Tactical Breach Wizards review — A hilarious, varied and accessible turn-based strategy

Malindy Hetfeld, 9 September 2024

Some people are wizards. Rather than being spirited away to a secret society you can only access by owl-delivered invitation, they’re traffic cops, doctors and the like, living right among us. This isn’t a conspiracy theory I’ve come up with in my free time, but the idea behindTactical Breach Wizards, a turn-based strategy romp by the makers of Heat Signature. In TBW, you take control of a squad of more or less military-trained wizards, each with their own unique abilities, to follow and hopefully stop a military group that uses magic in illegal ways for their own illegal enrichment. This isn’t the teenage wizard school kind of magic - there is violence in Tactical Breach Wizards, these are military wizards, after all, but the stylised graphics and the absence of any unpleasant sounds help keep things light.

In each chapter of the 15 hour-long campaign, you visit a location and breach a set of connected rooms. You then need to clear the room of enemies, seal any doors and use a laptop which unlocks your escape route. Your characters each have an action per round as well as movement, once you’ve used everything, your enemies take their turn. This is the kind of turn-based strategy you may know from games such as XCOM, but whereas XCOM focuses more on the difficulty of making it out in one piece, Tactical Breach Wizards encourages you to be as efficient as possible.

If you want to, you can slowly get closer to an enemy lobbing grenades at you and eventually take them out by repeatedly shooting at them, but where would be the fun in that? Instead, you get a lot of satisfaction from combining your team’s magical skills in a way that lets you take out several foes in one go.

Freelance witch Jen for example uses chain lightning that hits several enemies and shoves them, for good measure. In one mission, I managed to position her so that a burst of lightning punted an enemy out of the window, the second bad guy slammed into the third, and the third then slid onto a tile that Zan was marking with his overwatch ability. Very satisfying. Some enemies simply can’t be taken down without teamwork, such as armoured tanks that can block one source of incoming damage and thus need to be hit from several sides at once.

You can spend a good amount of time thinking about the different ways to solve these puzzles, or you can simply try them out! Tactical Breach Wizards’ rewind feature is a standout in accessible puzzle design. Simply make your choices, watch them play out, and if you’re unhappy with the result, rewind.

Using a skill called foresight, you can also see how actions play out that only take effect after your turn is over, such as a time bomb exploding. It feels great not to be punished for mistakes, and if we’re honest, allows you to easily do what a lot of players are already doing in other games by loading their saves when something goes wrong.

But Tactical Breach Wizards keeps itself accessible in other ways, too, from several different difficulty settings to the option to simply skip a level and get back to it later, no questions asked. You still get the skill points necessary to upgrade your spells, and you still get to see how the story goes. If you want more of a challenge, that’s also no problem, as each level features optional objectives for you to take a stab at.

There are also optional challenges that take place in Zan’s dreams, which often have different goals than escaping a room.  Tactical Breach Wizards also makes itself easy to understand through the gentle way it introduces new concepts. If a character gains a new skill for example, you get to play around with it in one level first, before the next level introduces a new enemy type for you to use it on.

The way TBW explains new skills could be slightly better, instead of a tutorial for new skills, you get a prompt to simply read a skill and then use it. Most of the time, this approach works fine since you can rewind mistakes, but sometimes, it’s difficult to tell how exactly a skill should be used. This could however be down to my trepidation as a player who is used to tutorials – simply trying things out is a skill I had to relearn to an extent, to get the most out of Tactical Breach Wizards.

TWB’s story may sound pretty simple, and technically it is, but it’s the quality of what’s there that elevates the game above the rest. In a genre where most games ask you to simply get rid of all the intruders, with little additional detail, here you have characters who have stories of their own, the occasional (large, magical) axe to grind with another, and some really inventive worldbuilding that ties it all together. Should you get lost among the names, faces and military ranks, you can maintain and consult a character relationship map, complete with red string to fulfil your dreams of being in that It’s Always Sunny meme.

Zan, the first character you take control of, watches his partner disappear during a seemingly standard hostage extraction mission, only to have her reappear, years later, as his enemy. You can really see this weigh on him, and the bits and pieces you learn about him and the other team members, both in conversations ahead and after missions and in optional scenes, really help paint a picture. The banter between friends (and enemies!) is really funny, reminiscent of the quippy tone of Marvel movies without entering eye-roll territory.

There are really only good things to say about Tactical Breach Wizards. It finds a new way to interpret a well-established genre of strategy games, it’s fun and accessible to a wide variety of players. For a game about shooting bad guys, it’s a magical achievement.