When I first saw the trailers for Tactical Breach Wizards, I can say I wasn’t very impressed. A puzzle game with a quirky presentation – wow, wizards with tactical guns! My cynical self could never be impressed with such low-brow mashing of tactical goonery and high-cast, low-mana shenanigans.
Obviously, I was going through something at the time because the past week or so the game has been out I’ve been hooked on playing it every single day to the point I hit 100% completion. (Thankfully, the game supports player-created levels just for this type of scenario.)
Tactical Breach Wizards’ presentation, which I’d deemed Not Cool at first glance, absolutely is Cool. It wears the ridiculousness of tactically capable wizards on its sleeve but doesn’t spend the entire game embarrassed about doing so.
It builds this weird, urban-fantasy, magically-enabled Cold War world with a straight face, and then they populate it with decidedly weird, goof-ball characters who make up your squad. It has a comedic tone but maintains verisimilitude throughout, and isn’t afraid about building the world out with serious, very real concepts of war, loss, religion, and religious-based oppression.
It absolutely knows when it’s time to kick the comedy out of the room for a minute and knows when to let it back in. It’s a really hard feat to pull off. Comedy is by far the hardest thing out there to produce and it’s so easy to sacrifice the integrity of the other aspects of the story in an effort to push the laughs. I have massive respect for the effort and the payoff they achieved.
Each character is written really well for the small snippets of dialogue you get with them. It’s a shame there isn’t more. I understand in the level-to-level game play it might get a little bogged down but the game features a completely optional ‘chat’ section where it lets the characters flesh out a little more. There’s a total of four chats in there. I really think they could have been more gung-ho on that and written some more side-talks. It’s a good complaint that the writing was so fun to read that the main complaint I have is ‘there isn’t more of it.’
In the later half of the game, near the climax, there are a lot more big dialogue sections with lots of fun choices that I really wish I could replay easier to see all the things I missed. The full cast speaking to each other really is a treat I’d love to see more of.
If none of this interests you at all then the game always presents a choice that will skip it and get you back to the gameplay ASAP. It’s all extremely optional. Honestly, the game presents so many things as completely optional to the point I found it weird. If you skipped everything the game deemed as optional I think you’d be done with it in a half-sitting. It’s not a massive game as is.
Onto the nuts and bolts of the gameplay, Tactical Breach Wizards is an amazingly approachable puzzle-game. Your goal isn’t so much to shoot the enemy to death, though that becomes viable later, but to use your arcane-toolkit to manipulate the battlefield like a real wizard should. Push enemies into walls to cause damage. Pull explosive barrels into groups to damage them all, knock them into each other for even more damage, or just kick as many dudes out of windows as you can in a single turn.
It slow-rolls new abilities, concepts, obstacles and enemies while changing up the arenas in a way that doesn’t leave you feeling dragging your feet or overwhelmed. Gameplay has this lovely flow of figuring out the best way to defenestrate people, objects (and sometimes yourself) while not trying to die from return fire along the way.
The fun never stops, and in the latter-half of the game the mechanics start to twist the turn-based function of the game against you. I would’ve loved to see more of throughout the entire game rather than the latter half.
Each character offers up unique combinations and the game isn’t shy about limiting your character pool to show you how different characters can work together. It’s easy to fall into habits to clear levels and the developers took the care to force you to think differently. With rewind and foresee (something I really appreciated being baked in the characters ability set rather than as a strict gameplay thing) you can find yourself experimenting over and over until you find an approach that works.
After each mission you’ll earn a dose of XP to unlock new perks which will open your way out to play. I have mixed feelings about this – some characters from the get-go, like your two starting protagonists, work fine out of the box. Later characters, especially Dall (a huge walking tank who can charge) suffer from a real nasty clunkiness before they get some perks. It’s a little sour to the sweetness of the gameplay loop and fixed after the act you unlock her in.
All of this is backed up by a really fun, charming, and simplistic artstyle that I didn’t get bored looking at. It drove me to finish all the optional objectives to unlock more outfits because the art direction with each character is really expressive, and playing dolls with my team of weirdos so they look their best when bursting through a door was a great motivation to do extra content.
I’m going to wholeheartedly recommend you pick this game up and give it a whirl – it’s cheap, cheerful, and player-made content is only going to provide more and more things to try as time goes on.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
