Breach and Clear: Deadline (PC)

The action/tactical strategy title Breach & Clear: Deadline is the follow-up to 2013’s Breach & Clear, though instead of commanding special forces squads in a variety of tactical situations, this time you’re them through a zombie-infested region cut off from the rest of the world. Players can decide if they want to play Deadline like an ARPG or whether they’d rather focus on the more tactical aspects of the game.

Breach & Clear: Deadline opens with a prelude mission that get players acquainted with the basic controls and introduces them to the storyline. The military unit you’re commanding has been sent in response to a distress call from a biochemical facility that’s apparently been targeted by terrorists. The local police have cordoned off the area, and it’s left to your group to secure the facility and to investigate the exact circumstances of this mysterious attack. It doesn’t take long before your men run into individuals that have been infected, who attack them on sight. The situation quickly gets out of hand, and the organization funding the operation, known as “Vergil”, orders you to leave the site immediately and to destroy the facility. The introductory missions ends once your unit manages to fight their way out through the hordes of zombies that are now all over the place. At this point you get to name the special forces unit you will be commanding in future missions, and even customize it to some extent.

You’ll meet the first few members of your team at the beginning of the next mission. First up are two soldiers whose aircraft has been damaged by a rocket and forced to land in a sealed-off danger zone that’s crawling with zombies. Seeing that the odds of fighting their way out aren’t in their favor, they set off to find the other members of their team, though they haven’t seen any traces of them since the crash landing. On top of that, the soldiers’ gear has sustained a lot of damage, so they’re also going to have to find better weapons and other supplies if they even want to last longer than a few minutes against the overwhelming numbers of Infected.

Gameplay

You can interact with doors, consoles, supply crates, etc. whenever the team leader is standing nearby. The game then indicates the button (or buttons) you can press in order to interact with the object. With closed doors, there are usually two options you can take, depending on how strong the lock or whatever else is blocking the door is. Regular, unlocked doors can be opened simply by moving the team leader into them, but sometimes you’ll have to use explosives to blow open blocked doorways and passages, which you can place using the C key.

In Action Mode, combat plays out in real time, using the right and left mouse buttons to operate weapons. For players who prefer a more tactical style of gameplay, you can always switch to Command Mode using the Ctrl key. The fact that you can so easily switch back and forth between gameplay modes means that it’s up to the player to decide which one is better in any given situation; i.e. which one has better prospects for success.

Command Mode allows you to give each team member detailed orders, allowing for a much more deliberate and tactical approach. You can carefully distribute your soldiers around a room and attack several enemies at once without having to worry about dividing your attention. Helpful red lines indicate which soldier is engaged with which enemy. You can also give orders to the entire team at once, such as when you need to concentrate all your forces to deal as much damage as possible to one particular enemy.

Another benefit of Command Mode is that it essentially gives you control over time, allowing you to think clearly about your approach and make the the most efficient use of your team’s weapons and talents. As soon as you switch into Command Mode, the game pauses to allow you to place your soldiers and give them their orders. When you press and hold the spacebar, the battle continues in real time, with your men carrying out their orders; let go of it and the game pauses again. This allows you to react quickly to any changes that take place on the battlefield and nip zombie ambushes in the bud.

There are two different movement types available to your team members. There’s “sweep”, where your team members will automatically attack and defend as needed; and then there’s “sprint”, which allows soldiers to move more quickly from one place to another. The downside of sprint is that it essentially leaves that team member defenseless in the face of enemy attacks. Sweep is slower, but it gives you more control over the character’s direction – you click on your destination, but you can also turn the mouse to make adjustments to the exact path they’re to take. You can use sweep to allow each of your team members to cover their own part of a larger area, automatically fighting off enemies who try to get too close.

Each member of your team possesses a special skill that can be indispensible in combat. The Weapons Sergeant, for example, keeps enemies in check by providing suppressing fire; the Explosives Expert is able to deal lots of damage by using different kinds of bombs, which is especially effective when you use them on a group enemies that have been pinned down by the Weapons Sergeant.

A skilled Medic is always useful when one of your own guys happens to take a bullet, as he’s able to bring back his mortally wounded teammates within a certain time frame. Your soldiers’ special attacks all have a certain cooldown time before you can use them again. You can select special skills by right-clicking in individual members to open up a radial menu. The radial menu also allows you to use mines, grenades, flamethrowers, and other useful items.

After you’ve cleared all the enemies in a particular area, they give you a mission report screen that shows you how much damage you dealt, how many zombies you killed, and how much time it took you to complete the mission. It also shows you how accurate each of your team members were. Another useful feature is the mini-map displayed on the right side of the screen, where red zombie silhouettes indicate the presence of hostiles.  

Graphics

Command Mode, on the other hand, is more top-down, which is ideal for tactical planning, though you miss out on a lot of the details. However, this does mean that the game can be played on older machines that might run slow in Action Mode.

Sound