“Into The Breach” is a turn-based strategy game where you control soldiers in massive robots to square off against a race of insect monsters and save the world, one carefully planned move at a time.

You are outnumbered, out gunned and the situation seems hopeless, but the biggest strength of “Into The Breach” is being able to turn around these boxed scenarios with the numerous options at your disposal.

Enemies always telegraph their moves. You will always know who will attack, in what order and how much damage that attack will do. There are no mysteries as to what will happen when a turn ends, so it never feels like you were just dealt a bad hand and cannot recover. The ball is always in the player’s court.

A giant ant might be poised to destroy a skyscraper holding countless civilians. However, with a good strategy, you can redirect his attack into another enemy, bumping them into one another and leaving them open to be caught up in an attack that chains lightning together. All while positioning your forces to be standing over the ground where the enemy spawns in, preventing reinforcements. All according to plan.

It takes a bit of practice, but once you’ve played a few rounds and learned the systems, you get a few different mechs to test out and find whichever one suits your playing style. Within hours, you get to the point where you can weigh your options and defeat your enemies with superior tactics. It’s like any movie that contains a character playing a chess match. You don’t even need to understand chess, but you know he just did something cool when he confidently grabs one of his pieces and reaches across the board while casually saying “checkmate.”

It’s the feeling of being a strategist, a “man with a plan,” a skillful general, a person who can get through their entire order at Subway without stuttering.

“Into The Breach” is the complete package for anyone who likes puzzles. It does have a handful of strange design choices, however.

Your goal is usually to kill the baddies while protecting buildings and factories. You have a “Power Grid” that has a maximum of seven hit points, which drops if a building is destroyed. Run out of power and you instantly lose. This incentivizes players to weigh their options. If it can secure a long term victory, then letting a monster destroy a building and kill the civilians might just be an acceptable loss. However, sometimes a building can be hit and it won’t be destroyed. This is called “Grid Defense” and has a 15% chance of occurring, which can be increased with upgrades.

It’s always a pleasant surprise to have a building suddenly survive an attack, but it is strange that a strategy game with almost no luck involved would include a mechanic that’s determined by chance. Maybe I’m just being too uptight, but I feel like the player shouldn’t be rewarded for making a mistake. I would rather have buildings get an extra shield when I have full power instead of leaving it to the roll of the dice. That way I can at least build an attack plan over what I know for certain.

The game is split up into four islands. After conquering one, you unlock another. Each one has a different variety of enemies and landscapes you can utilize and work around, inviting a ton of ways to strategize and play to your strengths. Once you’ve unlocked them all, you can take them on in any order you want during future playthroughs. I’ll give the creators props for giving the player some freedom, but since each island is remarkably more difficult than the last, trying to take them on with a new and not yet upgraded team is suicide. This is a case where I feel like the challenge should be scaled back if you decide to jump into the hardest island right from the get-go. The player should at least have a fighting chance.

What makes “Into the Breach” so good is the options you have. You can always find a way out if you think hard enough, and that idea has been lost on many turn based strategy games today that rely too heavily on random chance.

For $15, you can have a game that will make you feel and be smarter. That’s more than I can say about any overpriced textbook I’ve bought this year.