Breach & Clear Review (iPhone, iPad)

Considered one of the biggest games launched this week, Breach & Clear arrived on my iPad shortly after its launch and I had big plans with it: spend the entire weekend locked inside my mancave, playing the game. Glad I had some Chuck Norris DVDs laying around, because watching the Lone Wolf in action was a lot more fun!

Coming as a tactical game with a huge level of detail, Breach & Clear appears at first overwhelming: a ton of different squad setups to choose from, a gazillion of weapons, RPG-like skills, stats and so on. Your goal is pretty simple: you have to breach in, clear all the enemies and get the XP points and money, which sounds pretty good.

The problem is when the game tries to make it all become reality. First of all, the moment you are thrown in the game, you have no knowledge about what it is and how to play it and the game itself doesn’t even try to teach you. I had to select my squad first without really knowing what each of the stats mean. I am then taken to a menu I have to navigate through myself, aimlessly, only to find out the tutorial mission. One, which tells you everything you need to know about the game: how to move and how to set the view points of your soldiers. And unfortunately, that’s about it with the game!

All you have to do is to move from cover point to cover point and make sure that you have all areas covered. The actual tactical element of the game is hilarious. The enemies don’t seem to move too much or think too much, the noise of doors breaking to pieces doesn’t seem to alert them and sometimes they are stupid enough to avoid getting into cover, waiting to be shot down like sitting ducks.

The turn based system is also pretty flawed: you can’t instruct your soldiers to go in a specific order to a specific place, and whenever you hit the end turn button, they all start moving at the same time and you surrounding the enemy turns into you getting all your men shot down one by one because they don’t get there at the same time.

Do you want more? There is more! Actually, there is less: less of a real campaign: just a few missions (with the promise of more coming soon, as well as a ton of game features coming soon which makes me wonder why have they released a game with so few bits of content), all repetitive and insanely boring. Same enemies, same decor, same repetitive gameplay that is not rewarding nor fulfilling.

The plethora of items available (weapons, gear, attachments and consumables) don’t make a lot of sense in the game and I didn’t really get to see the improvements of adding a sniper scope to my rifles. Only the consumables are really worthy, but you can easily go through most of the missions without using a single grenade or medpack.

Visually, things are a little better as Breach & Clear comes with some pretty decent graphics, but they don’t really manage to save much of the mess delivered by the gameplay and repetitive gameplay and missions.

Unfortunately, Breach & Clear didn’t give me any reasons to be happy that I spent 2 bucks on it and it looks like a rushed product that the developers couldn’t wait to bring to the iTunes store. There is a lot of potential here and the concept is great, but from that to actually delivering anything fun, we have a very long line.

iTunes link: Breach & Clear
Final rating: 6 out of 10