Knockback

Lore & Background

In the shattered world of Into the Breach, the Goliaths are massive industrial war-machines built to hold the line against the relentless swarm of Breach-born creatures. Their designers understood that brute force alone would not suffice on a battlefield littered with crumbling platforms, toxic pools, and narrow chasms. So they engineered certain strikes—most iconically the Brawler's piston-driven punch—to carry a secondary kinetic impulse. The impact doesn't merely bruise; it launches the target in a rigid, unyielding vector, as though the Goliath's fist were a battering ram on a rail.

In Their Own Story

The grid was wet. Rain slicked the cracked tiles, and the Wasp's stinger still hummed with residual charge from the last exchange. Kael watched the preview lines bloom across the board—three Scuttlers advancing in a tight wedge, the Brawler's punch highlighted in amber, the knockback vector stretching two tiles east, straight into the pool of molten slag that the Warden had been guarding all morning.

'You sure?' Kael muttered to the co-pilot, who didn't look up from the energy readouts.

'Preview doesn't lie. They slide, they splash, they're done. Two tiles. No stopping tile in between.'

Kael exhaled. The Brawler's arm retracted, the hydraulic pistons groaning. He committed the move. The fist connected with a sound like a cathedral door slamming, and the lead Scuttler went flying—two tiles, three tiles—its chitinous legs scrabbling uselessly before it hit the slag with a hiss that painted the air orange. The second and third Scuttlers, caught in the same vector, followed. The wedge was gone. The corridor was clear.

The Wasp's stinger found the last one before it could recover. Clean. Quiet. The grid was empty, and the rain kept falling.

Reader's Guide

Knockback in Into the Breach works as a linear, axis-aligned displacement: the target slides in a straight line (horizontal or vertical, matching the attack's direction) until it encounters a blocking condition. There is no diagonal knockback. The slide stops at the first wall, occupied tile, map boundary, or hazard tile it reaches.

Range and reach depend entirely on the source ability. The Brawler's Punch is a melee-range attack that knocks back one tile of displacement minimum, but the actual slide distance is determined by how far the target travels before being blocked. A target in an open row can slide three or four tiles; one adjacent to a wall slides zero effective distance. Always read the preview vector carefully—the game shows you the exact landing tile.

Terrain interaction is where knockback becomes lethal. Pushing an enemy into a hazard tile (lava, acid, electric) deals that hazard's damage on the next turn or immediately, depending on the hazard type. Pushing off the map edge eliminates the unit. Pushing into another enemy can cluster them, making a follow-up area attack or a Wasp's multi-target sting devastating.

Synergy highlights: Pair a Brawler knockback with a Warden repositioning to block a second shove, creating a 'pin.' Use a Wrecker's slam to clear a row, then slide a Stinger through the opened lane. In tight 5x5 boards, a single well-timed knockback can reset an entire enemy formation, buying your Goliaths a full turn of free movement.

Did You Know?

• Because Into the Breach is fully deterministic, the exact landing tile of every knockback is shown in the move preview before you commit—there is never a 'hope it slides far enough' gamble.
• Knockback can push an enemy into a hazard tile, effectively converting a zero-damage shove into a lethal environmental kill without spending additional energy.
• The slide is strictly linear and axis-aligned; a knockback never changes direction mid-slide, even if the path crosses different terrain types.
• A unit knocked back into a tile occupied by another enemy will stop at the tile adjacent to that enemy, potentially creating a tight cluster vulnerable to multi-target attacks.