What ever happened to games that told you exactly what the game was about in the title? What even is a “Mass Effect” or an “Elden Ring”? I open Halo and it’s not about angels but about some dude in green armor fighting aliens. If you’re the sort of person that needs your games spelled out you’re in luck with Suspicious Development’s latest game: Tactical Breach Wizards. Like it says on the tin, Tactical Breach Wizards is about magical characters engaging in special forces/SWAT style breach and clear scenarios with a military backdrop, and is certainly a lot more on the nose than whatever their game Gunpoint was about. If the concept alone hasn’t sold you I don’t know if I can help you, but I can certainly try.
Tactical Breach Wizards is a turn-based affair that might remind you of Into the Breach, if I wasn’t the only person I know who played that. The combat is focused around “knockback” as much as it is damage, where the majority of friendly attacks include the ability to shove enemy units more frequently than directly hurt them. The goal is generally pushing enemies into walls, obstacles, or even out of windows to eliminate them, and the game has very clear damage indicators and enemy intent graphics so that you know the highest threats and their intentions before you finish your turn. Most battles are relatively “quick” in that they only last one to three turns, but there are a lot of levels and up to five playable characters that you can have with you at once, each with their own special abilities that can radically change how each player approaches the fight.
The whole system is held up by main character Zan and his magical ability to see one second into the future. Sure, he won’t win any awards in a D&D campaign with that power but it makes him the ideal protagonist for a game about quickly and cleanly breaching and clearing rooms. His power also lets you rewind every action taken on a current turn, so if an enemy doesn’t take as much damage as you thought they would (or if you inadvertently take too much damage, misclick, etc) you can just zip back an action or two and do something else. This combination of indirect damage, error correction, and skills that you can use to cheat out extra actions/movement creates a highly deep tactical game, with a few quirks that don’t make it a perfect experience.
The main problem is the fixed perspective in the combat leading to occasional issues in telling which objects block your line of sight and which don’t. Games like XCOM have a lot of different camera angles to help you get a reasonable idea of what’s what in terms of elevation, but unfortunately Tactical Breach Wizards doesn’t have something like that, which can lead to a lot of rewinding after you’ve made a move only to realize the water cooler across the room blocks your shot. The game tries its best with markers over the enemy’s head to let you know line of sight (much like XCOM) but in a game about constantly moving enemies around the board the sight lines aren’t always something you can confirm when you move a friendly to a given location. Certain enemies are also very unfun to fight, especially later in the game when you encounter those that can move and attack on your turn, but your witches and wizards are powerful enough to handle basically every level with only a little difficulty, assuming you aren’t trying to be too fancy about it.
Tactical Breach Wizards encourages to be to be fancy though with its “confidence challenges,” both to increase replayability and because the developers probably realized that the game needed a little incentive to not just play incredibly slow and defensive. They range in difficulty from “finish this level in one turn” to “use a certain character to deal X amount of damage” and while they are completely optional (used only for achievements and cosmetics) they help provide certain guidelines to pace yourself in a level.
The game does like reminding you that they are completely optional, however it can get a little irritating as they’re heavily reliant on the game’s perk system. Almost every character’s abilities can be upgraded with special perks that they gain arbitrarily as the story progresses, and while not all are created equal they are all almost all beneficial in some way. Unfortunately, that means that if you haven’t picked the right perk by the time you reach a level that needs it for its challenge then you’ll be left unable to accomplish it until you replay the level later. Double unfortunately, when your characters reach “max level” at the end of the game you don’t get to have every perk unlocked, which will inevitably lead to unnecessary respecing to make sure you have “the right perks” for that one challenge you just can’t unlock. No idea why they didn’t let you get max abilities by the very end, and it was a bit of a downer when I realized it.
Story wise the basic framework is the same sort of plot that you’d expect from any sort of game about special forces soldiers. Mentors gone rogue, disgraced soldiers looking to redeem themselves with one last mission, threats of a world war, etc., all set to the backdrop of a magical world where witches and wizards gain their powers when under duress. What might be a little less in the norm is the humor in the game, as the game has a rather charming comedic style that can be at times sarcastic, dry, or self-deprecating. Humor is the most subjective thing in the world and I’ve really never had to write about it because I don’t tend to play funny games, so you’ll have to forgive me if I can’t present it well. However I will say that I found most of the humor quite entertaining but it also is mostly optional through dialogue choices during cutscenes, so if you don’t want to have your lightning throwing private investigator quip before she fights a PMC then that’s your business.
Technically the game isn’t anything to write home about, given it’s more indie art style plus a lack of voice acting and its generic music, though I do like some of the animations. Aside from the humor many of the characters also go through several introspective scenes in magical dreams, which strengthens the writing and also helps build the world into something that is rather compelling despite you never visiting it outside of your breached rooms.
The worst I can say about both the presentation and the game itself is that there are certain mechanics that don’t quite seem to work, which the developers themselves warned might happen on the title screen. In my experience the two main ones I saw were a late game character’s ability saying it ends their turn when used but it absolutely does not, and a confidence challenge of “take no damage” being failed even when the attack damage was redirected. The former could be a typo left over from testing while the latter could be working as intended, but inconsistency isn’t ideal in a tactical game and I’m sure it’s leading to some confusion from players other than me. Also mission select after beating the game is a pain (which is unfortunate when you’re in a game that encourages replayability) as you have to pick “continue” from the main menu to go back to where you can pick any mission to replay. Mission select on the main menu restarts the game from whatever mission you picked and you have to replay the final mission and all it’s cutscenes to get back to the “complete” version of the game again. It’s all a bit convoluted and doesn’t make sense.
Occasional problems with sight lines and misleading text boxes aside, Tactical Breach Wizards is the most fun I’ve had with a game this year since Helldivers 2. The strategy, the characters, and the world all blend together perfectly, and the amount of content in terms of bonus challenge levels on top of the ten to fifteen hour campaign makes it well worth your money if you like turn-based tactical games like Into the Breach or even XCOM (especially XCOM‘s forgotten spin-off Chimera Squad). Even if that isn’t your cup of tea I think it’s worth at least a look, as there’s a lot of charm to be found here and the game’s rewind mechanic makes the game very forgiving. It’s not my game of the year, but it’s the closest anything not named Persona has gotten so far.
