Games Beaten in 2016 So Far - 78January (20 Games Beaten)
February (8 Games Beaten)
March (8 Games Beaten)
April (13 Games Beaten)
May (6 Games Beaten)
June (13 Games Beaten)
July (7 Games Beaten)
August (3 Games Beaten)
79. Breach and Clear - Vita - August 10
Breach and Clear was first a Steam game, then a Vita game, and then the rarest physical Vita game in the world with - IIRC - only 1530 copies in existence (1500 for the initial sale and 30 for the bundle with Breach and Clear: Deadline that went on sale a week or two ago). But what IS it? Well, it's part turn based strategy, part 'Murica sim, and part SRPG. I'll explain what I mean by each of those.
The TBS is the most obvious part. You control each member of your four person fire team individually when you give orders for each turn (called "phases" in the game) that last for five seconds. When all of your orders are given, everyone - your four soldiers as well as however many terrorists are on the map - move at the same time. What determines the combat is what enemies your guys come into contact with (or vice versa), what direction each combatant is facing, and the level of your stats.
Speaking of stats, there are six stats in the game - Accuracy, Reaction, Health, Speed, Evasion, and a class specific stat (more about classes in a moment). The first two are the most important for offense. If you have high reaction but low accuracy, you'll shoot at everything the second it enters your field of vision, but you're not going to hit shit. Conversely, if you have really high accuracy but low reaction, you're not going to realize there's an enemy until he's practically kissing you, but you could hit a squirrel three miles away using a 17th Century musket. Obviously, a balance is best.
The first thing you do when you start is make a four man fire team. You'll first choose which spec ops force you want to use, each specializing in a certain stat - US Army Rangers (health), US Navy SEALs (reaction), US Army Special Forces (speed), Canadian Joint Task Force 2 (accuracy), British Special Air Service (evasion), German Kommando Spezialkräfte (units' special stat), and Russian Spetznaz (health and reaction).
After that, you pick from six classes for each of your four units - Fireteam Leader, Weapons Sergeant, Breacher, Direct Action, Medic, and Intelligence. My team consisted of the Weapons Sergeant
-censored so as not to offend- Dickfuck (who used a blue assault rifle), Breacher Douchenozzle Gigacock (who used a green shotgun), Fireteam Leader Barack Obama (who used a gold sniper rifle), and Medic John Cena (who used a hot pink SMG).
Once you make your team, you get into the meat of the game. There are three games modes - one where you kill everybody, one where you defuse bombs in a time limit, and one where you just GTFO. Within each game mode, there are seven locations - Afghanistan, Turkey, Germany, China, Russia, Colombia, and Mexico. Within each location, you have five missions. So you've got a total of 105 missions. There are five difficulties ranging from Very Easy to Very Hard, and for each mission, you can receive between one and four starts based on how quickly you complete it and how your soldiers fared. These stars are used to unlock more missions as well as unlock weapons for purchase from the store.
Now the RPG element comes into play with the experience gained after each mission. After every mission, all of your soldiers - even if they died - are given experience, and each time you level up (up to a cap of 30), you get five skill points to place in any of the six stats. You can turn on permadeath for more experience, but I like to YOLO things way too much to bother with that mess. It's a nice way to specialize certain characters (I focused on speed for my medic, accuracy for my sniper, reaction for my shotgun breacher, etc).
All in all, it's not a bad game at all, and it's great for killing some time while you take a shit for wait in a waiting room, but from what I've read, the Steam version is MUCH better, and it's just okay. You know, maybe 6 out of 10 okay. Definitely not bad. Definitely not something you should rush to the Playstation Store to buy. DEFINITELY not something worth paying the ~$230 it's going for on eBay for the cartridge unless you just HAVE to be able to say that you have the world's rarest Vita game in your collection.
Yeah there's all of ONE copy on Amazon right now for $299.
