From the Archives: Breach & Clear Deadline

From the Archives: Breach & Clear Deadline

Limited Run’s debut release returned to life in this zombie-style spinoff.

July 2016 brought the third and final original Limited Run release from Mighty Rabbit Studios: Breach & Clear Deadline. As the name suggests, Deadline follows on from the concepts and mechanics of the original Breach & Clear, but anyone expecting another traditional take on the military strategy genre here is in for a surprise. Deadline mixes things up from its predecessor in several significant ways, the most obvious (though perhaps not the most meaningful) being the change in focus from military tactics set in modern combat theaters to fighting back waves of undead monsters in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

It would be easy to shrug off this creative change as anything but creative; these days, any military-themed property will inevitably stumble into the zombie genre at some point. Given the original Breach & Clear’s loose connections to the Call of Duty franchise, was there ever any question that this series was fated to follow in Infinity Ward’s footsteps and end up grappling with the undead as well, as in Call of Duty: Zombies? Sure, Deadline calls the monsters “the infected” rather than “zombies,” and the gimmick here is that the mindless walkers are driven not by some sort of viral outbreak but rather by an infestation of rapidly evolving, parasitic worms. But a zombie’s a zombie, no matter how you tweak the proverbial window dressing.

But if Deadline’s premise amounts to video game business as usual, the execution of those standards here is anything but typical. The original Breach & Clear was strictly a turn-based, mission-by-mission, tactical combat simulation in the XCOM vein. Deadline, however, is decidedly not. For this sequel, Mighty Rabbit Studios radically overhauled the Breach & Clear game engine to break away from the original’s rigid mission-based format—and also to break away from the original game’s exclusively turn-based combat. Deadline plays out as a sort of genre hybrid that blurs the lines between formats and traditions. It allows players to freely switch between turn-based and real-time play, even as it combines tactical combat with open-world dungeon-crawling. There’s a lot going on here and a lot for players to manage, but it all fits together with seamless clarity.

Where the original Breach & Clear can trace its design origins back to strategy classics like MicroProse’s XCOM, Deadline has more in common with seminal computer role-playing games like Fallout and Wasteland, which sent players on lengthy journeys across vast worlds riddled with hazards and ambushes. In Deadline, players control a four-man squad of soldiers, as in the first game, but you have a radically different relationship with the team this time around.

The two games are fairly similar in the broad strokes. Once a combat encounter begins, you still direct your team members around the battlefield, attempting to position them in tactically advantageous locations while evading enemy attacks. With each turn, your team members can stand their ground, rush to a new point of cover, or advance with caution while laying down suppressing fire toward the enemy.

Each of your soldiers can specialize in one of six different categories, which range from lightly armed scouts to durable fire team commanders. Each of these specialties comes with its own unique skill tree, with new abilities becoming available as team members earn experience in combat. At the same time, you can invest resources into leveling up your weapons: Raw materials can enhance weapon strength, while incorporating add-on components grants you access to new weapon features. Each combat class can deploy its own distinct set of consumable tools and weapons during battle, such as lobbing flashbangs, tossing frag grenades, or resuscitating a casualty under fire.

All of this is carried over more or less directly from the first Breach & Clear. Where things take a swerve for the unexpected is in how these familiar elements combine with new mechanics to create new ways to play. While you can approach combat in Deadline by the first game’s rules, you don’t have to. At any time, you can toggle between turn-based and real-time combat with the press of a shoulder button, essentially turning the entire game into a squad-based third-person shooter complete with a free camera system and guns mapped to the shoulder triggers. On top of that, you don’t always have to issue orders to your team members individually; by tapping the PlayStation 4’s Square button, you can order your team to form up as a group and move in tandem. Taking on a horde of zombies, simultaneously, as a team, in real time—it makes for a very different play experience than the one offered by the original Breach & Clear, despite this being very much a direct descendant of that game.

Even if you ignore the option to toggle the action into real-time in order to take a pure, turn-based approach, Deadline still ends up playing out more smoothly than the original Breach & Clear did. Rather than dividing up combat sequences into segmented turns, Deadline treats time as a fluid, continuous thing. When you designate a position and action for a unit, that soldier doesn’t simply move to comply in a single turn before time comes to a halt; instead, each fighter treats directions as more of a command to be carried out indefinitely until you say otherwise. Orders can be given to different units asynchronously with one another, meaning you can place one soldier on a continuous overwatch and leave him there indefinitely while you direct his squad mates to perform a variety of different consecutive actions under his protection.

The key to controlling Deadline’s combat is the PlayStation 4’s R2 trigger, which causes time to advance when pressed. Hold down the trigger and actions by all combatants on both sides play out in real time; release the trigger and the action freezes. The harder you press the analog trigger, the more rapidly events unspool, advancing at anything from a near-freeze-frame crawl to a full-speed clip reminiscent of a MOBA game. This gives players intuitive control over the battlefield, allowing them to watch their commands play out and see the enemy’s counter-tactics. You’re free to pan the camera around to focus in on specific details or skirmishes as needed while the action plays out and then pause the flow of time in order to issue new commands—or beat a hasty retreat, if things begin to go sour.

Deadline’s dynamic approach to combat flow isn’t simply a neat feature—it’s a basic necessity that emerges from the dramatic new enemies the game introduces into its sandbox. The soldiers and terrorists who populated the world of Breach & Clear fought according to the standard rules of combat, observing careful tactics and prioritizing self-preservation above offensive ferocity. That’s not the case for the infected of Deadline: Being essentially mindless zombies, they advance upon the player’s team in overwhelming waves, heedless of their own well-being, aiming to destroy your four-man squad with the force of sheer numbers at any cost. Breach & Clear was about finding safe cover while angling for a clear shot at canny foes who had bunkered down for safety. Deadline, on the other hand, often requires you to play more reactively than tactically. In the early going, you’ll find that sticking to cover is less critical than giving your team clear lines of sight so they can take out mobs of monsters and then backpedal for safety as needed. Eventually, infected capable of launching ranged attacks enter the fray, able to decimate an exposed soldier in a matter of seconds which forces you to rethink your basic combat strategies. Deadline’s infected hordes demand quick thinking and an instinct for improvisation that gives the game a radically different feel from its more considered predecessor.

This isn’t to say the need for more traditional military tactics no longer exists in Deadline. Your team crash-lands in a zombie apocalypse urban hellscape, after all, and that means you inevitably have to contend with roaming packs of mercenaries and looters along with the undead. Your human opponents in Deadline don’t make use of mindless zombie tactics, preferring instead to find their own cover and exchange fire with you on equal terms. Well… usually. Certain zombies have the ability to revive fallen opponents to create entirely new threats for you, so battlefields where you face off against both the living and the undead can be incredibly stressful. Not only do have you to deal with aggressive zombies and cunning humans, the latter can also become the former unless you take heed of that all-time classic bit of advice: “Burn it with fire.”

Time isn’t the only thing that flows continuously in Deadline—so does the game world. Once your team crashes into the remains of Harbor City, that’s where you’re stuck for the remainder of the adventure. But Harbor City doesn’t consist of a series of separate, standalone maps that need to be cleared of foes one after the other; rather, the entire city is a sprawling, interconnected entity. Any plaza, street, parking lot, or public park can transform into a battlefield without warning as zombies or other marauders stumble across your fire team. Likewise, any building you can enter is likely to be occupied by armed forces who have no desire to share their space.

Combat encounters are hemmed in by arbitrary perimeter boundaries that your team can’t pass until all threats have been put down, but those hazards are less rigidly defined than in the original Breach & Clear. While traveling around the city, you may encounter a handful of enemies from time to time outside of larger battle sequences—and your team’s stamina and equipment carries over from encounter to encounter, creating a real sense of tension and attrition as you wander ever further away from home base, which is where you go to heal up, stock up, and take on side quests. Nursing a wounded team around the city only to discover a mob of undead between you and base is a harrowing experience with no equivalent in the original Breach & Clear.

While Mighty Rabbit released Deadline digitally on multiple platforms, including Steam and Xbox One, the Limited Run physical release shipped exclusive for PlayStation 4 as catalog #014. Also released alongside the PS4 disc were physical editions of Jason Graves’ game soundtrack, available on both compact disc and an extremely limited LP version pressed on red vinyl.