Tactical Breach Wizards Is A Clever Strategy Game About Launching Guys Out Windows

By Elijah Gonzalez | August 19, 2024 | 1:00pm

Video Games Reviews tactical breach wizards

Tactical Breach Wizards Is A Clever Strategy Game About Launching Guys Out Windows

Since XCOM: Enemy Unknown helped revive its parent series and a specific type of turn-based tactics game with it, there’s been no shortage of imitators in its mold, from Gears Tactics to the unlikely Mario + Rabbids titles. At first blush, Tactical Breach Wizards, the latest from Suspicious Developments (Gunpoint, Heat Signature), seems to be playing this sub-genre straight; it’s turn-based, you command a squad who move across a grid-based tile, it’s presented from an isometric perspective. But where the game differs is that instead of being stuffed to the brim with procedurally generated challenges and other uncertainties, it mimics the deterministic logic of something like Into the Breach, successfully emphasizing the latent puzzler elements found in tactics titles as its witty dialogue and satisfying storytelling round out this clean operation.

As for how the skirmishes pan out, much of Tactical Breach Wizards’ uniqueness comes from how every level and encounter feel hand-crafted to highlight the abilities of your ragtag crew (each of whom has unique magical powers), resulting in cerebral battles where you combine these skills in non-traditional ways. You start with two squad members: Jen, a storm witch who specializes in pushing people around the map with wind-based moves, and Zan, a former navy seer who can see slightly into the future and carries a non-lethal magic assault rifle. Up front, they synergize in some fairly obvious ways—Zan has an attack where he automatically fires at any opponent who crosses his sight line, while Jen can help trigger this by moving both Zan and your enemies around. This is just the tip of the iceberg, though, because as the story goes on, you gain access to many more techniques, upgrades, and teammates that will make you feel like a seasoned battlemage tactician as you set up devastating sequences. Oh, and you can use magic to push people out windows, which proves as satisfying the first time as the 100^th.

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While Zan uses a very straightforward weapon, a gun, basically every other member of your slowly expanding team deals damage in less traditional ways, whether it’s utilizing Jen’s wind magic to defenestrate foes, flattening people with your close-quarters bruiser, using a non-traditional medic’s toxins to stack up debuffs, or deploying a shrubmage assassin to delete high-armor adversaries. They each start with only a few moves, but you gain new ones and strengthen them as the story progresses, allowing you to customize combatants somewhat. For instance, I went all in on powering up Zan’s passive upgrade that lets him perform follow-up shots after his teammates’ attacks, allowing him to perform screen-wipe turns that felt even more gratifying because I specifically built my character in this direction.

This kind of involved combo is central to the game’s flow, and I frequently found myself putting together intricate sequences that felt downright magical. Each turn, all of your characters get to move and perform an action. Some abilities spend action points, others spend mana (you start with one charge and can find more around the map), many use both, and a few don’t require resources but have limited uses per fight. However, where things quickly get zany is that your crew can learn techniques that allow them to refund these resources or maneuver without their movement action, enabling increasingly involved decision-making.

Combined with the fact that you can see exactly what your opponents will do on their turn because of Zan’s seer abilities and freely rewind your actions to the beginning of the turn, you’re given the control to orchestrate precise missions. A good example is how the melee character Dell has a charge attack that sends her across the map in a straight line, and if it connects, she can perform another one. When paired with similar skills, it can set up single-turn wins that make you feel like a genius general.

It helps that each battle feels designed around these abilities, and the story mode constantly introduces different team configurations, new enemy types, and stage setups that force you to think up fresh strategies. In short, unlike the more randomized (and admittedly more replayable) battles found in most of its genre peers, these skirmishes are twisty puzzles that are a joy to crack.

If there’s an issue though, it’s that while it’s rewarding to craft efficient solutions to these battles, most of the time, this isn’t mandatory. Your ability to see into the future and the lack of permadeath means that, unlike many other tactics games where a few mistakes will leave your troops in a meatgrinder as you bury a beloved sniper you named after your pet dog, I never got remotely close to failing a mission. Although it would often take a lot of brainpower to arrive at a well-crafted turn, most of the time, these characters’ powerful skills combined with the lack of dice rolls made it so I could find solutions where my team avoided damage altogether. The mission design doesn’t exactly push you either, and they usually boil down to clearing a room of enemies.

That said, something that helped make up for this was the more difficult optional objectives. While the only in-game incentive to complete these is new costumes for your crew, these challenges (finishing a level in one turn, for instance) added structure to these encounters and gave ample reason to fully engage with the game’s underlying complexity. Honestly, even without these trials, I’d probably still be compelled to run missions as cleanly as possible, in large part because it’s intrinsically rewarding to find cool combinations between these abilities. I imagine some would prefer for the game’s challenge to come from making tough decisions that could jeopardize the mission instead of ones that could mess up these optional tasks, but I still felt compelled to dive deep into its mechanics to craft effective solutions, which, at least for me, is most of the reason I engage with difficult games to begin with. Overall, the creatively designed squad members and rewarding interactions between their expanding toolsets carry the day.

However, while it’s not surprising that this tactics game is focused around, well, tactics, I was caught off guard by the quality of the game’s writing and characters, considering its setup seems like a silly gag: wizards breaching and clearing rooms in spec-ops hardware. As for the premise, we follow Jen Kellen, a spell-casting PI who meets up with Zan Vesker, an old war buddy in a bit of a pinch. He’s in the middle of chasing down his MIA former commanding officer Liv, a nearly unstoppable time mage who he believes has gone rogue and is planning World War V. From this synopsis, you’d be forgiven for thinking that besides the wizard hats, this magic-themed modern military game is following in the footsteps of any number of Tom Clancy novels, or more specifically, of Call of Duty, a series that uses the threat of dirty bomb planting bad guys to justify its bucketloads of torture.

However, instead of being full of jingoistic sensibilities that make it feel co-written by the CIA, this game tells a much different kind of story; our crew isn’t working for a hegemonistic military, they’re fighting against one. Along the way, our group helps revolutionaries battling a theocratic dictatorship and butts heads with a PMC trying to play world police as they use non-lethal means to deal with their enemies (thanks, magic!). They also make fun of centrist dads, who honestly had it coming. There’s a lot going on with this one’s windy plot, but after lore bombing you with this world’s geopolitics, you return to an evidence board where you connect red string that spells out the relationships between these fictional people, places, and things, clarifying these circumstances. Ultimately, the game may take place in a fantastical setting where people utilize magical abilities, but this backdrop where meddling nation-states (modeled after the West) exploit other countries for resources is alarmingly similar to our own, something the story comments on throughout.

And outside of its compelling high-level framing, it also helps that the writing here is unexpectedly hilarious. The banter between the cast is witty, as extensive pre-breach chatter between fights fleshes out the cast and acts as a palate cleanser for these involved combat puzzles. Perhaps most impressively, while these conversations are sharp and involve snarky jabs, they manage to add levity without feeling insincere or tonally at odds with the dire stakes. Because although these digressions may be tongue-in-cheek, the game isn’t afraid to be genuine when needed, as these characters work through long-held anxieties and fears. For instance, Jen may be kind-hearted and a badass, but she’s spiraling over her career, while Zan is haunted by the mission that set the overarching plot in motion. I came to this one for its chin-scratching tactics gameplay and stayed to spend more time with this crew of spell-casting “bleeding-hearts,” as another character describes them.

All in all, Tactical Breach Wizards’ combo-heavy battles and well-considered storytelling come together with precision. While I wish it was a tad more punishing, I still had a blast orchestrating complicated turns that involved teleporting allies across the map, utilizing diverse powers, and, of course, knocking hapless cronies out windows. But, perhaps its greatest accomplishment is how it escapes the inertia of countless other modern war games that feel like the product of the military-industrial complex. I guess all it took to avoid these tropes was not being in the back pocket of the US armed forces, a bit of empathy, and a guy who looks like Gandalf with a magic-infused M16. Who knew?

Tactical Breach Wizards was developed and published by Suspicious Developments. It is available for PC.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.