If you’re here because you thought the name Tactical Breach Wizards was equal parts funny and confusing and your curiosity got the best of you, then don’t move a muscle – you’ve come to the right place. It’s got tactics, it’s got breaching, it’s got wizards – it does exactly what it says on the tin. Suspicious Developments Studio has configured a simultaneously hilarious and challenging tactical strategy game as the third game in their spiritual “Defenestration Trilogy” that will have you sweating bullets, and then firing those bullets at dark sorcerers wielding machine guns to knock them out of the windows from the top floor of very tall buildings.
The setup is pretty simple. You are a tactical breach wizard named Jen, who must clear her name after happening to see a mysterious warlock attack the police station alongside… Liv, a wizard detective who’s gone rogue! P.I. Jen must team up with Liv’s former partner, Zan, and together they travel the continent, meeting strange new wizards that represent friend and foe alike, unraveling the conspiracy just a bit at a time. It’s a really fun setup and it takes itself exactly as seriously as it should, which is none.
Each level begins as your squadron of up to three tactical breach wizards waits outside the door to a room of waiting warlocks and witches equipped with anything from anti-magic grenades to sniper rifles and exchange some witty dialogue reminiscent of an 80s procedural cop show. The jokes were pretty much always funny, leaning a lot on exchanging one-liner zingers, but I pretty quickly grew tired of the story exposition. You’ll then choose where to position your wizards, breach the doors, and begin the tactics! See, it’s all there.
I’ve played a good number of tactics games before. I do think Tactical Breach Wizards has an edge on the other ones, including fan favorite Into the Breach, simply by letting you actually do way more stuff on each turn. Each turn, each character starts with one action, but can cast spells using mana, before or after their action. You can bank up to six mana points with each character, so more often than not you can get a great deal done with each character before your turn is up. There’s laptops to steal, turrets to hack, enemy respawn doors to seal, and much more to be done outside of just attacking the enemies. There are also actions and moves that can regenerate mana, and a few times now I’ve chained it so my three characters have performed over 20 maneuvers in a single turn before the enemy gets to do anything.
Tactical Breach Wizards is not interested in providing you a challenge at the level of the famously difficult Into the Breach, nor is it as lackadaisical as Mario + Rabbids . It somehow finds not a middle ground between the two, but an entirely new ground somewhere off to the side. The most front-facing mechanic of Tactical Breach Wizards is the rewind mechanic, where at any time, with no limits, you can rewind action by action back to the beginning of the turn after seeing how it all plays out. You have wizarding foresight, so every time a turn will end in death for one of your characters or something doesn’t go as planned, you already have been warned. You have full, omnipotent power over how the turn plays out, but you can only rewind within the same turn you’re in. Once you hit Next Round, you’re locked in. Oh, how the turn tables turn. The real enemy in Tactical Breach Wizards is your own uncertainty.
Life is Strange is one of my favorite games of all time, largely because it lets you make big decisions and watch the consequences play out, and then rewind time and try something else. Very quickly, you realize that there is no obvious optimal solution. You can try and retry all you like, but you will never totally feel that you’ve done the best you can. Tactical Breach Wizards is strangely similar in that it makes the player’s own anxiety the ultimate threat, since you can manipulate the battlefield completely to your heart’s content. It’s kind of genius in how simple it is. Every turn you don’t throw someone out a window is a turn wasted, after all. Sadly, the challenges that are provided in each level also don’t really add anything. If anything, it makes the game less fun to play, and I will certainly not be doing a replay to complete them.
I love the variety of tactical actions and spells that can be cast, and the variety is even more appreciated when dealing with anti-magic fields and bosses with new powers. Poison, fire, confusion, sleepiness, dizziness – all of these status conditions and many more keep you on your toes. Often, it’s not how you can beat a stage – it’s finding the best way to do it. Whether that means completing challenges, keeping all your wizards alive to the next round, or simply dodging a poison bomb you didn’t realize was coming is up to you. I often found myself rewinding because I thought of a cooler way to do something, which brings me to how damn cool some of the powers are. You can upgrade powers and unlock new ones between rounds in a simple refundable skill tree that is the perfect amount of malleable without being overwhelming for the type of game this is.
Tactical Breach Wizards has, unbelievably, reminded me of Dishonored. If you know anything about me, you know that is the greatest possible praise I could ever give a video game. There’s even a mechanic similar to Domino where you can tie the fate of one character on the field to another – anything that happens to one happens to the other. There’s also an equivalent of doppleganger, creating a fake version of you that runs out and cannot attack or move but simply exists. My heart raced when I realized I could Domino my Doppleganger to a shielded enemy and kill him by using chain lightning on my own clone since the enemy was around a corner. I won’t spoil all the other sick combos you can pull off, but trust me – it’s going to feel great when you figure them out yourself.
The only portion of Tactical Breach Wizards that I actively don’t like is, unfortunately, the story. Like I said, it’s actually funny. Maybe that’s come at the expense of the characters not being interesting in any way, shape, or form. The dialogue is all parody of 80s cop procedurals, so it’s intentionally goofy, but again it comes at the cost of not being able to convey character moments. The story is honestly so boring and dull that I began skipping all dialogue just a few hours in, which I’m sorry to say since the rest of the game is so damn good. To better explain my point, Austin Powers is hilarious. It would still be hilarious but also a lot less fun to watch if every 15 minutes it stopped and made you answer serious questions about the characters’ goals, motives, and relationships before continuing on – which is exactly what Tactical Breach Wizards makes you do.
Between each mission, you’re forced to to go a giant map on a cork board in HQ and one by one thread strings between different characters, places, operations, items, organizations, and more to connect the dots and figure out the conspiracy. There’s a huge problem with this, which is that it’s unbelievably boring and really forces you to actively engage with a story that I think is pretty poorly written. If there was some kind of autocomplete button I wouldn’t have even brought this up, but it’s agonizing having this extremely fun game grind to a halt while you squint at 30 little squares and drag threads between images until they let you stop. I don’t care about these characters, I don’t care about why Liv betrayed Zan, I don’t care what storage facility the mercenary group was taking the magical drugs to. Stop.
I really loved Tactical Breach Wizards and I do recommend it to everyone who enjoys tactics games and when a police chief yells “You’re off the force! Turn in your gun and your badge!” so the rogue cop can solve the case outside the law. It is hurt badly by its very boring story and characters, although they crack some great jokes, and is exacerbated by the fact that you must actively engage with the story to progress through the cork board segments which can take 10 minutes to figure out sometimes. If not for that, I’d recommend skipping the story entirely and enjoying the incredible gameplay, but you literally can’t. Still, it’s worth trudging through these short bits for hours of extremely malleable gameplay and the high of tossing a screaming skull through a guy’s head, ricocheting it off the wall behind him, and knocking his buddy into a pool of poisonous potions that he himself dumped there.
Nirav reviewed Tactical Breach Wizards on PC with a review code.
