QC Games has opened a rift and unleashed Breach upon the world. Now, there are probably many of you who have never heard of the game, and that’s okay. The company is fairly new and Breach just recently made it onto certain larger gaming networks’ radars.
Explaining the game to a new player is both simple and complex. The simple way to explain Breach, would be that it’s a dungeon crawler. You hop in either a party of 4 or solo, try to clear objectives, and defeat a final boss. Conversely, you can decide to play as the evil entity and hinder the other players from success in a 1v4, one versus many, scenario.
However, Breach can be much more complex. There are seven schools total with six for the Heroes: Arcane, Battle, Dark, Hedge, Shadow, Tech, and one for the antagonist, Veil Demon. Each school then has its own “classes.” Currently there are three classes available in each Hero school and six classes under Veil Demon. Breach also has a unique class system mechanic. As you level up various classes within the school you can swap out class skills to make your own unique class build.
Each class skill is “unlocked” for swapping in intervals of two, unlocking at two, four, six, and eight. This feature encourages the play of various classes at least to level eight so that you can have a truly diverse class spectrum and a personalized experience.
The Veil Demons, or the “enemies” of Breach are a bit more unique. Playing a Veil Demon switches the role from 4v1 to 1v4. It sounds unbalanced, but QC Games has done a good job of keeping things fair in Breach. When you get into a match, you pick from one of the 6 classes. Then you pick your 2 “Elite” summons from a pool of 10 monsters. You also are able to equip items to the Veil Demon to help improve their stats.
Breach has several game modes to choose from, Solo, Co-op vs AI, Co-op vs Player, and Custom. Co-op vs Player is the 4v1 mode similar to Evolve from Turtle Rock Studios or Space Lords from Mercury Steam while custom allows players to make pick the map they want to play on.
As you play the game you will acquire gold and item drops randomly. The gold is in-game currency used to buy equipment for classes and also for purchasing new classes. There’s also a premium currency called “QC Points” which can be used to buy classes as well as cosmetic items to customize your character. The randomly dropped items can vary from class-specific equipment to gems used to apply passive bonuses. My only wish is that there was a bit more control on the random drops, as most of the time you end up with items for a class you either don’t play or don’t have unlocked yet. Maybe they could implement in a cache system that allows you get an item for you school.
The gameplay in Breach is arcade-like, as you can either use a Mouse and keyboard or even utilize the partial controller support. The gameplay is relatively smooth for the most part. There are some hiccups here and there but that’s to be expected with a game in early access. That being said, the development team has been doing a great job at addressing any major issues. Thankfully I’ve yet to run into something major, just an issue of my bullets missing because my aim is bad.
The matches are played in a large dungeon broken into smaller mini-dungeons, each with its own unique mission objective. These can range from something as simple as slaying enemies until the progress is full to having to move a drone from Point A to Point B. All of these require you to be mindful of your surroundings as you must fend off waves of enemies coming out of rifts. Also, you will have to be mindful of the Veil Demon either setting up traps or possessing one of the various enemies to try and take your team out.
The graphics of Breach are pretty good, however there is a hard blur on my character model when lounging in the main hub, but that could possibly be my computer not rendering properly. Otherwise, enemies are great, character models are detailed, and environments are gorgeous. It does need a little bit of optimization to make it pop more, but overall I’m very happy with what I’m seeing.
To sum it up, Breach is shaping up to be a solid game with some unique features and enjoyable gameplay. They do have a road map to add in more maps and more classes, but we’ll have to wait and see what they are.
For the future, I hope they increase the equipment list. That way they could possibly implement a better loot drop system or even a rarity system to make the grind more enjoyable. I see myself playing this game for a while, especially being that I have friends to play it with, and as long as they continue to support the game with new classes, gear, and maps, I’ll be happy.
Slated to go Free-to-play later on this year, the early access requires you buy into the video game in order to play right now. If you’d like to buy into the Early Access click here, there you can purchase a Founder’s Pack to gain instant access. Breach is projected to be in Early Access for six months before it goes “Live” and transitions to a free-to-play version of the game.
Breach was initially released in Early access in January 2019 but was canceled.
