Tactical Breach Wizards Review - Breach and Seer

You might not know them by name, but developer Suspicious Developments has been around the indie scene for quite a while. The creators of Gunpoint and Heat Signature are back with what might just be their best game yet, which is saying a lot since this studio takes risks and isn't afraid to be weird and different.

So for their latest game, Tactical Breach Wizards? Like I said, it's definitely weird and different, but also cleverly designed and wildly inventive.

Hurling Baddies Out of Windows in Tactical Breach Wizards

Here's a little lesson on defenestration. Even as an English major, I hadn't heard of this word, but once you learn it, it captures the essence of Tactical Breach Wizards quite well. To defenestrate someone is to throw them out of a window, which goes to show there truly is a word for everything.

On the surface, one wouldn't put wizards and throwing folks out of windows together, but Tactical Breach Wizards says otherwise. As a turn-based tactics game, you use the magical powers of your units to move enemies around in strategic ways -- usually involving windows.

In this regard, the strategic elements of Tactical Breach Wizards follows the same philosophy as Into the Breach: using abilities to move enemies into positions that put them at a disadvantage or outright dispose of them. You can approach each mission like it's a puzzle and you'll do just fine -- finding how to optimize your strategy and defeat enemies in the least amount of turns is half the fun.

With quite a few missions across a roughly 15 hour campaign, Tactical Breach Wizards' employs exceptional level design and combines that with an array of powers that make anything seem possible. Mission objectives are often accompanied by secondary, optional tasks that add a bit more difficulty, and in turn, variety.

A Colorful Cast of Characters in Tactical Breach Wizards

But the real star of the show are your units themselves. As you progress across Tactical Breach Wizard's campaign, you'll recruit a few extra members. Once your party is complete, everything comes together and a whole world of possibilities are revealed.

Jen and Zan are the first two units players start with, and this duo starts out a bit underwhelming but become powerhouses as time goes on. Now Jen, she's especially useful when it comes to defenestration, as her abilities push enemy units pretty far. She can even chain together lightning to push around multiple enemies at once, so you can just imagine the possibilities she offers.

Zan, on the other hand, is arguably the most important unit in the game. This multi-talented Navy Seer has the ability to create mirages that distract enemies and even shoot at them later on. The attack with his weird-ass gun/staff hybrid moves enemies a bit, too, so on top of dealing a lot of damage, he can also move people around.

His quintessential power is that of foresight, enabling players to make moves before a turn ends and see how solutions play out -- and thankfully, this ability extends to other units even when he's not in a battle. This allows you to commit and experiment, so Tactical Breach Wizards encourages players to test out different strategies rather than punish you for silly mistakes.

The other units that'll join you are extremely helpful in their own right, like Dessa. She's a necromancer, so she can revive teammates, but don't just think of her as your traditional healer. She has some awesome abilities, like a spell that creates Death's Door that, when you push an enemy into it, they're thrown into the void, never to return. Now that is metal.

Spells: Tactical Breach Wizards' Tools of the Trade

Here's how one scenario could play out: use Dessa to put Death's Door on a wall behind another of your units, Dall. Use Dall to swap with an enemy halfway across the map. Now that the enemy is in close range to your other allies, have Zan use a spell to push the enemy into the door and have them removed from combat for good.

Two more characters join you, and it's when all five members of the party are together that Tactical Breach Wizards shows its full potential. Only a few missions will have all members of the team on at each time and you can't choose, so I would have liked to see them all in action at the same time more often.

Nonetheless, the ever-expanding arsenal of abilities and even skill trees keep each unit more or less on par with the others. I can't begin to imagine the work it took to create levels revolving around so many unique abilities, but they make it work.

Environmental hazards like exploding barrels and electrified walls on top of the copious amount of windows means you can and should take full advantage of the environment around you, especially since enemies become more complex in their own abilities as time goes on. Tactical Breach Wizards is a game that demands to be broken, and with your teammates, nothing seems impossible.

Tactical Breach Wizards' is Quirky, Alright

Tactical Breach Wizards leans pretty hard into the narrative side of things, so it pains me to say it didn't captivate me nearly as much as the gameplay did. There's a lot of back-and-forth dialogue, which in itself is fine, but it has to be intriguing to keep my attention. This is not the case, and in fact, turns out to be more annoying than anything else.

The characters are pretty goofy and quip at one another, so dialogue is definitely more lighthearted and jokey than anything else. Try as Tactical Breach Wizards might to be humorous, it didn't resonate with me at all. I wanted to like the characters, but some of the things they said to each other were just so unrealistic and weird, it was hard to get over.

The goofy dialogue and the serious content of the story clash with one another. The stakes of the plot are high, so for the characters to be these goofballs the whole time while attempting to stop a giant war feels wrong.

We're led to believe every single enemy we defeat isn't killed, even though some of them are quite evil. We're throwing enemies out of windows, slinging spells, and knocking explosive barrels into them. That's not something you can just walk away from alive.

Even still, the world-building is admirable, if a bit messy. Tactical Breach Wizards drops you into the deep end and creates a modern fantasy world where Traffic Warlocks and the Druid Mafia are just everyday things. Some elements of this world can be pretty funny, even if the vast majority of dialogue suffers from too many jokes.

Tactical Breach Wizards Review | Final Thoughts

I usually play turn-based tactics games with a controller, but Tactical Breach Wizards makes that difficult. The Gamepad's joystick moves a mouse cursor on the screen, which is a huge pet peeve of mine. It only ends up making the controller an absolute burden to use.

Using a controller for most tactics games makes things quick and snappy, but it's the exact opposite here. It feels like you're swimming against the current where instead, gamepad should be an easy alternative to mouse and keyboard controls.

It's easy to forgive Tactical Breach Wizard's shortcomings when the core gameplay itself is so inventive and addicting. It's definitely one of those games where you'll be surprised by your own ingenuity, and Tactical Breach Wizards encourages you to think outside the box. So go on -- defenestrate to your heart's content!

Tactical Breach Wizards was reviewed on PC with a copy provided by the developer over the course of around 15 hours of gameplay. All screenshots were taken during the process of review.