In a world where a large enough portion of the population has access to a magical ability of some kind, it’s easy to envision how that might affect their career path. The military would make great use of those able to see into the future or others that travel along a different plane of time, making for the ultimate espionage tools. A surgeon who isn’t burdened with the risk of losing a patient on the table could be invaluable for some of the most complex and dangerous tasks in a hospital room, while an adept pyromancer could find honest (or incredibly dishonest) work in a variety of fields. Tactical Breach Wizards has a lot of fun toying around in this space, thrusting together a renegade party of regular, but magically capable, heroes in a globe-spanning adventure that is supported by an engrossing turn-based tactics system that rewards smart thinking and creative experimentation.
The adventure starts with Jen, a plucky witch who gets by as a loose-cannon private investigator. Her latest job gets her involved in a wider conspiracy involving a wizard mafia, a presumed-dead spec ops agent, and a war-torn nation with a valuable resource ripe for exploitation by capitalist countries. It sounds like a checklist for any number of po-faced Tom Clancy novels, but the tongue-in-cheek approach to deconstructing such stories is what makes Tactical Breach Wizards’ lengthy campaign such a joy. It does rely too heavily on occasional exposition dumps to catch you up on why you’re moving from one locale to the next, but it’s otherwise lifted up by its endearing cast of protagonists and villains alike, with their consistently entertaining banter quickly establishing itself as a highlight.
Jen might be the de facto leader of your party, but she isn’t the only one with a personality you’ll likely fall in love with. Zan is a retired military man whose entire career hinged on his ability to see just one second into the future, but was hamstrung by his inability to act on this clairvoyance during critical moments. He’s a grizzled but often bumbling war veteran, doling out strategic prowess in one scene while defending his inability to keep a cohesive dossier system during the next. Banks, on the other hand, is a skilled surgeon who happens upon the ability to resurrect people, which makes her a target for some nasty people involved in all manner of illegal activities. She’s viciously blunt in comparison to Jen and Zan, but equally playful at times, even if it’s just by poking fun at Jen’s insecurities or pointing out the sheer ridiculousness of the mission they’re on.
This trio makes the initial cast, but it’s expanded on with new members and memorable villains that further flesh out a sharply written script. Tactical Breach Wizards allows you to spend a lot of time with these characters, and it’s impressive how much personality is imparted by each of them through text alone. I consistently looked forward to the brief exchanges between party members in between each level, most of which could definitely have taken place anyway but behind the door of a room filled with enemies. It balances the demanding tactical action with flairs of levity at the right moments, peppering in some fourth-wall-breaking moments but never overusing any one element either. Tactical Breach Wizards knows that it’s both funny and endearing, and therefore this self-awareness feels earned.
When your party isn’t conversing, they’re breaking through doors with loud and flashy hexes. On the surface, Tactical Breach Wizards seems like a familiar take on tile-aligned turn-based gameplay. There’s an emphasis on positional placement, a focus on turn efficiency, and a wide array of abilities to use and synergize. Where it begins to differ is in the scope of its skirmishes. Each fight takes place in a relatively small area, never taking more than a couple of minutes and a handful of turns to complete. It’s far less about the intense, drawn out fights of XCOM and more akin to the fast-paced bouts in Fights in Tight Spaces or Into the Breach, with Tactical Breach Wizards offering a spin on elements from both in its distinct blend of strategy action.
For starters, you can rest assured that all of the actions you take during your turn will succeed in the ways you expect them too. Zan, for example, features an ability similar to overwatch in XCOM, but isn’t burdened by the possibility that he might miss an enemy that wanders into his crosshairs during their turn. Tactical Breach Wizards also lets you see how enemies are going to react to your actions before you move onto your next turn, giving you insight into exactly how much damage your party will take and how the field might be altered. You’re given the chance to rewind all the way back to the start of your turn if you’re dissatisfied with how things transpire, but have to live with the consequences once you accept the outcome.
Tactical Breach Wizards [thrusts] together a renegade party of regular, but magically capable, heroes in a globe-spanning adventure that is supported by an engrossing turn-based tactics system that rewards smart thinking and creative experimentation
This less punishing approach encourages a level of experimentation that you might miss from other contemporaries in the genre. It’s captivating to try and squeeze out every tactical advantage during each turn, rewinding seemingly small decisions that can ultimately have a big impact. It gives you the freedom to truly understand the ways in which your party’s varied abilities synergize without the burden of having to fail towards those epiphanies. That doesn’t mean it’s without challenge, however. With all these tools to aid you, Tactical Breach Wizards’ levels all feel like small, self-contained puzzles with open-ended solutions. Careless and wasteful turns can quickly push you into a corner, whether you ignore the threat of reinforcements flooding in through doors you have been too lazy to seal or capitalizing on your misguided prioritization of different enemy types. But it creates this challenge without resorting to frustrating failure as a means of developing your skills while maintaining the rewarding feeling of a well-executed operation.
The tactical depth of each encounter is accentuated by the growing repertoire of abilities you’ll have access to as you progress through the campaign. Each of your party members has class-specific spells and abilities to play with, with new ones introduced at key moments of the story. Jen is a witch-of-all-trades, with a devastating chained lighting attack that can dispatch multiple enemies at once and an incredibly useful passive that lets you move again after specific actions. Banks, by contrast, excels as a utilitarian, helping revive dead teammates, debuffing enemies with a far-reaching sedative, or just throwing out a glowing skull to do some damage of her own.
Zan’s military background informs the long-ranged attacks from his arcane-powered assault rifle, while his useful decoy can be used to double up on his ability to attack any enemies the rest of your party targets during a turn. These are just a handful of offensive abilities you’ll have initially, all of which can be lightly upgraded with perks obtained through experience accrued as you play. Your party composition is determined by the level you’re on, so you’re consistently required to develop new strategies with new combinations of characters, which prevents each skirmish from getting monotonous.
Setting enemies alight with magical fire or lining up a bunch for a devastating shield charge, but victory in Tactical Breach Wizards often hinges on how you use the environment to your advantage. Most attacks inflict damage, but also induce some form of knockback, letting you bully enemies around the battlefield. Windows are as deadly as wands here, with enemies dying immediately if you manage to push them, emphasizing the importance of a balance between damage and enemy placement.
Compound that with the damage you can inflict if you knock enemies into one another or, better still, into explosive hazards that affect others nearby, and you’ll quickly start seeing how rewarding it can be to figure out an efficient way to wipe the board before enemies can even take their turn. But it also creates challenges around where to have your party at the end of each turn, as enemies can be just as brutal and knock you off of the map if you’re not careful. Some of the game’s funniest moments occur when you think you’ve just conceived a perfect turn, only to witness half your party get knocked to their deaths when playing out the enemy’s turn afterwards.
Varied enemy types and less window-laden stages ensure that you can’t rely on the same strategies all of the time. Larger enemies bring with them some complex buffs, introducing armor to negate damage, gas masks that make them immune to knockback enhancing debuffs, or an outright immunity to being pushed out of a map. Helpful explanations for each type of resistance and immunity can be seen when hovering over an enemy, but the combination of all these effects can sometimes make parsing exactly how to overcome them a little tricky. Some shield-bearing brutes that are introduced mid-way through the campaign are a good example of this. They’re the first enemies that you can’t really push around, resisting a lot of incoming knockback and traditional damage, while almost making Banks’ sedative toothless. They feature so many buffs that stack on one another that it’s initially confusing how to start tearing them down, making levels filled with them immediately after their introduction unwelcome difficulty spikes. But they’re not frequent enough to completely derail the campaign, and the ability to outright skip levels that are frustrating means you have an option to maintain a pace you’re happy with.
Being able to play on your terms expands to optional content throughout the campaign. Optional bonus objectives feature for each party member throughout each level, while you’ll also unlock additional combat puzzles and survival challenges as you progress. Completing any of this optional content doesn’t reward you with more experience to spend on upgrade; Instead, you earn points that can be used to purchase cosmetic items for each member of your party. This lets you engage with more tactical content if you choose to rather than making it a component vital to campaign progress, which sidesteps any potential frustration around being too underpowered to move forward with the story.
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You’ll find it harder to avoid any frustration, however, if you decide to play Tactical Breach Wizards with a controller. While there are some buttons assigned for actions like rewinding or ending a turn and quickly swapping between team members, reducing the analog stick to a mouse cursor makes selecting abilities and targeting enemies with them a cumbersome chore. It didn’t stop me from spending most of my playtime on the Steam Deck, but my time playing with a mouse and keyboard did make it clear that it is the intended way to play, making me long for a more elegant solution not afforded by some tinkering in the controls menu.
A lack of content isn’t an issue here as it might have been with Suspicious Developments first breakout hit, Gunpoint. Tactical Breach Wizards is the largest and most ambitious game the studio has worked on yet, and the extra time it took to get here has certainly not been wasted. It presents familiar tropes of the tactical turn-based genre and removes a lot of the friction that acts as a barrier to entry, without sacrificing the fundamental thrill of formulating a perfect turn and executing it. Coupled with an incredibly personable cast that is brought to life through witty and hilariously written dialogue, and you’ll find it hard to resist the urge to breach into battle just one more time after each well-deserved victory.
