middle of the group to vaporise them. You wouldn't think suppressing fire would work on brainless zombies, but I guess it does.

Then the tutorial blew up my intelligence officer and killed him! He was my favourite as well. But it's fine, as dead characters aren't really dead until their timer runs out.

You can see here on my weapon sergeant's item/tactic screen how items on the left have a limited stock, while tactics on the right have cooldowns. So I can presumably get my medic to pick people off the floor indefinitely as long as they don't die again too soon, but healing them afterwards is going to cost a precious medpack.

This is the tragic prologue though so there's no way anyone from this team was ever going to make it out of here alive. Which is why I was surprised when they actually kind of did! I think.

Either way I'm done with Cool Squad now, so I get to set up my own unit and.... hey these are the exact same faces as in Breach & Clear! Like we wouldn't recognise them.

I was worried that I'd be stuck here for hours thinking of names, but now I'm thinking that I'll just reconstruct my old crew I used to beat the last game.

Like in Breach & Clear I've got six classes to pick from, but this time they come with their own outfits and skill trees.

Each class has a different tree layout but they're all keen on making me grab things I don't necessarily want to reach the tiny 5% upgrades I do. I could give this guy any gun I acquire, but if I want better reload speed and luck I'm going to have to spend points becoming a 'specialist' with both shotguns and assault rifles.

Alright, the game proper starts with two of my four heroes dropped into XCOM: Enemy Unknown
after their chopper was shot down by a stinger missile. Not that I get to see any of this, there's no cutscenes, so I'm just going to go ahead and assume that a zombie fired it. We're too far inside the zone for pick up though so we're going to have to walk.

But I only managed to take a few steps before a red barrier appeared to seal me in with a bunch of zombies heading my way. So I got ordered my soldiers into cover using command mode and started firing away at them with my shitty infinite ammo pistols. This turned out to be boring though so I switched into real-time mode instead and now it's a twin-stick Smash TV-style shooter!

I have to hold down the aim trigger before I can shoot, but aiming slows my walking speed, so I'm firing for as long as I can before the enemies catch up, then releasing aim to run away a bit. It's all cool as long as there's somewhere to run to. Fortunately my other guy knows how to look after himself and there's no friendly fire, so we're doing well here.


A FEW ZOMBIES LATER.

Seems that every time I wipe out one group of zombies, I only get to take a few steps down the street before the red barriers appear, and I'm doing it all over again. At least I've found the rest of my squad and some proper guns, though these things only have limited ammo and it's taking a while to wear these bastards down.

The dead zombies been dropping white gears, which seem like something I want to be picking up. I have to hurry though as they disappear over time. Why? Because zombie gears evaporate when exposed to air, that's just a fact.

Yay, I won another zombie battle, and everyone gets a level up! They don't get a health refill though, for winning fights or levelling up, so I'm going to have to try very hard to keep my 'Total Damage Taken' low.

In Breach & Clear levelling up meant getting to spend points on attributes, but here I get a single skill point to invest in my skill tree. I'm pretty sure my attributes must have gone up as well, seeing as there's was a 'stat growth' picture on the class select screen, but it wasn't enough to raise my max health.


EVENTUALLY.

A few steps down the road I got into another fight, but some kind civilians took pity on me afterwards and brought me into their safe house for some more unvoiced dialogue!

Wait, "You're lucky they didn't find you"? She just saw us fight off half an army of zombies right outside her stadium! Oh wait she's talking about armed non-zombie psychopaths. So I've got them to look forward to as well.

We're trying to escape to the harbour, but she won't tell us how to get there until we help her out first. So now I need to raid a pub for 'medical supplies' (ie. alcohol). Fine, QUEST ACCEPTED.

I'm liking this safe house they've got here. Not only do I magically recover all my health when I step inside, but they've got a locker for me to stash my excess inventory items and a workbench for me to upgrade my guns and gear.

Wait, is that a broadsword hanging on there?

You can't just put a broadsword up there with all the other weapons and then not let me use it, that's just mean. Though maybe it's a clue that the next game actually will be Breach & Clear & Dragons.

Hmm, I'm not overly impressed by this workbench menu. It's not the look of it that bothers me, though it isn't the prettiest gun upgrade screen I've ever seen, I'm mostly just annoyed that they've mapped (A) to the upgrade button. I keep pressing it by accident when I want to change the attachments and that's the story of where all my scrap went. It's easy enough to get scrap back though, as I just need to kill more zombies and grab their white gears.

Wait, I just discovered a much bigger problem with the workbench that's almost game breaking in its severity: there's no option to paint the guns any more!

Breach & Clear (PC)

I had such beautiful weapons in Breach & Clear, and I assumed that this would build upon that game's powerful customisation features. Now I know what it feels like when hope dies. Though it does let me name them at least.

Something else the game's missing is a shop, meaning I can't stock up on health potions before I leave and I'm stuck with whatever I can scavenge. Though I can convert scrap into ammo at least, so I shouldn't have to resort to the pistols.


SOME ADVENTURING LATER.

Didn't take me long to find the pub (like everything else so far it was just down the road), and there's human Fanatics in here, so I finally get to indulge in a bit of Breaching & Clearing! The game up to this point has been mostly about Staying Put & Waiting for zombies to come to me, but human enemies aren't keen to stray from cover so I'll have to go to them. Splitting the team up and sending two guys to sneak around the back and flank them seems like a smart move.

That big cloud of shadow on the right is my fog of war, so it's a mystery what I'm running into, but that never bothered me in Breach & Clear. That game was all about storming into a room and Owning Every Angle, and hopefully this isn't too different. By the time they see me coming they'll already be dead.


SOME TACTICS LATER.

Well I was bloody lucky to only lose one soldier after that. Turns out that if you rush in front of an human enemy in this game, they'll shoot you a lot. Fortunately I was able to stabilise poor Zach before he died died. I can't imagine the game has permadeath, but this would be a crappy place to find out.

I got the 'medicine' so I ran back to the safe house for free health and discovered that people are starting to appear in there who want me to do things. So now I've got sidequests as well! The game's turning into an actual RPG here.

Plus the outside streets are getting a bit saner too. Sure there's still zombies roaming around, but I'm actually free to walk around a bit now without being surrounded by red walls every few steps.

Though it still happens and now I have to kill every Fanatic inside if I want to get my team back out. Either that or load my last save game.

The weird thing about the red barriers (aside from the fact that they're shy and rarely turn up in my screenshots) is that the game can't make up its mind about whether my team gets teleported inside them or not. Most times they're all boxed in, but on occasion the team will be split up, and the ones outside get to point and laugh at the poor suckers stuck within.

And they've got good reason to laugh, as whoever I send in to fight Fanatics is likely to get their ass kicked. Zombies I just have to get out of the way of, they're easy, but I can't figure out how to neutralise these entrenched lunatics without soaking up serious damage myself.

I do have items, but I don't really want to waste a precious grenade on one of these guys when there's another five of them off screen I still have to kill. I suppose I could try the skills, but what does my team actually have?

• Provoke enemies? They seem plenty provoked as it is.
• Speed up by 1.2X? If I travel that fast I might disappear from reality and become lost inside a dimension of pure thought.
• Pin a single enemy? They're in cover, they're happy where they are! And that's going to be a lot of help next time I'm swarmed by a zombie horde.
• Stablize? Well okay yeah, I am going to be getting a lot of use out of that.

Maybe I could splash out and get myself Suppression from the weapons sergeant class and see how that works out. There's a three point fee to start getting skills from another class though and I only get one point per level up, so it'll take me a while to save up for it.

I really should've picked the class with the infinite satchel bombs.


SOON.

Aww yeah, look at this thing I just pulled out of what was literally called a loot crate! It's not just any trigger, it's the deadliest trigger one can install in their gun!

Though it gives me -4 damage per second.

Still, it got me a lot when I scrapped it. I can restock on ammo and level up my hat now. Plus it's not like it's the only thing I found while I was out, as there's boxes everywhere on these streets.

There's also a surprising number of streets as well.

I was expecting the game to be on a Dungeon Siege-style linear path the whole way, but nope I've got a town here to wander through. The stars point to quests I still have to complete, and the flags are bus stops. Turns out that the zombie apocalypse wasn't enough to keep the buses from running and I can use them to fast travel around the map.

I know what you're wondering, and no there isn't a DeLorean parked at the Twin Pines Mall. Or if there is, I didn't spot it.

The logo's kind of familiar though!


EVENTUALLY.

The streets have become a lot quieter now I've triggered all the red wall battles. It's almost feeling like Silent Hill out here.

At this point I'm just mowing down stray groups of respawned zombies as I run around completing sidequests, locating supply caches and collecting loot. I should really go do one of those things written down at the bottom right, but how can I possibly resist the allure of this open sewer grate?

Oh by the way there's a handy minimap radar beneath the quests, but it's missing one very important thing: there's no north marked on it! I keep having to check the actual map to figure out which way I'm heading.

Oh damn, there's a worrying number of Bs to this sewer. I figured I'd drop down here and see what loot I could scavenge, I didn't expect to find an epic multi-floor dungeon.

The loading hints are a lot more useful than the than the random military facts in Breach & Clear, but I'm not sure if this one means I should use the Supression skill or if I can just suppress enemies by shooting them. Either way I really am feeling like I picked the wrong classes now (I didn't bring enough medics for one thing).
 

THREE FLOORS DEEP.

Holy shit this place is a slaughter! Look at all the bodies on the floor, then look at all the dots on the radar left to go. I'm pretty much exclusively just twin sticking these sewers in real-time because there's only zombies down here and otherwise I would be here for the rest of forever.

The downside of not micromanaging my group is that we're more prone to taking damage, but every few floors I reach a new safe house level with a workbench, locker, and full health. So really I'm fine as long as I don't make too many mistakes along the way. Plus I'm unlocking floors as I go, so I can return to the surface with the convenient ladder and then pick up where I left off later.

It's almost become a pure action RPG down here, except without those annoying crates and barrels to smash along the way containing 3 gold pieces each. Plenty of proper loot boxes though, and they're marked on the minimap so I don't miss them.


SEVENTEEN FLOORS DEEP.

That said, it's really handy to be able to drop into the paused command mode instantly and start putting people exactly where I want them (mostly anywhere the zombies aren't). Sure any real-time with pause game has that feature, but this gives me coloured lines to show where they're going and what they're up to, so I can be sure they're not taking the scenic route.

I still haven't really developed any special skills to make my sewer cleaning more interesting, but the zombies have. There's now spitting zombies that spit nasty shit at me that lingers in puddles on the floor. Even more reason for precise coordination. 

After 20 floors of sewer dungeons I finally reached the bottom, and ran right into... pretty much nothing. I was expecting to get my ass handed to me by a giant zombie sewer boss, but that didn't actually happen (though found a cool gun!) I guess I'm going back out now then.


EVENTUALLY.

This is where the quest wants me to be, checking out an office building for a way to get out of the city, but it turned out to be another dungeon so I'm going to floor 20 instead 'cause I do what I want.

Well I'm going to try anyway, though I'm pretty much navigating by muzzle flash at this point. It was hard enough fighting these Fanatics when I could see them, but it's getting ridiculous now. I wish I hadn't packed all the chemlights away into my locker with all the other stuff I've picked up; how was I supposed to know there'd eventually be a use for them?

And then my team got wiped out by a guy with a machine gun standing on the far end of a moderately lit room, entirely out of sight. Oh that reminds me: I've read enough loading hints now to know that fallen soldiers respawn at the safe house, so there's no permadeath. I'm totally loading after that though.


AT THE TOP OF THE BUILDING.

Wow, I am suddenly starting to regret coming up to floor 20. Killing zombies is easy, as long as you’ve got somewhere to run away to and they eventually stop pouring in. But alas I am thoroughly surrounded by the bastards here and I can't kill them fast enough.

After a few reloads I was desperate enough to resort to the item bag and discovered the magic of frag grenades. They're the easy way to turn an overwhelming horde of undead into a red mist! It's just a shame that supplies are so tight that I never usually get to have fun with things like explosives... or health kits.

By the way, this is pretty much what Challenge Mode is. Not just the office, but the sewer too, and presumably other multi-level dungeons as well. Clear as many incredibly samey floors as you can in the fastest time! It's got online co-op as well apparently, though I won't be trying that.


BACK AT THE STADIUM.

Alright, here's what I brought back from the top floor of the office building: a golden M4 that does a whole 6 damage per second. Just very slightly less than the 181 DPS I'm getting from my camo painted Jungle Warfare.

The colours indicate the rarity by the way, so this Breach and Clear M4 should be a fantastic weapon once I've levelled it up a bit. Trouble is that there's no way of knowing how a new weapon compares to my current gun, or how much scrap it'll cost to get it to its full potential (the cost goes up every level). So I can either look up its final stats online or spend the scrap and take a chance.

And... it turns out that I don't even have enough scrap to make it better than my current gun, so I'm loading my last save. The golden M4 can stay in my locker until I'm unimaginably wealthy.


LATER.

The plot sent me to the sewers again, but this time the sewers brought me out into the countryside! I'm not sure how far this goes but it's nice to have a change of scenery.

But I've just remembered something else to complain about: when the aim trigger's held down, I press up on the right stick to point the gun up. But when I let go of aim (to run back a bit for instance), up on the stick becomes 'zoom in'. So I keep having to fix the camera all the time in order to get nice views like this.

The game needs a bit more consistency in its controls I reckon.

Hey there's a whole new world out here! New opportunities! A new safe house! I was worried I’d be stuck in that slice of town for the whole game, especially as I'm reaching the bottom of my skill trees now.

Oh, I looked it up and I'm only at level 12 out of 30. I guess I'm supposed to end up with dual-class soldiers by the end of the game then. Well that's good, as it gives me some actual choices to make (even if it's just which tree I want to spend 3 points unlocking).


LATER.

Turns out that the next dungeon is 20 floors of caves. They're very pretty caves though, with lots of offices and stairs. The Elder Scrolls games should be jealous. Plus there's lots of people shooting me on this floor, which is a bit awkward. A few zombies heard the gunfire and interrupted us, but the Fanatics just slaughtered them all and went back to shooting me when I popped up to take advantage of the distraction.

I got a new skill for my medic that lets me full heal my soldiers, so I've been taking dumb risks like this and then healing up afterwards (after waiting for it to cooldown). It was great for a while, but I just learned that it uses health kits to work, so I've accidentally burned through every medpack I've collected during the game without realising. Because I'm a damn idiot. Though it's the game's fault really for not giving me regen or a free healing skill!

Alright I'll turn this off now (without saving, so that my medikit loss isn't permanent, hah).


CONCLUSION

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You know what's weird about Breach & Clear: DEADline? I played it for hours and I was never once given a deadline. Not that I'm complaining, I can do without time limits.

I have to admit, I kind of had a feeling this wasn't going to be that great before I even turned it on, mostly because I saw the user reviews on Steam saying it wasn't that great. But I think coming in from a place of extreme... pragmatism has helped me appreciate what the game gets right. For one thing it seemed to run just fine for me, except for some occasional stuttering I'm going to blame on loading, and a few occasions where I escaped the red box combat zone. The biggest bug I found was when I shot a zombie and he stretched into a twisted mess of polygons before bouncing around the screen, but that seems more like a feature.

The game's basically Breach & Clear, except in an horror-themed RPG world, with limited resources, and loot boxes, and there's a twin-stick shooter mode, and most of the time you're fighting mindless creatures that shamble towards you from all directions. So it pretty much feels nothing like Breach & Clear actually. Even when I got to fight some human enemies I found that sweeping through rooms like in the olden days only got me shot. It's more tactical, less of a puzzle game. Or more of a bastard at least. I never reached a point where I could make it look like I knew what I was doing against those guys.

When it comes to zombies though, 9 times out of 10 you just have to pay attention and get out of their way and you're fine, provided you don't get cornered. And 9 times out of 10 it's zombies you're fighting in this. At first I was playing it like Fallout Tactics, using tactical mode for the fights and doing my running around in real-time, but after a while I figured it'd be faster to leave combat mode off entirely and just kite them around a car while my buddies sent bullets their way. So the game looks like XCOM remade in the Unity Engine, but most of the time for me it played like the missing link between Robotron and Left 4 Dead.

The presentation isn't exactly AAA standard, the game's a little unpolished, and I get the feeling they didn't hire a writer, but the moody menacing music and gritty miserable visuals set the scene with some class, even if the walk animations are very slightly hilarious. Plus I appreciate how hard is to really lose track of where things are, as off-screen enemies become icons around the border and hidden characters become glowing outlines.

It's nothing spectacular as a zombie story, a shooter, or a tactical RPG, but I can't say I didn't get into the game, especially when I realised it was giving me somewhere to explore. It's nice to be able to fill in an area map, then dive into an optional dungeon and complete all 20 levels for a shiny new gun, sending doors flying off their hinges the whole way. To be honest I think I prefer the first game's streamlined simplicity, but I'd happily keep playing this one as well so by my rules it's earned itself a shiny Gold Star of adequacy:


But like I said at the start, my friend worked on the game and I'm biased, so please disregard all my opinions.

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Thank you very much for engaging in this extended article-reading experience. You must be exhausted by this point, but you should fight through the fatigue to put a comment in the box below. If you feel like it.