As a game that relies heavily on glimpsing the future, the best place to start with Tactical Breach Wizards is slightly ahead of ourselves. So let’s kick off with the fact that this magical mystery spec-ops tour is the most significant turn-based tactics game since the venerable XCOM 2. Its blend of ingeniously flexible puzzles and deliriously funny writing would be sufficient to clear it for active duty on anyone’s gaming device. But what qualifies it for the Special Arcane Service is how boldly it stares down the murky morality of military-themed games.
Placing you in command of a ragtag team of witch detectives, necro-medics, time-manipulating wizards, and a druid hitman, Tactical Breach Wizards challenges you with using your squad’s eclectic powers to overcome escalating tactical siege scenarios. A typical level will require you to breach and enter a room, disable a half-dozen enemies, barricade doors to keep out reinforcements, and reach the computer that unlocks the pathway to the next room.
It’s a stripped-back example of the form, with no base management or higher strategic layer to worry about. Instead, the focus is on the creative use of your magical powers to resolve the scenario as cleanly as possible. Jen, your freelance storm witch, casts lightning spells that do no damage but shunt people around, letting you knock out enemies by shoving them into objects or pushing them out of windows. Your Navy Seer, Zan, can foresee events one second into the future, which lets you generally predict how enemies are going to attack, but also allows him to set up ambushes and dish out additional actions to teammates. Combining powers to maximise your efficiency is a key tactic, such as using Zan’s time-boost ability to let Jen use her lightning powers twice.
Almost every room you enter introduces a new ability, opponent, or idea that enhances the challenge and your ability to meet it. Recruiting Dessa the necro-medic, for example, lets you heal people by killing and resurrecting them, and placing interdimensional portals on walls that you can push enemies through for a swift elimination.
Tactical Breach Wizards wants to eke every drop of puzzling potential from moving a bunch of little guys around a room. Yet unlike XCOM, it doesn’t stretch your lateral thinking through force. Most scenarios can be resolved relatively painlessly, not least because you can undo any decision you make in a given turn. But there are also bonus objectives for each stage, such as completing it without doing any damage whatsoever. Instead of punishing your errors by killing your crew, Tactical Breach Wizards gently encourages you toward excellence.
This more tolerant attitude carries through to the game’s themes. Tactical Breach Wizards is by no means a serious game, as evidenced by objectives such as “Defenestrate the Pyromancer” and the fact that Zan’s “assault rifle” is a machine-gun frame with a wizard’s staff instead of a barrel. But it does take its characters and the problems they face seriously. One of my favourite flourishes is how your team has heartfelt exchanges each time they stack up to breach another door. Not only is this a great running joke, the ensuing conversations are also supremely witty and provide great insights into each wizard’s inner life.
Yet this game’s most impressive trick is how it weaves a genuinely intriguing espionage thriller out of its daft concept, while also refusing to comply with the queasy ethics of modern military games. Your team is built from rebels and outcasts rather than government-sanctioned wizards, while your enemies are the enforcers of religious dictatorships or employed by private military companies (plus a Traffic Warlock called Steve). Even when facing down these foes, your team is committed to exclusively non-lethal rules of engagement. If you’re wondering how they can do this while constantly punting people out of windows, the answer is simple – they’re wizards.
It’s a game in near-perfect balance, a lean and distinctly not mean ode to turn-based tactics that embraces the genre’s creative puzzling while repudiating its worst excesses. Tactical Breach Wizards lets you see the future, raise the dead, and burst through windows on a witch’s broom. Yet amid all that, its most powerful spell is empathy.
Tactical Breach Wizards is out 22 August
