I maintain that the development for this game was spark by some art piece with tacticool wizards. Don’t @ me about it, I said and I won’t take it back. Tom Francis has done what every game journo wishes they could do – become a successful game creator – and his newest piece of work is a banger. Tactical Breach Wizards is an operational gameplay success and a strategic-level writing achievement.
In a world somewhat different from ours, Jen, a freelance witch, is down on her luck. As it is traditional for aspiring detective protagonists, she’s not very good at her PI work. She is great at using magical lightning to push people out of windows and then suspending them mid-fall. Jen soon meets Zan, an old acquaintance with an assault staff jammed into an AR-15 upper receiver and somehow fed from a box mag of 5.56 link. Both of their pasts converge onto a mysterious investigation involving wizards long (5+ years) thought dead and geopolitical plays for power.
Being serious is actually a good thing
The biggest achievement of Tactical Breach Wizards is making a serious game with categorically unserious protagonists. Normally, I loathe anything Netflix would brand as “tongue-in-cheek.” MCU, Star Wars sequels and countless others use humor to ruin tension, to preemptively shield themselves from anyone who’d make fun of the works treating “unserious” subjects seriously.
Tactical Breach Wizards, on the hand, wears its heart front towards the enemy. The protagonists aren’t just a wisecracking bunch of marketable faces. They’re people with people’s needs and people’s issues. Nobody who ends up fighting armed dudes while on the run from the law isn’t damaged in some way.
So they joke, and snark, and fool around, but they also challenge each other to be better. They also try to do good when there’s an opportunity to do so, even if their charming rogue personas are averse to heroism. They oppose theocratic regimes without ridiculing the faith they used to gain power. They’ll trade quips before breaching the room and criticize neoliberal approaches to foreign policy.
It’s a very tight rope to walk and more creations fall than succeed, but Tactical Breach Wizards does it with cat-like grace.
I read the Field Manuscript FM 3-06
Now, unto the gameplay. Under normal circumstances, your heroes can walk once and spend a single action point on their base attacks/powers. They’ll also have some tricks that are limited by mana (consumable) or per encounter (that is, a single room/zone). The sequence in which you do those things don’t matter – you can walk after attacking and so on.
Despite the way it sounds, Tactical Breach Wizards is less of a tactical RPG like XCOM and more of a puzzle like Into the Breach. You can deal direct damage with one spell or the other, but the real power is in defenestration. Nobody is immune to being thrown out of a window. Similarly, a damage 1 spell isn’t much, but if it knocks the enemy back into a red barrel and thus takes out a group of 3, it can be made to work.
Even more powerful is comboing wizard powers. Zan’s Predictive Bolt will take out most enemies that would spawn at a reinforcement door. However, Jen can use her pushing abilities to deliberately push an enemy in front of the Predictive Bolt and take them out before they can act.
Combos like there are possible because Tactical Breach Wizards is heavily reliant on Zan’s ability to see shortly into the future. That is, you can do your actions, and then see how this will affect enemy actions. If anything goes awry, you can then rewind step by step to correct your plan right at the time it goes wrong.
Give me a wand, one spell, and point me at Berlin
And once you start gaining levels (p. sure XP is doled out by storyline fiat rather than being based on player achievement), you can start upgrading your powers! Some may be simple damage boosts, others add more utility to the way the spell works.
For example, normally, Zan’s False Prophet uses 1 mana to create a doppelganger to draw enemy fire. Simple, effective. However, with upgrades, a) you can recoup the cost if the doppelganger bites it (including blue-on-blue) before it would disappear naturally, b) the fake-Zan interacts with objects at the final destination, and c) the clone can even support you with fire.
Suddenly, Zan is very good at reaching faraway objectives and economizing on his mana expenditure.
Now, you don’t need to be a 5 dimensional chess grandmaster to play Tactical Breach Wizards. The objectives usually aren’t timed, and no matter how much you bumble your way from point A to point B, you’re still good. However, each level comes with optional confidence objectives that are far more difficult: Jen likes timers and Zan wants to finish puzzles with no KO’d teammates. This is the real reason to go intricate with your solutions. After all, it gives your wizards confidence points. And confidence points mean the most important thing in gaming: cosmetics.
Looking good while doing good
Each wizard has a handful of outfits they could wear (both in missions AND during cutscenes!). Could. If they had the confidence. Granted, the personal goals are different for every level (and you have out-of-campaign levels that are unabashedly just puzzles), so it’s not always about beating the encounter in one turn. But if you do go after those objectives, it will take you no time to build up enough confidence for the more outlandish outfits. Sure, the most expensive one is 20 points, but you will get there.
Or not. Again, all the grind you do via confidence goals and challenge levels? Purely for cosmetics and the joy of play. More than anything, Tactical Breach Wizards is about going forward and having fun. That’s why you have so many tools at your disposal. You can even skip a level if the spirit moves you (without kicking you out of the window). It doesn’t matter! Having fun with the game is the only important detail.
The only real downside for me is that not all costumes are made the same. Wiz Tac line is the safe unlock for anyone, but other than that? Two different models with three skins per. And if the base model isn’t special, nothing can help. The men of the game are especially hit with the bleh stick, though Jen fares only slightly better. On the other hand, peeps who join the team later have some killer outfits, some of which take their appearances in wildly unexpected directions.
I suppose this is the place to mention something about the visual aspects of Tactical Breach Wizards. Well, the game looks great. The visuals are heavily stylized, so it doesn’t have to compete with AAA titles, but not so much as to rob us of detail. Having nothing but eyes, the characters are perfectly capable of emotional expression. Again, there’s a lot of love and cleverness put into doing the best with what they have. Plus, Jen has a cat and you will never be able to forget that.
Unfortunately, I can rarely muster that much attention to detail when going after technical aspects of the game, so, uh, the audio is nice, and you don’t even feel the lack of voiced lines. Tactical Breach Wizards also runs well, never crashing on me once in the 19 hours I played.
Game good
In conclusion, play Tactical Breach Wizards. It’s clever, it’s charming, it’s tactical room clearing action without the bad politics of Door Kickers, sloppily implemented XCOM mechanics or the body counts you’d expect from such a premise. More games should be focused on throwing villains out of windows.