Let’s Get Tactical: Tactical Breach Wizards Review

Tactical Breach Wizards kind of snuck up on me, which is a bit funny given the nature of the game.

It’s another of the many games that I’ve played demos for this year while profiling games during Steam Next Fest. I really enjoyed what I played of it, and was keen to see more. However, I didn’t expect that the full game would be this good. The demo, which was just the game’s opening chapter, sold me on the concept, but I had no idea that Suspicious Developments Inc was going to quietly drop one of 2024’s best games when they released Tactical Breach Wizards back in August.

No bullshit. Tactical Breach Wizards is one of the best games I’ve played all year. Part of that is definitely personal taste, but it has a lot of smart stuff going on under the hood too.

Either way, here are my extended thoughts, but, I guess to spoil the review in the open paragraphs, I do highly recommend Tactical Breach Wizards. If you’re at all interested in it then go buy it. It’s absolutely worth the full asking price, and I’m fairly confident that most people who check it out will have a good time playing it.

A Strong and Familiar Mechanical Foundation

I don’t enjoy making comparisons to other games when talking about the strengths, or weaknesses of a given title. Regardless, I am going to make a comparison here because I think that it works really well: Tactical Breach Wizards is a lot like Into The Breach. I mean that as the highest of compliments. It features a similar style of grid-based tactical combat where you’re given perfect information about what your enemy intends to do every single turn. Your job is to figure out how to use your limited tools to solve each scenario. At first glance, you’ll seem hopelessly outgunned, which makes every level feel almost puzzle-like in design. And, just like in puzzle games, figuring out what sequence of actions will get you through totally unscathed is incredibly satisfying.

There is one major difference though: Tactical Breach Wizards is not a roguelike. It has a fixed number of scenarios, and a story (more on that later). I think this is to the game’s benefit, as I didn’t personally find that a roguelike structure gave Into The Breach much replay value. Instead, with Tactical Breach Wizards you get a boat load of highly curated, excellently designed levels that will push you to experiment with the game’s systems in several exciting ways.

And experimentation is actually possible because players are given a rewind button with unlimited uses. This helps with allowing players to approach a given problem from multiple angles (sometimes literally) while trying to determine the best possible solution. The rewind feature really helps to open the door for experimentation as players aren’t penalized for trying something just to see how it works as they think through how they actually want to solve the problem at hand.

It’s worth noting that giving the player unlimited rewinds ensures they’re also always able to test the outcomes of their actions. I can only speak for myself, but I find it really frustrating when I envision what seems like the perfect plan only for it to fall apart when I’m shown that certain gameplay mechanics don’t interact in the way I envisioned. Tactical Breach Wizards entirely sidesteps this problem because you can always rewind your proposed solution when things don’t quite work out.

This also means that players are able to find all the potential uses for their different abilities without the developers having to spoil them. They simply tell you how the ability works, and give you a variety of different scenarios to experiment with them. Then it’s up to the player to discover all the potential ways they can use abilities by experimenting, and iterating thanks to the rewind feature.

There’s also no chance, or ambiguity in Tactical Breach Wizards. Random critical hits are the bane of my existence even when they’re in my favour. It can be cool to score a game winning critical hit, but, in games that reward thoughtful play, I always find that kind of self-defeating. Is it really my victory if I was only able to cinch it out because of chance? I don’t think so, and I found Tactical Breach Wizards a lot more fulfilling to play thanks to its complete lack of chance based mechanics.

It’s probably already abundantly clear, but I think Tactical Breach Wizards is top-class tactical gameplay. The game rewards thinking outside the box, and using the full breadth of your squad’s different abilities in every scenario. It even provides the tools to make sure that this process is fun, instead of a bunch of frustrating guesswork. I promise, from a strictly mechanical standpoint, Tactical Breach Wizards is an all-timer.

Pitch Perfect Pacing

Speaking of all those different squad abilities, another major aspect of Tactical Breach Wizards that I really enjoyed was the sheer variety of different mechanics on offer. Just to put things into perspective, there are 5 different operators on your squad (eventually), all of which have 4 or more unique abilities with very little mechanical overlap. On top of that, there are also several different ability upgrades, a bunch of level specific mechanics, and a bevy of different enemy types. That’s a lot of stuff, but it means that nothing in Tactical Breach Wizards ever gets a chance to become boring.

Crucially though, all of this stuff has the opportunity to breathe. There are very few mechanics that you’ll only see on a single map. Instead, different configurations of operators, enemies, and level mechanics are mixed to create a variety of different combinations. This gives the player a lot of opportunity to experiment with something before it disappears forever, which is pitch perfect pacing in my book.

There was 1 point I wanted to circle back around to though: upgrades. This is an area that I think Tactical Breach Wizards excels in. Each of the unlockable perks changes your operator’s abilities in a very noticeable way. In some cases, the change is enough that the ability almost feels like a completely new one. This further enhances the already great pacing because the skills that your operators have access to is the one part of the game that otherwise doesn’t change that much.

If you’ll allow me to be a bit pretentious for a second here, all of these different elements end up coalescing to create this perfect gameplay cocktail. There’s so many different ideas, but Tactical Breach Wizards explores them beautifully. That’s somewhat of a rarity in my experience as I often find games will under, or over-utilize mechanics. It was really nice to see the full breadth of what Tactical Breach Wizards had to offer while also feeling like I had my fill by the time the credits rolled.

Compelling Story and Dialogue

Finally, I wanted to touch on the writing in Tactical Breach Wizards.

I don’t compliment video game writing terribly often. I think a lot of games completely miss the mark by delivering stories that are too afraid to say anything of substance, and never actually go anywhere. Not every game needs to be Shakespeare, but it’s nice when a game is able to actually draw me into its world, and motivate me with narrative hooks instead of simply relying on mechanical hooks.

Having said that, I think the writing in Tactical Breach Wizards is fire. It wasn’t just the overarching plot that got me either – the character writing did too. In fact, I’d argue that the writing does almost as much heavy lifting to keep players interested in continuing to play Tactical Breach Wizards as the mechanics do. And that’s a fairly big accomplishment because the mechanical side of Tactical Breach Wizards, as already discussed, is probably the driving source for why you’d even want to play it.

I want to keep things spoiler light here, so I’ll limit my discussion of the plot to high-level story beats.

For all intents and purposes, Tactical Breach Wizards is a political thriller with lots of espionage. However, it also occasionally gives off the vibe of a buddy cop film. That’s a bit of a tonal clash, but I think it ends up working to the game’s benefit. Neither of these styles (genres? I don’t know) really detract from one another, so you get a somewhat serious story with moments of levity sprinkled in to help keep things from getting too heavy.

As far as the actual content of the plot, you’re leading a ragtag team of retired Spec Ops soldiers who are looking into one of their former co-workers. This drags them across several countries, and also sees them making unusual alliances to fight their common enemy. Again, don’t want to spoil things, but you can probably already see how Tactical Breach Wizards ends up being a mix of espionage, and buddy cop from that setup.

There’s one final point I wanted to touch on with regard to the plot of Tactical Breach Wizards, and that’s the pacing. Which, as you’ve probably already guessed, is really good.

Tactical Breach Wizards does this wonderful thing where it constantly sees your squad solving the problem that is immediately in-front of them, only for them to realize some new kernel of information that sets them down their next path in the story. In this way, you as the audience always have a narrative string to keep pulling on until the game finally rolls credits.

I’m a really big fan of writing that constantly pulls the reader along with narrative hooks like this. I find it almost feels like the text in question has this incredible sense of momentum where you can’t put it down because you have to know what happens next. That’s a big reason for why I’ve enjoyed reading some of Dan Brown’s novels, for example. I don’t know that Tactical Breach Wizards is that good, but I do think it does a great job of keeping players interested thanks to the way it doles out its story beats.

Shifting focus a bit, I also wanted to elaborate on the character writing because I think it’s executed quite well too. Tactical Breach Wizards does that new-age indie film thing of writing the characters a little rougher around the edges. What I mean by that is that the dialogue isn’t written perfectly. It has the kind of subtle imperfections that mirror how people actually speak to one another. That can be super annoying depending on the context, but I felt like it worked really well here. Each member of Tactical Breach Wizards’ cast ends up feeling a lot more real, for lack of a better word, thanks to this grounded writing style.

The writing also helps to convey each character’s personality a lot more easily. For example, Banks is impatient, and fairly sarcastic. That could make her come across like a complete dickhead, but she ends up being a lot more endearing thanks to the less sterile character writing. I found I got a much better sense of who she was, and where Banks was coming from than I do from a lot of other games’ characters.

I dunno – this is one of those things I don’t have a lot of practice describing, but, to me, it felt like the characters of Tactical Breach Wizards actually existed. They had goals, problems, and motivations that extend beyond the game’s plot. They didn’t just exist for my benefit – they were people in this world. When I finished Tactical Breach Wizards, and was asked where I thought each of the squad members went off to, I felt like I had a really good sense of where they would actually go. I wasn’t just choosing my own fan-canon endings. That’s really cool, and I think it speaks volumes about the quality of writing within Tactical Breach Wizards.

I mean, what more is there for me to say? I already recommended Tactical Breach Wizards at the top. I would imagine that I’ve only continued to cement why I gave it that recommendation as I’ve rambled for the past almost 1800 words.

Either way, Tactical Breach Wizards is definitely one of 2024’s best. At least, I think it is. I imagine I’ll be writing about it again in a couple of weeks when I’m doing my year end round-up, and I hope by that point some of the folks who are reading right now will have played the game themselves.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. And if you’ve already played Tactical Breach Wizards let me know what you thought of the game. Or if you want something easier: who was your favourite character? Mine’s a tie between Jen and Banks.

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