Funny, smart and so satisfying: I may be in love with Tactical Breach Wizards
REVIEW: It wasn't love at first play, but its humour and tight mechanics really kindled my affections.
This is a repost of the review from the end of last week’s edition. Each week I write one main story and finish the newsletter with a game review that I’ve played. If you are new here, and like what you’re reading, well, the button below is for you.
Maybe it was that time where I thrust four troops off a train. Or the other where I cleverly knocked out several enemy reinforcements as they entered the arena. Or maybe, when a made-up joke objective displayed at the end of one of the missions that literally made me laugh out loud.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly when I fell in love with Tactical Breach Wizards. It's a game that lives up to its name, with plenty tactical depth, but surprisingly so much heart and humour. Given the subject matter — war, cults, and world domination — it's laugh-out-loud funny, playing on just about every magic fantasy trope in the book. I'm going to say this upfront: Tom Francis, who both wrote and designed the game, has a knack for words.
As an XCOM veteran and strategy game aficionado, Wizards was bound to hook me eventually. But like any good relationship, it was a slow build, as I learned the mechanics and built my confidence.
Tactical Breach Wizards is an isometric strategy game. It plays a bit like sophisticated chess, where each room you breach is a unique gridded board and each character can move, attack, and trigger abilities. Goals can vary, but you are more often than not tasked with neutralising — knock out, not kill — each enemy and sealing doors to prevent reinforcements.
You play as a coven of wizards essentially trying to unravel a global conspiracy. You initially start out with two characters, Zan and Jen, with the band growing over time as the story progresses to a total of five unique wizards.
Each plays very differently. Jen is focused on movement and knock back — her best turns are where you knock multiple enemies out of the arena or into each other. Zan, on the other hand, is more tactical. He can deflect attacks and pre-emptively shoot enemies if they move into his line of sight. Other wizards can animate the dead, cut through armour or even change places with enemies. For such a simple set of abilities, there's a level of nuance here that lends itself to there being a dozen different solutions each and every turn.
This is daunting at first. Enemies feel overpowered and you feel outnumbered right up until you get a full grasp of your toolkit with each character. The first few areas of the game are arguably the hardest, as your options are limited as is your understanding of the mechanics. Tutorials hold your hand for the first hour or so, but beyond that, you are on your own.
While I managed fine with the default difficulty settings, there are a robust number of changes you can make to the game to adjust it for your play style, such as increasing your character’s health, upping your actions per turn, or limiting enemy reinforcements. This flexibility makes Wizards a great recommendation for those new to the strategy genre. For veterans, though, if you can't get enough, there are also bonus levels designed to challenge and hone your skills. While there are plenty of them, I found them harder to play in rapid succession as they aren’t looped in with the overall story that pushes the game along.
A foundational mechanic for Wizards is the ability to see how the enemy will react to your moves before they have their turn. It's essentially patching up a major weakness of the XCOM games, where an unpredictable enemy manoeuvre — or surprise reinforcements — would encourage you to reload an earlier save of the game. Perhaps the closest similarity is the rewind feature in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Wizards' fix for this classic frustration with turn-based strategy games doesn't detract from it at all, and if anything should be a new benchmark for strategy games with high-stakes turns.
All of this tense strategy gameplay is wrapped together with an engrossing story and world, where magic is commonplace, but only practiced by a few gifted individuals. The character lines between breach encounters and levels are snappy and laden with jokes. There's also a fair amount of characterisation here, with each wizard in your party given space within the story.
Wizards plays very well on the Steam Deck — I had no issue with controller-based controls either. Fair warning though: it's power-hungry. I can only suspect it's a bit like XCOM where on the surface it looks like a simple game for a device to run, but actually operating it sucks a lot of life out of any and all gaming machines.
On that, as of the print date of this review, Wizards is a PC-exclusive. That means you'll need a Steam Deck or decent gaming PC to play it. That's a real shame; I know plenty of players who enjoy XCOM — have only played it on console — and would very much get satisfaction out of this game. Ports aren't easy, and the hit-or-miss nature of strategy games makes them a risky endeavour.
But if Civilisation VI can outperform on Switch, I suspect the makers of Wizards may be quietly sitting on a hit.
Reviewed on: Steam Deck OLED
Worth trying if you like: Fire Emblem: Three Houses, XCOM 2, Marvel's Midnight Suns
Available on: Steam, Windows