Tactical Breach Wizards

Tactical Breach Wizards is a charming, witty and mostly well-designed title that definitely deserves your attention. It’s an interesting mix between puzzle and turn-based strategy that manages to feel mostly balanced throughout the whole campaign, and not overly limit the player in their moves and strategies. It’s a great looker, with a very cheap price tag that won’t break the bank.

Tactical Breach Wizards is so easy to pick up and get hooked on, friendly to beginners and still stoutly strategic for those looking to really test their mettle, with plenty of side missions and even player-made content to really spice things up. Anything goes here, and the unending depth of the gameplay mechanics marries well to the bombastic, absurd campaign that is so genuine and loving with its inspiration that it’s hard not to grin from start to finish. Whether you’re a returning XCOM addict or someone searching for their gateway drug to turn-based strategy games, Tactical Breach Wizards has no shortage of charm and staying power and will keep you spellbound the entire time.

A lack of content isn't an issue here as it might have been with Suspicious Developments first breakout hit, Gunpoint. Tactical Breach Wizards is the largest and most ambitious game the studio has worked on yet, and the extra time it took to get here has certainly not been wasted. It presents familiar tropes of the tactical turn-based genre and removes a lot of the friction that acts as a barrier to entry, without sacrificing the fundamental thrill of formulating a perfect turn and executing it.

It’s a game in near-perfect balance, a lean and distinctly not mean ode to turn-based tactics that embraces the genre’s creative puzzling while repudiating its worst excesses. Tactical Breach Wizards lets you see the future, raise the dead, and burst through windows on a witch’s broom. Yet amid all that, its most powerful spell is empathy.

Tactical Breach Wizards doesn’t demand knowledge from lost magical tomes to conquer its character-focused missions, each of which is filled with lots of doodads to fiddle with and not a lot of space to do it in. Being easy doesn’t mean it isn’t fun though – in fact, the very opposite is true here, thanks to the creative kits on every unit and how dynamic the combinations between them can be.

Tactical Breach Wizards is one of the cleverest and most enjoyable tactics games I've played in a long old time. A handful of useful features remove some of the genre's most frustrating pain points, and the forgiving structure lets you experiment with all manner of off-the-wall solutions, even if there really is just one ideal path forward. It's a blueprint for how tactics games should be designed, and I can't wait to dive back into it again.