Published , by Josh Broadwell
Published , by Josh Broadwell
Some developers craft their project titles with careful consideration of how words fit together, their symbolism, and what emotions a name could evoke when people hear it. Suspicious Developments took a different route with Tactical Breach Wizards and decided to tell you everything you need to know in three short words. It’s a tactical game, you breach places, and you’re a wizard. Or a witch. Or a necromantic doctor who tends to kill their patients (oops).
Anyway, the apparent simplicity of the concept – small-scale tactical combat with magical skills – belies just how well-designed and smartly realized Tactical Breach Wizards is. It’s clever, it’s a blast to play, and it’s some of the most fun I’ve had with a tactics game in ages.
Tactical Breach Wizards doesn’t take itself seriously and desperately doesn’t want you to, either. It’s an offbeat conspiracy tale about a broke PI and a navy clairvoyant teaming up with a cast of increasingly bizarre characters against organized druid crime, corrupt police, private militaries, and the mysterious force pulling all their strings behind the scenes. One of the first things Tactical Breach Wizards teaches you is the dictionary definition of defenestrate, and the act becomes a key part of any strategy against evildoers of all kinds.
I’m not easy to please when it comes to humor, and the fastest way to sour me on something is if it makes me wade through poorly framed jokes trying hard to be funny. Tactical Breach Wizards is not that kind of game, even with the rare few self-conscious jokes that stick out from the rest. It embraces the ludicrous at every turn, from the off-beat conversations before a mission starts to the way you achieve your objective.
It all plays out like this. You and your team arrive at a location, indulge in some silly banter, and breach the stage. Each location is divided into several small – sometimes not so small – puzzle-box stages, and where you decide to breach in that stage has a big influence over how your next moves play out. Once inside, you might need to stop the flow of reinforcements, grab some intel, throw a few people out the window, or a combination of all those things and then some, and then it’s time to do it again on a different stage.
After clearing a location, you and your team head back to base to piece together whatever knowledge you gained and figure out your next moves, and there’s some light customization as well, where you can augment abilities and change how they behave.
Each ally has an excellent, often bizarre range of skills that encompass genre staples, such as Zan’s overwatch skill, and the cast’s offbeat personalities, like Dessa the doctor having to kill someone to heal them. It’s so easy for “funny” games to trip over themselves with offbeat abilities, to stop at being humorous and not actually do anything interesting with them. Tactical Breach Wizards deftly avoids that trap with some ingenious character and skill combos that build on the humor and turn it into an active feature instead of just a throwaway point to hopefully make someone laugh.
Tactical Breach Wizards builds on lines of sight in some interesting ways. Aside from determining who an ally can target, the angle of the sight line also influences what direction your attack pushes the enemy in, whether they hit a wall and take extra damage, or if you can chuck someone out a window. Some of the most satisfying moments when I may or may not have let out a little “hell yeah” happened when I lined up a group of enemies and then blasted them all out of multiple windows with a single skill.
Stage layouts are designed for similarly spectacular moments, even when you aren’t defenestrating an entire police force in one go. One very early example sees Jen and Zan progressing down separate, window-lined corridors where you’re expected to use their skills not just to deal with threats in front of them, but to anticipate and react to enemies on the other side as well. It’s all just so good.
I’m less fond of how some multi-target skills work, though. Take Jen’s Chain Bolt, for instance, one of the first such skills you get access to. You can pick two targets – more, as you unlock new perks – but the way Tactical Breach Wizards lets you pick those targets is strange and unpredictable. In one mission, the available targets changed every time I rewound. Some were blocked off, some only became target-able after I picked a different enemy first. I imagine it’s just a bug that can be fixed eventually, but it does make for an annoying little bump in the road.
The emphasis on causing collisions to deal extra damage means that stages often end up feeling like puzzles with only one proper solution, instead of the open-ended murder sandboxes Suspicious Developments presents them as. However, even when there is just a single efficient way to approach a problem, Tactical Breach Wizards won’t punish you for finding other solutions. You get a little congratulatory message if you clear a stage under a certain turn threshold, but there’s nothing wrong with taking 20 turns to finish a mission, either.
Even Breach Wizards’ optional objectives feel forgiving, which is impressive, considering how demanding they are. If, for example, you fulfill Jen’s desire to clear an entire room of enemies in one turn, congrats! You get a confidence point, which lets Jen feel brave enough to wear new outfits. If not, no biggie. The outfits are just for fun, and you can replay a stage later with fresh skills and perks that make meeting that objective easier.
Humor, intelligent level design, rewards for throwing things out the window – none of that even gets close to Tactical Breach Wizards’ best feature: rewinding. You can undo any action you take until you commit to ending your turn, and Breach Wizards is careful not to let you accidentally end your turn without a little warning first. That simple little feature erases most of Breach Wizard’s potential problems and solves several issues that bog the genre down.
Accidentally move to the wrong tile? Rewind! Click the wrong target? Rewind! Make a catastrophically stupid decision? And so on. Making mistakes in tactics games usually prompts you to restart anyway, so not having a rewind feature always feels like a way to artificially inflate the stakes – and force you to waste time by reloading or replaying an entire mission. Tactical Breach Wizards’ design is so strong that a rewind option has little effect on the actual difficulty and, instead, helps you learn the game’s complexities. Now that’s smart design.
Tactical Breach Wizards is one of the cleverest and most enjoyable tactics games I've played in a long old time. A handful of useful features remove some of the genre's most frustrating pain points, and the forgiving structure lets you experiment with all manner of off-the-wall solutions, even if there really is just one ideal path forward. It's a blueprint for how tactics games should be designed, and I can't wait to dive back into it again.
This review is based on a Steam copy of Tactical Breach Wizards the publisher provided. Tactical Breach Wizards launches for PC via Steam on August 22, 2024.