Before we continue, a moment of thanks for Tactical Breach Wizards, one of the best video game titles of all time. This is a video game about wizards, who like to breach things. Tactically. Short. To the point. Succinct. Violent. It sums up the game quite well.
Tactical Breach Wizards looks a bit like an XCOM clone, with its isometric (but fully 3D, pannable, zoomable, tiltable etc) view, grid of squares, the ability to take cover, set up intricate special moves, unleash standard shots, use once-per-mission special skills and combos etc. We've been here before, many times, but rarely with as much panache.
It helps that this is one of the best-written examples of the genre, with a script that mixes dry humour with wry observations on the absurdity of what's going on without quite crossing the line into Marvel "did that just happen?" quip-humour (it gets tight a few times, but the game mostly avoids it). Instead, it feels a bit more Douglas Adams, which isn't a bad place to be. The game deploys a cast of five playable characters who are all various shades of messed-up, and the game develops their personalities and backgrounds through their in-mission abilities and solo training missions which delve into their psyches at the same time they are delving their fists, bullets and spells into enemy skulls. It's a very time-efficient process of deepening the characters, getting the player more acquainted with their abilities and just blowing stuff up. And throwing people through windows. A lot.
The worldbuilding is also exceptional, being basically a modern world with magic, but the story is a good exploration of how that would work, and why anybody would choose to direct traffic as a job when they can bend reality to their will. I'd like to see more of this world.
The early game does suffer a little from you having access to only a tiny number of abilities, so the early missions tend to have very optimal ways of playing them and anything else will either cause you to fail or take a lot of damage in the process of winning. This is something I dislike about tactical combat games - the subgroup that pretends to be tactical combat but actually are just puzzle games with a single way of completing them - but Tactical Breach Wizards only spends a brief amount of time in this space. As more characters join the team and more abilities unlock, your options for completing each mission increase almost exponentially (and certainly chaotically), with huge amounts of fun to be had on working out how to combine Banks' portals with Rion's werewolf bites and Dall's rugby-style tackles to maximum mayhem.
The minimalist graphical style is extremely characterful and works well, whilst also meaning the game will work on a potato (seriously, this thing could have come out before the turn of last century and still played as well). The lack of spoken dialogue may be a barrier for some, given there's a lot of it, but it's at least frugally effective, and allowed the writers to tweak dialogue right up to release. The game also has good pacing, taking 15 hours or less to put away the main campaign storyline, but mastering the various optional challenge levels, optional side-missions and the bonus objectives within the main missions will take significantly longer.
Tactical Breach Wizards (****½) does what it says on the tin. Play wizards blasting people through windows, with much better writing and worldbuilding than you'd expect. The game is available now on PC.
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