Tactical Breach Wizards, the next game from Tom Francis (Gunpoint, Heat Signature), has everything you could want out of a game with such a name. There are 1) wizards, 2) tons of tactical breaching, 3) a huge conspiracy to unravel and 4) so many windows to throw people out of. What might not be apparent at first glance is just how deeply funny the game is (beyond just the inherent humor of defenestration) and what a biting satire it turns out to be.
An early conversation with a police officer paints the picture pretty vividly. Jen Kellan, the Storm Witch who serves as Tactical Breach Wizards’ de-facto protagonist, has just returned from a job gone badly. As a PI, she responsibly goes to the police to file her report and findings before being dismissed for inserting herself into missing persons cases and having her abilities dismissed as “witch’s tricks.” Since the game is wildly sharp, it lets you talk your shit right back at them, pointing out that maybe she wouldn’t have to insert herself if the police did their jobs. Soon after, you spend a mission dismantling the brutally inefficient police force, and once again, toss people out of windows.
Tactical Breach Wizards is immensely talk-y. It’s got an unfiltered voice that I’m deeply jealous of and which bleeds into its presentation and lovely level design. Some of my favorite moments in the game aren’t even in combat, but instead in the dialogue-heavy cutscenes that play between missions or just before you breach a door to begin a level. You get to know Zan, a veteran black ops wizard with ties to the game’s villain, and the “base” he brings you back to is actually his mom’s flat. Once you’re there, the two of them regale you with Zan’s “origin story” and his mom tells you that he’s got his dad’s “dogshit spirit.”
Everyone is a character in Tactical Breach Wizards, which makes me appreciate how much it squeezes from these interstitial scenes. A traffic warlock with uncanny hearing named Steve Clark is among the brightest of them, and he thankfully recurs as a hilarious rival to Jen. Bori, a pyromancer known for producing barely-hot flames, is another such oddity, and a necromedic named Banks even ends up joining your team. Her whole shtick is that she can only heal people by resurrecting them and she can only resurrect someone who’s died within an hour, so she carries around a gun to expedite things. Yes, she resurrects you with a headshot.
Naturally, this quirkiness extends into the game’s story and approach to level design. Combat plays out via a turn-based system on an isometric grid, where you first deploy your units and take your actions before the enemy goes. If you leave one of your allies in a precarious position, you can foresee what the enemy will do before ending your turn and committing to it, and a rewind button allows you to carefully calculate every step of the turn before letting your foes advance. More often than not, you won’t be dealing direct damage as much as you’ll be debuffing enemies, knocking them into parts of the environment, or sending them careening out a window or into holes. However, Tactical Breach Wizards does a marvelous job of ramping things up, despite how simplistic this might sound.
One of the latest levels I took on occurred within Jen’s own anxiety dream, and it was appropriately pretty unorthodox and challenging, both thematically and mechanically. On one level, Jen is quite literally interrogating herself about her inability to separate her identity from her work, diminishing her worth and sense of self. On another, two versions of her are fighting through stifling bureaucratic offices filled with the very police officers and traffic warlocks that filled her otherwise bland daily life. That is, until Zan came to her for help preventing World War Five and she began to feel like she was capable of being more than a cog in a broken machine.
In addition to familiarizing me with her struggles, this anxiety dream also pushed me to get to know all of Jen’s tricks. For example, the biggest thing about Jen is that she is both highly mobile and capable of pushing units around, so rather than confronting enemies head on, I tried to reposition her near windows. That way she could either use her main weapon (which pushes a unit at a time) or her Chain Bolt (which knocks back even further and also attacks multiple enemies) to send people flying out of windows, or use her broom to fly out of a nearby window and emerge from another one.
Banks plays an excellent supporting role, being able to transfer damage from one character to another, opening up eldritch portals that enemies can be sucked up into, or even just softening them up with a thrown sedative, multiplying the effectiveness of any knockback damage. Zan is much more offensive, having the ability to set fire to any enemy that crosses whatever axis he fixes his sights on, but my favorite move of his eventually allows him to send out multiple projections of himself to take fire, shoot at nearby enemies, or even interact with objectives. It’s corny to admit, but you feel downright magical after a certain point, though Tactical Breach Wizards rarely feels pitched in your favor because of that.
An enemy turret will still absolutely cap you in 1-2 hits, and other traffic warlocks will send spectral cars and buses in three lanes directly at you. Neutralisers occasionally fill the ranks of enemies, and since they fixate on the closest unit to them and strip them of their magic, you have to carefully consider pulling enemy aggression when breaching a room and tactically position your allies accordingly. You wouldn’t want Zan to be pinned down on that opening turn, for example, since his clones and uniquely offensive skills make him ideal for taking out that Neautraliser quickly. That then creates an opportunity for Jen to dart through the room and push people into walls, portals, or out of windows. No matter what you think the goal of this game is, it’s pushing as many people out of windows as possible.
If you don’t believe me, try and meet all the “confidence” goals in every level. These sub-objectives encourage you to optimize your playstyle by challenging you to sometimes beat a level in a certain amount of turns, toss a certain number of enemies out of windows in one move, or extend a turn so long that you and all your allies are able to use a number of skills, which take either action or mana, or sometimes both. Each character has their own confidence objective, which gives points to unlock cosmetics, but just beating missions will reward XP that can be doled out to modify and level up individual skills in a system that’s deeply familiar to anyone who’s played the beloved tactics game Into the Breach.
While I am two acts into the game, there’s another two that are even longer and there’s a slew of dream missions, which include challenging gauntlets as well as survival missions. You know, just in case you thought there wouldn’t be enough meat on the bones. Between its ridiculous cast and premise, a sleek sense of style, and a mystery I actually want to unravel—complete with a board and lots of interactive red string—not to mention its incredible wit, Tactical Breach Wizards is absolutely one of the best games I’ve played this year.
