Post Script
Off the grid: how tactics games are breaking free of the XCOM template
When Jake Solomon and his team at Firaxis reinvented Julian Gollop’s original X-COM design for more modern sensibilities, they tried many things. As Solomon shared in E368’s Collected Works, two entire prototypes were scrapped, over the course of multiple years, for being too complicated. But eventually the team settled on a simplified format: two actions per soldier per turn, one of which is generally used to move them on a gridded map. (On PC – the grid was hidden for console players.) It ended up working so well that, as XCOM: Enemy Unknown nudged the turn-based tactics game back into fashion in the west, this format became the norm. In its wake came a flood of lesser games that essentially redecorated the same systems for whatever setting was chosen – the Cold War, cosmic horror and so on ignoring the fact that XCOM worked in part because its mechanics served the theme: of soldiers on the ground, pushing gradually forward into the jaws of an unknown threat. This was something Into The Breach understood, keeping the grid and two-action format while putting a fresh emphasis on prediction and repositioning of enemies that suited its kaiju-wrestling mech action.