Tactical Breach WizardsTom Francis' next game (At gunpoint, Heat Signature), has everything you could want from a game with such a name. There are 1) wizards, 2) tons of tactical exploits, 3) a big plot to solve, and 4) lots of windows to throw people out of. What might not be obvious at first glance is how deeply funny the game is (beyond the inherent humor of just being thrown out of windows) and how bitingly satirical it is.
An early conversation with a police officer paints the picture quite vividly. Jen Kellan, who plays the Storm Witch Tactical Breach Wizards' The de facto protagonist has just returned from a job gone bad. As a private investigator, he responsibly goes to the police to present his report and findings before being dismissed for involving himself in missing persons cases and having his skills dismissed as “witchcraft.” The game is insanely sharp, allowing you to call out your bullshit on them, indicating that if the police had done their job, perhaps they wouldn't have to involve him. Shortly after, a mission brutally ineffective police forceand once again they threw people out the window.
Tactical Breach Wizards he's overly talkative. He has an unfiltered voice that I deeply envy, and that's reflected in his presentation and beautiful level design. Some of my favorite moments in the game aren't even in the combat, but instead in the dialogue-heavy cutscenes that play between missions or right before you break down a door to start a level. You meet Zan, a veteran black ops warlock with ties to the game's villain, and the “base” he brings you back to is actually his mother's apartment. When you arrive, the two of them tell you Zan's “origin story,” and his mother tells you that his father has the “soul of a dog poop.”
Everyone is one character inside Tactical Breach Wizards, which makes me appreciate how much he squeezes out of these cutscenes. A traffic wizard with a strange hearing ability named Steve Clark is the smartest of them all, and thankfully returns as a funny rival for Jen. Bori, a pyromancer known for producing barely warm flames, is another oddity, and even a necromedic named Banks joins your team. His whole gimmick is that he can heal people just by resurrecting them, and he can only resurrect someone who's dead in an hour, so he carries a gun around to speed things up. Yep, he can resurrect you with a headshot.
Naturally, this quirk carries over into the game’s story and approach to level design. Combat is played out in a turn-based system on an isometric grid, where you deploy your units first and execute your actions before the enemy leaves. If you leave one of your allies in a dangerous position, you can predict what the enemy will do before ending your turn and sticking to it, and a rewind button lets you carefully calculate each step of your turn before allowing your enemies to advance. More often than not, you’ll be weakening enemies by throwing them into parts of the environment or throwing them out of a window or holes rather than dealing direct damage. However, Tactical Breach Wizards As simple as it may seem, it does a great job of speeding things up.
One of the last levels I tackled took place in Jen's own anxiety dream, and it was quite unusual and challenging, both thematically and mechanically. In one level, Jen questions her inability to separate her identity from her work, which diminishes her sense of self and worth. In another, two versions of her struggle in the stifling bureaucratic offices full of police officers and traffic warlocks that fill her otherwise dull daily life. That is, until Zan comes to her for help in preventing World War II. Five and he began to feel that he could be more than just a cog in a broken machine.
This anxiety dream, in addition to introducing me to her struggles, also forced me to learn all of Jen's tricks. For example, the great thing about Jen is that she's both quite mobile and has the ability to push units, so instead of confronting enemies head-on, I tried to position her near windows. That way, she could use either her main weapon (which pushes one unit at a time) or her Chain Bolt (which pushes back even further and also attacks multiple enemies) to blast people out of windows. or Using her broomstick, she flies out a nearby window and exits out another.
Banks plays a great supporting role, with the ability to transfer damage from one character to another, opening terrifying portals for enemies to be sucked into, or even softening them up by casting a sedative, increasing the effectiveness of her knockback damage. Zan is much more aggressive, able to set fire to any enemy that passes through any axis he aims at, but my favorite move of his is the one that eventually lets him set multiple projections of himself on fire, fire at nearby enemies, or even interact with targets. It’s a cliche to admit, but after a certain point, you just feel downright magical. Tactical Breach Wizards so you rarely feel like it's in your favor.
An enemy tower will still definitely limit you in 1-2 hits, and other traffic mages will send ghost cars and buses across three lanes straight at you. Neutralizers will occasionally fill up enemy ranks, and since they focus on the closest unit to them and take away their spells, you should carefully consider drawing enemy aggression when entering a room and tactically positioning your allies accordingly. For example, you don't want Zan cornered in that opening turn, as his clones and unique offensive skills make him ideal for quickly taking out that Neutralizer. This creates an opportunity for Jen to burst out of the room and push people into walls, portals, or out of windows. Whatever you think the point of this game is, it's pushing as many people out the window as possible.
If you don't believe me, try hitting all the “confidence” goals in each level. These sub-goals encourage you to optimize your playstyle, sometimes by requiring you to beat a level in a certain number of turns, knock a certain number of enemies out of windows in a single move, or extending a turn long enough for you and all your allies to use a set of skills; these skills require actions or mana, or sometimes both. Each character has their own confidence goal, and these cosmetics grant points for unlocking them, but simply passing missions rewards you with XP, which can be distributed to swap out and level up individual skills in a system that's fairly familiar to anyone who's played the game. popular tactical game Towards the Cleft.
While I’ve completed two acts of the game, there are two more that are even longer, and there are a number of dream missions, including challenging gauntlets and survival missions. You know, in case you thought there wouldn’t be enough meat on the bones. Not to mention the incredible cleverness of its ridiculous cast and premise, its slick sense of style, and its mystery—with a board and lots of interactive red strings—that I really wanted to solve. Tactical Breach Wizards Definitely one of the best games I've played this year.