Breachway is a deckbuilder leaning heavily into managing your ships systems which allows for some satisfying plays with how it shakes up some of the genres norms.
Once you’re far enough through the prologue/tutorial, you’ll find yourself with three different resources, one largely for weapons, one for shields/general energy, and one for special…essentially. Each card type has plenty of overlap with the others the more it does. The ships generator determines your energy pool you can assign for each, and each has a cap it can generate per turn. This is all being upgradeable with credits, the common currency from progression.
Your deck is going to be based on your equipment, which you can find after some battles or events, or bought at space stations. Plus each piece of equipment has slots for upgrades, also found while exploring or purchased. Your route has to be planned carefully though. There is also a fuel resource that limits how much you can stray from the main paths through the sector. You’ll have to be mindful, as I didn’t run into any way to refuel on my runs, but I feel like there is probably some event that’ll provide a small boost.
Combat involves not discarding your hand every turn, allowing you to discard any card you want, and discarded/played cards have a cooldown before they can be drawn again. Some weapons are marked as precision, which allows you to target enemy systems, some are flak, which do more damage if you’ve already hit their hull with flak weapons, and some are ion, which start to shut down ship systems or do more damage to shields. There is also a heat mechanic, tied to some laser weapons or triggered by swapping energy between systems, which dissipates per turn.
There is a lot of room it seems for big brain plays based around how you can hoard certain cards to punish a ship system, wait out for shields to deplete, or use cards that combo with one another for a huge push.
All of this gets animated with some cool 3d effects, making it also a fairly attractive game to play.
Breachway still has the demo available, for anyone looking to try it out for themselves, and fans of the genre should give it a shot.