Can a tactics game work with the player to streamline the user experience and eliminate a lot of the frustrations of the genre? No more blindsiding players to create artificial challenge. No more 95 percentile shots that result in misses. In their place, straightforward level and character design that can be read at a glance so that a plan of attack can be formulated instantly. Respect for the player is at the core of the design of Tactical Breach Wizards and it shows.

LET’S BREACH THIS TOPIC

Tactical Breach Wizards is a single-player, turn-based strategy game set in a modern world where the use of magic has permeated all aspects of combat, from policing the population to special ops in the battlefield. You control a group of wizards with unique powers that you’ll need to fully understand to make it to the end.

The “breach” aspect of Tactical Breach Wizards comes from a Rainbow Six-esque breaching mechanic wherein the player learns a little bit about the level from the outside as characters have a brief discussion. You can select where to deploy certain characters and once you’re ready to breach, all hell breaks loose.

CHARACTERS BLOOM EVEN ON A BATTLEFIELD

While the game invites comparisons to series like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics, the closest analog I’ve seen is XCOM: Chimera Squad, which focuses less on permadeath and more on getting into the psyche of the limited cast of characters. Each character is unique from the battle-hardened, tough as nails Navy Seer blessed with foresight to the goth doctor Necromancer who shoots her patients to resurrect them.

My favorite was Dall, the Riot Priest who is built like a tank and decked out in a wall of armor. While most of her moves involve close-up melee combat, she can also swap places with other characters which can result in catastrophic situations for those she swaps with or narrow victory for allies snatched from the jaws of defeat.

As the story progresses, each character will experience a dream in the form of a series of challenge rooms where they explore their subconscious and reveal things they may not have told other characters. While the dreams are optional, they put your skills to the test. Completing these dreams sees you rewarded with a unique ability perk that will help in the final battle.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF WHAT’S BEEN GIVEN

One of the biggest strengths of Tactical Breach Wizards is that it is very conscious not to waste the player’s time. While XCOM seems interested in giving the occasional bullshit situation that could never have been foreseen, Wizards lets you play out the remainder of a round after you’ve made your choices but before committing to them. If you forgot to take cover at the end of the round, the game will let you know by killing your character, and you simply rewind one move and instruct them to take cover.

Similarly, when new enemies enter the fray, you’ll know exactly from where they’re emerging. Don’t want to deal with new enemies? Get your ass over there to seal the door up, and you’ve cut off a major influx of new combatants. Or position one of your automatically triggered abilities to go off if an enemy dares cross your enchanted rifle scope.

Reading the battlefield is crucial. The game is set up to have you take advantage of environmental exploits such as windows (you knock people out of them) or explosives (you knock those into people). Some moves can feel like billiards, knocking a half dozen characters and objects into each other by setting off chain reactions across the map. In some of the dream levels you’ll need to knock out the entire enemy onslaught on your turn without letting the computer act once because if they do… you’re dead.

EXPLOITS ARE A FEATURE, NOT A BUG

But death is never the end. Early on, you gain access to time bending abilities from Zan, the aforementioned Seer who will let you rewind moves if you’re finding your forces are getting depleted too quickly. The game will liberally warn you though that finishing a round will lock in all of your choices. This is countered by Banks, the aforementioned necromancer, resurrecting characters that fall if you botch the execution. Sometimes you will need to exploit these abilities by intentionally letting your characters die and come back after the enemy selects different positions.

As you progress, you may feel like you’re cheating the game by using all of its mechanics. Based on the perks you select you can have rounds where you keep using and refunding your actions seemingly endlessly while the enemies don’t act at all.

Style For Days

The bonus objectives are tied to a system that unlocks character outfits, some of which go a long way toward helping you feel like these characters are yours. I often went with the more brightly colored outfits to help my team stand out a bit visually but if you want an all goth squad, by all means, have at it.

Suspicious Developments took great care with the art style that is both simplistic yet easily understandable. Opponents wearing armor are clearly visible, and their health bar reflects their armor rating. The game never goes for realistic graphics, but the simple designs let your imagination do a lot of the heavy lifting. The music keeps things riveting even when you’re bogged down by a bit of analysis paralysis and can aid with the immersion of making the game feel more fluid than a standard turn-based game. A stand-out was the train car level where the constant drum patterns reminded me of the chugging trains barreling down the tracks.

Some bits of the design struck me as a little wonky. Sometimes I struggled to understand the Perks upgrade screen and the game wouldn’t advance until I had assigned all my points. Other times it wasn’t super obvious when an ability would do immediate damage or damage on the character’s next turn, such as with the poison or fire damage. Through repetition, these minor qualms were overcome.

MECHANICALLY DELICIOUS

While I know it’s not always possible to get voice acting on an indie game budget, I think that this game would have benefited from actors bringing these characters to life and taking some of the load off the player who’s reading the copious dialogue between levels. The characters have a lot of repartee and I can’t help but think that it would have felt better coming from actual people instead of simply existing in my brain.

However, as a person who’s more interested in game systems than narrative, I never felt like I was lacking in my understanding of the game. Objectives are clearly outlined, and when a new mechanic suddenly shows up, the game is happy to offer hints. The tactics stand front and center in this game and the developers should be proud of their ingenuity. The abilities core to each character feel specific and establish each of them as unique members of the party. On missions where a character is absent, their absence is felt while giving someone else another great moment to shine.

Mechanically, the main game is superb. When you’re deep in the weeds of each characters’ skills and how they cooperate together, planning your approach and trying to eliminate opponents before they can move can be a real delight. While the overall presentation of Tactical Breach Wizards does come off a bit on the “indie” side, from a purely mechanical perspective it can teach some of the bigger players in the space a thing or two about quality of life.

WIZ BIZ

There’s a lot on offer under the hood as well. I played through the campaign on standard settings and while I occasionally had to restart a level and the final fight was quite tough, I persevered and finished without tweaking anything. You can dial in the exact experience you’d like to have in the difficulty settings, not to mention replaying story missions with any combination of characters you’d like.

Combining magic powers with a realistic combat setting is an inspired decision for a strategy game. It brings the tactical view and fanciful powers of a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 into the hard realism of a world beset by private military corporations. The setting is rich enough that I look forward to what Suspicious Developments does in this space going forward, especially if their next outing sees them come back with an even bigger budget for more things like voice acting.

8/10

This review was conducted using a digital Steam copy of the game. It was paid for by the author.