September 4th 2022

Beaten 1st time on difficulty – Normal
Mods/fixes used: N/A
Favorite OST:
04 – Old War Machines
11 – Cataclysm
15 – Pinnacle Robotics

ITB is a turn based game where we have a squad consisting of 3 mechs fighting giant bugs called Vek. After you place your units on the map, Vek make their move, setting up attacks on your units or the civilian buildings that you must protect. When Vek are done, you know exactly who or what they’re going to attack, how much damage their attack will do and if it will leave a mark on one of the tiles (like setting nearby forest on fire or covering a tile in pool of acid). Your next turn is to figure out the best counter. You can kill the Vek if you have enough firepower or if the type of enemy is squishy, you can move them to redirect the attack or attack each other, cancel their attacks with smoke, push them to death (they can’t swim, for example :P). You usually have plenty of options and I don’t know if I’m making this up, but the AI almost always sets their units in a way that there’s a solution where you can take no damage, if you can find it. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes you need to carefully plan your steps to execute a good turn. However to get the AI to setup in such a way, you need to have 4 or less Vek units on the map. Usually 3 of them will focus on building, the last one on your unit, so in this scenario you simply move the unit that’s targeted and focus on killing or pushing units that are targeting the buildings. If you can’t contain the Vek numbers though, you will quickly find yourself in situation where the best you can do is minimize the damage.

There are 4 islands, each with different environments and unique missions and the final island “The Last Stand” that you can access after clearing at least 2 islands. When you play for the first time, you only have access to island owned by “Archive Inc.” corporation. Secure it once, you get access to RST island, secure RST once and get access to Pinnacle Robotics and secure PR to get Detritus. When you unlock 2nd island it’s up to you which islands you want to clear and in what order. The islands and their respective corporations are:

Archive Inc. – Earth like island, with forests and lots of green. It’s also a sort of museum of Human civilization, before the oceans swallowed most of land. First island you have access to and the easiest. There’s a lot of missions where you have an advantage, like old Earth MLR’s or air support.

R.S.T. Corporation – Desert like island with lots of tiles covered in sand and when hit they create a smoke, smoke cancels attacks of any unit standing on it. Somewhat more fair island, there’s one mission where you get insta-killing terraformer, but others have environmental effects where both sides are affected.

Pinnacle Robotics – Icy island. Runned by AI. And you often get a missions that involve robots. Sometimes you need to protect said robots to get more reputation, even if the robots attack you or do something that makes it harder for both sides to move. If there’s water it’s frozen (duh) but you can break the ice to have option for insta killing Vek.

Detritus Disposal – Waste Island, trash, toxic industrial environment. Somewhat balanced, has unique tiles like teleporters or conveyor belts. And because of that Vek might position themselves in a way that requires you to use them to get the best result. Also lots of tiles with acid on it, units covered in acid take 2x damage and sometimes a perfect position to deal with a Vek is right on top of acid tile… At first may seem like an island where odds are stacked against you slightly, but it’s pretty balanced, just requires some more patience and planning.

The Last Stand – Final. Small volcanic island. Just one, two stage mission and it’s the destruction of Vek hive. On normal and hard difficulties the odds are against and you often have to cheese it to win. If you decide to tackle it early without clearing all islands, you’ll get less alpha versions of Vek but it still can be hard as your mechs don’t have many upgrades.

Achievements play an important role in this game, they’re not just trophies but your way of obtaining currency to unlock new mech squads. There are global achievements that you can do with any squad and squad achievements tied to specific mech squad. That can be a problem for some people as some achievements can be difficult to pull off unless you get really lucky or setup for them. And without achievements you get less coins to unlock squads, you get less options. Luckily you don’t have to do them all to get all squads. And you can do them on easy difficulty too, so you can always do run on easy to get achievements and continue on higher difficulty if you want.

Mechs are split into squads and they usually specialize in one or two things. For example Rusting Hulks specialize in covering the map tiles in as much smoke as they can and one of the mechs gives you a passive bonus that any enemy unit standing in smoke will get 1 point of dmg at the start of next turn. Flame Behemoths specialize in spreading fire and are immune to it. Blitzkrieg rely heavily on Lightning mech within that unit that has electric whip that can chain attacks to nearby units, but it can hurt your units too. You can make custom squads too, with the mechs from squads you unlocked, or create a random squad. Both custom and random squads have their achievements too.

You can make squads even stronger with special pilots. And after a lost/won game you can keep one pilot, and they keep their bonuses from leveling up. My favorite combo is Rusting Hulks with Camila Vera inside Jet Mech, Camila is immune to smoke and Vek web, so she cannot be immobilized and can attack while standing on smoke tile. It can be a pretty OP combination as it’s possible to get so much smoke on map that Vek AI gets confused and sometimes stuck. Abe Isamu is another favorite as he has “Armored” passive and blocks 1 damage. Superb in early game before Alpha Vek start to appear as most normal Vek deal 1 damage and he can just tank them with no consequence. Morgan Lejuene is another favorite, on every kill she gains “Boosted” which increases Mechs move and damage for next turn, it’s possible to keep the buff for entire mission if you can get kill on every turn with her. All pilots have some personality too, aforementioned Abe Isamu is very cold and determined to destroy the Vek, pilot named Adam is a sort of religious fanatic, Lily Reed is a little childish and sees this war like a video game. Morgan is very curious about Vek and how they communicate, how they function, she constantly wants to gather more samples and data. Even non-unique pilots have some personality to them and by their clothing you can tell from which island they originate.

Special pilots get their unique bonuses from the start, but like normal pilots they can level up and you get a random bonus. Before “Advanced Edition” update the bonuses were very simple, +2 HP or +1 reactor energy, as some examples. Advanced edition introduced bonuses like “Thick Skin” that gives immunity to fire and acid, “Masochist” which gives you +2 move when not at full HP, “Technician” that repairs your Mech by 1 at the start of enemy turn. “Normal” pilots can get any of the mentioned and not mentioned level up bonuses, but unique pilots are obviously better. It is possible to have a full squad with unique pilots as at the start of a mission there is a chance that a time pod will crash on the map and if you recover it during mission or the Vek won’t crush it, there’s a chance a unique pilot will be inside (this is also how you unlock them, as at the start of new game you can pick one unique pilot from the pool).

There’s some RNG in this game. You don’t know at what turn a specific enemy will spawn, but before picking an island you know what types of enemies are going to be present and what boss waits at the end. Missions give you reputation that you spend after clearing an island, but you don’t know what weapons or passive bonuses you will see there. And the “shop” is random as you get weapons for Mech class that you don’t have, you can still use that weapon but it will require one extra power to work. AI is not fully predictable either. While having 4 or less Vek you almost always have tools to deal with it, when you get say 6 Vek their decisions can be weird. Sometimes 4-5 will focus on your units and you can avoid most of attacks by just moving, sometimes all of them will focus on buildings. But if you have this many Vek on screen that means you made mistakes 99% of time. But that’s it I think… Hell, you even get information of attack order for Vek, perhaps a Vek attacking 1st that can be moved, could kill that other Vek attacking 2nd that cannot be moved, you have information to set it up like this. But point is while there is some RNG, I never felt like I got screwed by it.

ITB has some interesting story and world, though it’s never in your face, you learn about it via short dialogues that pop up during or between missions, and from dialogues of unique pilots. It also uses the idea of multiple timelines to justify you playing the same game over and over. Once you defeat the Vek or loose trying, you are sent to the next timeline to fight Vek there. Like I said before you can take one pilot with you to the next timeline and there’s no limit into how many timelines you can take them. In my current state I have one pilot with experience from 20 previous timelines :) Aforementioned time pods are obviously from different timelines. You can abandon the timeline at any point in the game, even in middle of the mission.

Overall I really enjoyed this game and after dozens of runs it serves great as a game to run a podcast or YT video in background, as sound is not needed to play this. It is from creators of FTL but it is different, though they are very familiar in some regards (art, font, music by the same guy, some game mechanics). ITB is completely turn based, FTL has pause button to issue commands and your crew carries them out in real-time, combat is in real-time too. FTL was way more tense sometimes, in this game the worst that can happen is you realizing you’re screwed after running all options in your head and just accepting it. I can’t promise you’ll enjoy this one if you enjoyed FTL and vice versa. But I highly recommend both games.