As I was playing Breached, one thought came to my mind quite often. I was wondering if there was some sort of Do it Yourself kit out on the internet, where you could build your own survival game, with relatively simple plot points to choose from. From what I’ve seen on Steam, it seems like it has to be the case because, at the current rate, Steam will be filled with survival games. Regardless, Breached takes a different route with this genre. Instead of being out in the wilderness, you’re stuck inside your pod, and the only connection you have with the outside world is a drone.
When you’re unexpectedly woken up by the system, you receive news that your ship/pod was damaged and that your fuel has leaked out. As it stands, you only have enough oxygen for eight days, and if you don’t manage to fix your generator, the system will die along with you. So, you set out to find resources for synthesising fuel and parts for the generator. Every day you enter details of your progress into a log, where the mindset of the protagonist is laid bare. As you get closer and closer to the deadline, the person you’re in control of starts becoming overly dramatic.
I personally didn’t have any issues with the story, as it was within reason to expect that something like this might happen, just like Matt Damon got stuck on Mars and had to ‘science the heck’ out of his survival. My issue with the game is that it takes a completely different approach to when it comes to exploration. I thought to myself as I played through the game, that the protagonist must have felt like hurling at every turn. Whenever you took control of the drone, the display would turn into a low-resolution version, with odd vertical lines across the display that ‘simulates’ VR, however, it also simulates nausea you feel when using VR from my perspective.
The game must have been built around the idea that you could play it in VR. It clearly handles that way. From the get go you’re only able to use the mouse, and controlling the drone is also handled by the two mouse buttons. It clearly has that simplistic appeal, but with VR not so prevalent, the whole execution feels sickening. As for the fidelity, I didn’t have any issues with how the game presented itself, the world looked amazing, even with low-resolution textures, but the excessive motion blur and massive ‘lag’ when controlling the drone made the entire experience feel half-baked.
As for the ‘lag’, I tried lowering the system requirements to its lowest but the unoptimized mess that is this game didn’t improve. As for it being a VR game, I don’t see that future right now, unless they overhaul the entire concept.
Breached isn’t one of those survival games that will take the world by storm. It has limited itself to extremely basic gameplay elements, confusing mechanics, and aspects that would have you die more often than not. It tries to be complicated but fails as dramatically as the protagonist did when I played the game. Even the end game is uninspiring. Breached can basically be summed up in a sentence.
Summary
Breached tries to imitate the success of other survival games, and push your detective and survival skills to the limit, however, it doesn’t do any of that. Breached will make you reel with confusion as to why you just spent your money on it, and then make you motion sick as well. The game feels half-baked and unoptimized. There are some good elements in the game, as always, but they’re bogged down by uninspiring gameplay.
Dreyer was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 139 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @dreyer_smit.