Tactical Breach Wizards review: Defenestration simulation

Tactical Breach Wizards offers a humorous tactics game experience

Suspicious Developments

Whatever your expectations are after hearing “turn-based tactics game featuring wizards” as a content description, Tactical Breach Wizards will shatter them within the first seconds and then throw them out of a window as if they were Russian oligarchs who displeased the regime. 

The game’s opening mission, which doubles as a tutorial, perfectly sets the scene for what’s to follow: A gray-bearded wizard and his young protegé prepare to face druids who’ve taken a hostage but there’s a twist: they both wear modern special forces outfits and are preparing to storm a container ship captured by this notorious druid mafia. The graybeard stuffed his wand into the shell of an assault rifle, while his apprentice has added a tactical laser to her own wand, which is uselessly facing upwards to make it look like one of the glowsticks you get at k-pop concerts.

This is a modern setting in which magic is commonplace, which in itself isn’t an uncommon trope, but the execution of it all here is very light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek. Despite being made with a graphics style that’s neither realistic nor unique, that interpretation of the setting nevertheless gives Tactical Breach Wizards a ton of personality.

Tactical Breach Wizards is fully committed to the bit: Look at those get-ups. / Suspicious Developments

The dialog and story reinforce that identity, managing to tell an intricate action-thriller tale that spans entire countries without ever getting lost in the minutiae of it all – of course, all that will require you to actually read all the text in the game: There’s no voice-over. Personally, I don’t have a problem with that as I like reading, but it’s a little unfortunate since some people don’t enjoy that and will use the game’s skip button, missing out on all the great humor in the script.

Of course, the skip button existing in the first place means the developers are aware of that – and this respect for your time is something apparent throughout Tactical Breach Wizards. This isn’t one of those endless epics you’ll need to replay ten times to see all its content with the story being around 15 hours in terms of playtime if you stick to the main stuff. There is some optional content to be had for those who want to engage with it, adding another few hours, but it’s just a nice bonus.

Tactical Breach Wizards’ missions are presented in relatively short blocks, allowing you to experience the game portion-sized. Coupled with its general gameplay design, this is very much the snack-version of a turn-based tactics game you can enjoy in small bites.

If you’ve played XCOM or any other representative of this genre, you pretty much know what to expect: You have a team of unique characters with specific abilities and need to achieve certain objectives or clear out rooms of enemies in grid- and turn-based combat. Your characters have limited action points and mana, restricting what you can do in a single turn.

Where Tactical Breach Wizards is different from the likes of XCOM is the focus of its combat – you don’t really deal a lot of direct damage to enemies, because you’re the good guys and don’t want to kill anyone unnecessarily. You merely want to knock people out, and that’s best achieved by throwing them against walls and similar obstacles or by defenestrating them. In fact, you’ll probably want to defenestrate them as much as you can, first because it’s pretty cool to say defenestrate and second because each mission comes with some optional goals to fulfill.

De-fe-nes-trate. Defenestrate. It's so satisfying. / Suspicious Developments

Again, this game really respects your time, so you can simply blitz through missions by doing whatever you need to do in the way you want to do it. But where it really shines is when you let yourself be guided by the optional goals associated with every mission. Those will tell you to defenestrate two enemies in a single turn or hit a certain number of targets with a single skill use or finish every enemy off by the end of the first turn and so on. It’s these objectives that transform Tactical Breach Wizards from a regular turn-based tactics game to a really engaging puzzle game that will activate the neurons of any hardcore fan of the genre. Having an undo function to correct your errors is a huge win for this aspect of the game, reducing possible frustration.

It's up to you how many optional goals you want to commit to, but being guided by them really makes the game shine. / Suspicious Developments

Fulfilling these objectives isn’t just a lot of fun because it really forces you to think about your characters and ways of how to use their varied kits and synergies, it also awards confidence points which in turn can be used to unlock alternate outfits for your characters.

To sum it up, Tactical Breach Wizards’ combat is a lot about movement – moving the enemy into a certain direction to put them against walls or kick them out of windows. Your characters do not have a lot of HP, so taking enemies out quickly or keeping close to cover, which prevents attacks completely, must always be considered.

Every character you get as the story develops has really fun things to offer: One can foresee the future to allow you to rewind time and use his overwatch ability perfectly, another can use chain lightning or use her broom to fly from window to window. There is a necromancer who can revive allies or enemies and create an insta-kill portal on a wall. Another one is basically Reinhardt from Overwatch and can charge foes with her riot shield.

Enemy design is relatively varied as well, providing you with plenty of challenges, and the same goes for mission and map design. It does sometimes feel like the game could introduce newer elements at a faster rate, but it’s good enough to keep things from being monotonous – at least for players who keep engaging with the optional goals.

Combat is very much the core of the game – the story is presented via dialog between missions, you can level up your characters’ abilities as they gain XP, and you can interact with the map in the game to keep track of the unfolding conspiracy, but there’s no base-building elements or any other gameplay aspect. Tactical Breach Wizards is focused on its clever combat missions and it does that very well. It’s also very approachable with various difficulty settings to customize.

You get play detective between missions a little bit as you slowly uncover a conspiracy. / Suspicious Developments

Tactical Breach Wizards is a wonderfully refined turn-based tactics game with fantastic humor and clever combat design that offers challenges for casual and hardcore players – and a lot of defenestrations.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)