Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics game for people who don't like tactics games. It's a tactics game for people who, magically, like tactics games as much as nothing else. It's permissive and demanding; it's fun and tense. The plot involves world-wide conspiracies, PMCs, and brutal theocratic dictatorships. There's also a traffic summoning wizard named Steve who wears a high-visibility robe. Finding an absolutely, completely ridiculous XCOM round every round… and knowing that it's absolutely, completely okay if you don't. In short: one of the most enjoyable tactics games I've ever played, and the only tactics game with a fire mage so terrible that he relies on knocking his enemies out of heatstroke.
As all critical operations should, Tactical Breach Wizard’s story begins with a door being blown open. Some bad guys have a hostage, and the Navy Oracle is here to save him. The Druid Mafia’s bush lord is wearing a ghillie suit. This is despite the fact that, as Liv Kennedy points out to her one-second prophet Zan Vesker as a chrono-crusher, he’s already a tree. He’s also tough, so Zan’s rifle won’t be able to take him out with a single round. Liv is left completely exposed, so Zan will have to guess the outcome to see if he can dodge the shot. Likewise, you’ll be able to predict the outcome of every action before you take it. And if you decide later that it was a terrible mistake, you can rewind to the beginning of the round – one move at a time.
Zan rescues the hostage, but things get complicated for Liv as she races away from the scene to meet storm witch and private investigator Jen Kellen, who is reprimanded for interfering with police business. It doesn't take long for the office to suddenly burst into flames – a fact Jen tells the police as if she were telling someone their pasta is boiling. A scuffle with the bumbling fire mage leads to Jen and Zan's reunion, a police shootout, and a rabbit hole of conspiracy that eventually takes them to the other side of the planet.
I don't have the rewind powers I mentioned, so I'll first have to acknowledge a mistake I made when I wrote about the demo, when I called TeeBeeDubs' missions “highly solvable, room-by-room puzzles.” You should still read them, because I used my best window jokes there, but that's not really how things work. There are still optional challenges and side stories that are closer to specific puzzles with an ideal—or even the only—solution. But once you expand your team and unlock a few abilities, things get a lot more improvisational. Have Zan gather some intel for a mana boost, have Jen throw a few extra action grenades, and you can figure out how to spend them after she's swept to the far window with her broom to close the reinforcement door. A mission completed feels like you've stumbled upon just one of many perfect outcomes. And even then, you've climbed to that point with your own chain of gleeful, spontaneous, magic-spewing shenanigans.
Crucially, this indulgent playfulness is still satisfying, tied to the need to juggle challenging targets and multiple priority threats per round. You’re basically a solver. Jen should definitely throw that heavy weapon through a window before taking out Zan, because Zan can’t stay in cover when the other bad guy, Rion, has a spell-nullifying beam bead on him, Rion has to turn into a dog to bite the second heavy weapon, which makes him rabid and thus attacks the person wielding the shotgun, who is also a major threat to him… etc. It’s never been more satisfying to have so many proverbial micro-USB cables ripped from their medusa-hair prison.
All of this is supported by optional objectives. Complete in three rounds. Throw (verb: throw) four enemies out of windows. Deal eight knockbacks. The open reward is a resource called trust, which you can use to buy new outfits for your team. The more flamboyant your wizards act during the missions, the more flamboyant outfits they can wear. These are presented as voluntary challenges, described as “so that players find basic completion too easy.” But I'd say that's underestimating the game itself. In essence, they're creative writing prompts in the John Wickensian sense of penmanship; little inspirational flourishes that I'll use to clue myself in to what's possible. Once you realize that a one-round victory is theoretically doable, your brain starts reverse-engineering crime scenes that don't even have names yet.
And yes, all of this means that TeeBeeDubs isn't a difficult strategy game to get through, but even the ability to skip levels entirely is beside the point. Such a bulging bag of rule-breaking magic tricks is probably never going to appeal. This is magic 101: You already have enough dangerous power to conjure up storms, the game is about using it with enough finesse to prompt a prompt.
That’s not to say there’s no classic joy in stretching out every action point as long as possible, it just means there’s always room to get weird for the sake of showiness. Like those suits, this is about self-expression. It uses the convention of cool to make you want to crank out the cleanest, most detailed, and most efficient games possible. In this way, it encourages you to use your full toolset without relying on punishing difficulty. Normally, it takes an enormous amount of pressure for a game to make me want to delve this deeply into my bag of tricks. A selfless game of Into The Breach. Being surrounded by a seemingly insurmountable force in XCOM 2. Here, nine out of ten corners I felt pulled back into were ones I would happily teleport myself back into. For the most part, I felt like I’d just been let loose in a toy store.
For context, I don’t always get tempted by the internals, especially if I’m in review-free time. Here, I find myself replaying rounds because I figure my berserk smarts wouldn’t want to get hit even once, if they can help it. You can finish a mission with most of your team bruised and battered across the map with no consequences, and you’ll still start the next one healed. Yet even as it bends itself to offer absurd flexibility, the game never reveals its spine or breaks it completely. The difficulty ramps up via new wrinkles like alarms, locked doors, enemies who are rarely just ‘this guy’s still deadly’, and sometimes ones who can break the rules just as powerfully as you. An evil priest who retaliates whenever you attack his allies but doesn’t defend himself. A medic who can raise the dead. A heavy riot shield-wielding man with a gas mask that makes them immune to your special knockback juice. If language is the fundamental rule of the game, your abilities and those of your opponents are both poetic and pun-filled.
When we talk about games feeling 'human,' it's usually an attempt to capture something resonant, fearless, or otherwise authentic about the stories they tell. Tactical Breach Wizards, by the way, nails it. The writing goes from “this is funny” to “no, but this is actually Really funny”. Then it goes back to “I really enjoy hanging out with these weird people” to “Is someone throwing onions out the window here?” There's even an optional anxiety dream mission in which each teammate—say, Jen—has to work out her insecurities by collaborating with her own subconscious. But I actually found TeeBeeDubs' hidden depths on a menu screen above all else.
Each of the five wizards you'll eventually recruit into your band of wildly talented failures has an incredibly distinct skill set, and as you gain experience through quests, you'll unlock abilities that boost their standard abilities. While a few of the abilities are more mundane, even Zan's extra point of damage per hit is transformative. Overall, reader: this is shit wild. I would stare at the perk screen, paralyzed with glee, trying to imagine all the ridiculous scenarios that would ensue if Zan’s spectral clone could now interact with panels and doors. You can refund perk points at any time, but this conundrum is a distillation of my experience with the game. A preemptive fear of missed opportunities made sweet by the smirking, dull sense of exciting possibilities. Like being alive. With better hats.
It's not without its problems. Necrosurgeon Dessa Banks has a skill so universally useful that I've spent so long fixating my games on her, and it wasn't even that she could resurrect people by shooting them. The final missions prioritize story scenes over the final exam gauntlet I was hoping for, and I found myself drifting off on autopilot even a few missions before them. There's probably too many icing stains on the conspiratorial layer cake plot to comfortably follow on your first go-round. But there's one second I hope the gameplay of a 15-hour game I played for work speaks for itself. Right now, I'm diving back in again and again to check details and take screenshots, and eventually replaying all the missions. There's more! Survival maps. Optional puzzles. The same level editor the developer has, with the option to share your maps with others online. Hard mode. Is this all window dressing? Maybe. But man, what a gorgeous window dressing. Say “hi” on your way down.
This review is based on a review structure for the game provided by the developer. Tom Francis of Suspicious Developments wrote for RPS.