I finished Tactical Breach Wizards as part of my backlog project, and I was very pleased by it, though not particularly thrilled to play it.
Tactical Breach Wizards follows two mages navigating high-stakes urban fantasy scenarios. While the gameplay shines with well-crafted tactical mechanics and clever unit synergy, the writing and story left me divided.
Setting-wise, the urban fantasy theme lends itself to a lot of cool powers: the power of one antagonist is to summon a lot of ghost cars, and another mage’s power involves making super-controlled fires, for example. It makes the setting is very memorable; people have magic, but they have these super-specific powers that are used in mundane ways.
Sadly, while the setting lends itself to some very good comedic value, this is about as far as I can praise the writing of the game.
The humor leans heavily on quippy, sarcastic dialogue—sometimes hilarious but often groan-worthy. While the game’s political themes are intriguing, their execution feels superficial, like a simplistic “fascism is bad” moral rather than a nuanced critique.
The problems with the writing don’t end there: this game starts as a simple spat with the local police and then escalates to avoiding a literal world war with supersoldiers. There is, of course, nothing wrong with escalating conflict, but in this case, it’s as if the writers had 4 different stories that they wanted to cram into one act each because the heroes of the story literally just stumble into their next story arc at the start of every episode.
To be clear, am I not criticizing the story for “being political”, I am calling the politics of the game shallow.
With that said, it’s not all bad: like I mentioned earlier, there are some amusing moments, a couple of the characters are memorable enough, and the finale feels very tense. It’s a mixed bag of a plot, more on the “bad” side than “mixed”, but it’s still something that gives purpose to every encounter.
Am I taking the story too seriously? Maybe, but when the plot name-drops fascism and world wars, it invites a serious reading.
Still, I don’t think this drags down the game significantly: it doesn’t have any super long cutscenes or anything, and every encounter gives you context as to what’s happening, making the fights feel more meaningful. Gameplay-wise, this is a very strong entry if you like tactical games: you will find yourself in control of anything from one to five units in the entire game, and it does a pretty good job of mixing it up: even after you recruit all units, there are still maps where you only play with 2, or play with 4, etc.
Each character has distinctive abilities, and maps are small. This makes the game almost feel puzzle-like instead of tactical, but I wouldn’t say that’s any detriment: each character’s abilities complements each other very well, giving you a variety of ways to “solve” the puzzle that is each map.
Key to this game is that you can push enemies into walls and do damage that way, so characters often have a push (called “knockback”) and damage (called, uh, “damage”) in their kits that synergize in some way about movement. This provides plenty of strategic options for tackling each enemy.” and it’s very satisfying to, for example, have one character not do any damage to a target, but use the target’s new positioning to do another move with another character. It all blends together very well, making enemy unit manipulation feel specially important when compared to other games.
Characters are also slightly customizable, letting you enhance the abilities that you enjoy more. The game also has extra content in the form of “anxiety dreams”, where you play as multiple copies of each unit, but I was not involved enough with the characters to play it.
There’s also excellent pacing as far as difficulty is concerned: enemies will start simply trying to shoot you back, and they will evolve to have resistance to knockback/damage, have personal shielding, or have other sorts of abilities that will effectively develop how every character plays into them.
Despite my issues with the narrative,
Tactical Breach Wizards
delivers a solid tactical experience worth your time, what with its lengthy content, strong gameplay, good presentation and excellent variety.
Let me know your thoughts below! Did the humor land for you, or were you also left rolling your eyes? What did you think of the tactical gameplay?
