Game Information
Game Title: Tactical Breach Wizards
Platforms:
- PC (Aug 22, 2024)
Trailer:
Developer: Suspicious Developments
Review Aggregator:
OpenCritic - 87 average - 100% recommended - 12 reviews
Critic Reviews
Eurogamer - Matt Wales - 5 / 5
Suspicious Developments’ latest builds a witty, wonderfully generous adventure around a smart, rewarding, and endlessly imaginative turn-based tactics core.
Guide a mismatched team including a Navy Seer and a necro-medic through this smart, funny, and resolutely empathetic espionage thriller
Try Hard Guides - Erik Hodges - 10 / 10
Tactical Breach Wizards uses great writing, genuinely well-executed humor, and subversive takes on genre gameplay and pairs it with a super unique setting to make what is one of my favorite new titles.
Shacknews - Josh Broadwell - 9 / 10
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.
PC Gamer - Harvey Randall - 88 / 100
Tactical Breach Wizards review: Excellent turn-based tactical combat wrapped up in a joyful, tightly-written story.
Paste Magazine - Elijah Gonzalez - 8.7 / 10
While I wish it was a tad more punishing, I still had a blast orchestrating complicated turns that involved teleporting allies across the map, utilizing diverse powers, and, of course, knocking hapless cronies out windows. But, perhaps its greatest accomplishment is how it escapes the inertia of countless other modern war games that feel like the product of the military-industrial complex. I guess all it took to avoid these tropes was not being in the back pocket of the US armed forces, a bit of empathy, and a guy who looks like Gandalf with a magic-infused M16. Who knew?.
God is a Geek - Mick Fraser - 8.5 / 10
My ultimate takeaway from Tactical Breach Wizards is that I simply didn’t expect it be so refreshing.
GameSpot - Alessandro Barbosa - 8 / 10
Tactical Breach Wizards deftly blends deep tactical gameplay that rewards experimentation with sharply-written dialogue and characters bursting with personality
IGN - Jarrett Green - 8 / 10
Tactical Breach Wizards is full of magical charm, with inventive skills and characters that make it hard not to get entranced in its spell.
Slant Magazine - Steven Scaife - 4 / 5
Luckily, though, you’ll spend much of Tactical Breach Wizards in the heat of battle, and that’s where it functions best. Few of the scenarios are difficult, and intentionally so; the game is less about raw challenge than having you experiment in pursuit of efficiency and style. Many of the optional, more difficult objectives encourage you to squeeze 15 actions into a single turn or complete a map without letting the enemy ever fire a shot, which means constantly refreshing your actions and movements several times per turn. Even when the characters are patiently waiting their turn, there’s always a remarkable sense of speed to Tactical Breach Wizards.
TechRaptor - Austin Suther - 8 / 10
Tactical Breach Wizards delivers a fresh and addicting tactical experience. Using an array of awesome spells, there are limitless ways to complete the mission, making for a very inventive experience.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun - Nic Reuben - Unscored
Layered challenges, unhinged abilities, and generous tools to support wild experimentation combine with brilliant, laugh-out-loud funny writing. A tactics game that’s as welcoming to newcomers as it is rewarding for genre aficionados. What an absolute treat.
Yeah it’s giving me Into the Breach vibes, and that was a game that also felt very “puzzle tactics”.
EDIT: actually I have a question for the group. How do y’all feel about “puzzle” tactics games like this versus more open-ended tactics games like XCOM? Personally I can sometimes get turned off from games that feel like all the levels are predesigned with a “best” solution that i have to work out. XCOM can feel freeing because when you come up with an incredibly efficient turn that synergizes everyone’s abilities, it can feel like you “got one over” on the game.
Considering you can go back and play the levels again with a completely different team and more powerful perks (you unlock some new characters as the game progress), while the devs certainly have some solutions in mind (and may hint at those through the confidence “challenges”), there are definitely plenty of different solutions to each level. So while sure, there might be an optimal solution, there’s also a solution where you defenestrate every enemy.
Which is kinda fun, because it’s also fun to go back and replay some earlier missions that had a “survive 5 rounds” with a challenge of “survive 7 rounds” and deciding “I bet I can survive 9 rounds” (though I was a bit disappointed the enemies stopped coming after 9 rounds. But I think there is a bonus side-mission with infinite rounds, so that one might be fun to go try.)
Or a mission that had the confidence perk of “defeat all enemies in 2 rounds” and being able to do it in 1, when the first time took 3.
So while this one is maybe more “puzzle-tactics”, the puzzles are very open-ended.
thank you for sharing your experience with the game!