Breached is a game that offers polished graphics for gamers to explore in the drone segments, but as the gameplay doesn't offer much challenge as it progresses.

Gamers interested in the idea of driving drones and attempting to solve logical puzzles in a race against the clock may be interested in Breached, an upcoming Steam game arriving on June 22 for both PC and Mac. Breached is a futuristic sci-fi puzzle game developed by Drama Drifters, and it uses a combination of polished graphics and text-based story progression to lure potential fans into the fold.

Players will assume the role of Corus Valott, who awakens from a long cryogenic sleep to discover that his shelter has been badly damaged. With only eight days of oxygen left, Corus must repair the oxygen systems and manually synthesize a fuel source to so that he can move from his location. These tasks are solved with different puzzle-based approaches, though each of them involve piloting a drone across the land to gather resources.

The game is very text heavy, with the plot of the game stemming entirely from a Twitter-like journal interface used by Valott. Players pan through hashtags in order to find out more about Valott's mysterious past, and slowly uncover more data each day, which then quickly leads to more entries, and thus more hashtags. Unfortunately, there are some dead ends to the text searching, so be prepared for some disappointment.

The visuals for the drone-based portion of the game are a definite highlight, and players will find the decrepit structures and sand-filled dunes compliment the setting perfectly. Piloting a drone around the decaying locations is done with a very intuitive interface, though players will have to avoid floating anomalies that threaten to damage the drone. Some sections of each sector are unfortunately prone to 'invisible wall syndrome', which is bound to catch a few players off-guard. Still, finding the right resources scattered across the map can be a challenge, especially when each sector's materials vary.

Alongside the drone exploration, the aforementioned anomalies are the main challenge of the game, as they move around the sectors and disrupt the player's drone if they happen to get too close. The sphere-like objects are a bland obstacle in a game which otherwise has nice visuals for the drone sequences, and we found ourselves wishing for a more creative obstacle. Some of them will move, and some of them will be stationary, but by the eighth day all of the anomalies will barely register as a challenge for players.

Players will also be gathering minerals to synthesize into a fuel source, which requires a trial-and-error approach and plenty of guesswork. Players must find the right balance between three different materials, but each failed effort means wasted resources that have to be collected again. As the days wind down, players will feel the pressure in collecting enough resources of a certain type in order to continue the tests, and we found ourselves spending too much time scrounging through each sector for the appropriate cargo. And since players can only collect three items per trip, the drone gameplay becomes a selective affair. The gameplay is a bit like Tharsis, where players gamble on what is the best move for the next portion of the game.

Breached is ultimately a very short experience, and we expect most gamers will be able to complete it in under 2 hours. In this short window, gamers will have seen and done most of what the game has to offer, with the only replay value coming through hidden journal entries. Breached is a game that offers polished graphics for gamers to explore in the drone segments, but as the days wear on it offers no real challenge. The race against the clock element adds some drama to the mix, though it's ultimately not enough to make Breached a memorable sci-fi adventure.

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Breached releases June 22, 2016 for Mac and PC. Game Rant was provided a PC code for this review.