IWe’re barely halfway through the year, but Tactical Breach Wizards is already a contender for best video game title of 2024. The name, which is both exquisitely silly and decidedly practical, perfectly reflects the intention behind this magic-filled turn-based tactics game. Tactical Breach Wizards puts you in charge of a wizard-themed Swat team that uses guns and spells to fight through puzzle-like scenarios, and combines a decade-old joke with a desire to solve a particular problem in the genre that inspired it.
“This came from playing a lot of XCOM, especially XCOM 2,” says Tom Francis, director of Suspicious Developments and creator of the critically acclaimed titles Gunpoint and Heat Signature. “I love that game in a lot of ways, but I’m also frustrated by the many ways you can misinterpret things and not realize a rule, and simply lose irreplaceable troops or suffer catastrophic losses.”
Francis wanted to create a tactics game that focused less on punishing the player and more on encouraging experimentation. His solution was to allow players to rewind their turns to try new approaches to each situation. But the game still lacked a theme to go along with the concept. Then Francis recalled a conversation from his time as a journalist at PC Gamer. “We were joking about how fun it would be if there was a very serious Call of Duty-style military game,[where]all the people had tactical gear, but they also wore tunics and hats.”
And so Tactical Breach Wizards was born, combining Francis’s idea of rewinding with an eclectic cast of police-related magical characters, ranging from freelance storm witches to riot priests, each with unique abilities that can be experimented with in different ways. One example is the Marine Seer. Blessed with the ability to see one second into the future, the Seer can also throw a time-augmenting grenade that provides teammates with additional actions. Another is the Necromancer Medic, a necromancer who heals characters and replenishes their “mana” by killing them and then resurrecting them. “She rewinds your body. Your body goes back to the state it was in an hour ago,” Francis says. “So when she resurrects you, you get your mana back.”
According to Francis, these characters started out as puns, but gradually became the focal point of the game. Indeed, Tactical Breach Wizards doesn’t have the free-form structure and base-building of XCOM, instead telling a linear story that explores each character’s personality and motivations. “I wanted to know who these characters are,” says Francis. “I feel like each one should have a story behind them.” He compares the narrative approach to the loyalty missions in Mass Effect 2: “For me, that was the most interesting thing about the game.”
Moreover, while Tactical Breach Wizards’ story, according to Francis, “aims to parodies Tom Clancy and Call of Duty,” it also attempts to invert the authoritarian morality of that fiction. “I don’t like those stories. There’s not a lot of critique or self-examination,” he says. In Tactical Breach Wizards, the characters you control are not enforcers of the state, but criminals and outcasts fighting against a consortium of elite organizations, including a religious military dictatorship and a private military corporation. “I didn’t want them to just be soldiers in a country’s army,” he explains. “There has to be an urgent reason for you to commit acts of violence.”
Tactical Breach Wizards has been in development for six years, a massive investment for a small team. Fortunately, it doesn’t take a naval soothsayer to recognize that the signs are positive. The game is high on Steam’s “wish list,” and Francis says the recently released demo has received a positive response from players. “There’s a certain type of person that you say ‘Tactical Breach Wizards’ to and it makes them laugh,” he says. “We knew that person existed, but we didn’t know how many there are. It’s really nice that a lot of people get it.”
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