We’re only just over half way through the year, but Tactical Breach Wizards is already a contender for best video game title of 2024. At once exquisitely silly and decidedly practical, the name neatly reflects the intent behind this magically infused turn-based tactics game. Putting you in command of a sorcerous Swat team that uses guns and spells to fight through puzzle-like scenarios, Tactical Breach Wizards combines a decade-old joke with a desire to solve a problem particular to genre which inspired it.
“It came out of playing XCOM a lot, especially XCOM 2,” says Tom Francis, director at Suspicious Developments and creator of acclaimed titles Gunpoint and Heat Signature. “Loving that game in so many ways, but also being very frustrated by the many ways you can misunderstand things and not realise a rule, and just lose irreplaceable troops or suffer catastrophic losses.”
Francis wanted to make a tactics game that focused less on punishing the player and more on encouraging experimentation. His solution was to let players rewind their turns to try new approaches to each situation. But the game still lacked a theme to accompany the concept. Then Francis remembered a conversation from his time working as a journalist at PC Gamer. “We were just joking about how it would be really funny if there was a deadly serious military Call of Duty-style game, [where] all the people had tactical gear, but they’re also just wearing robes and hats.”
And so, Tactical Breach Wizards was born, combining Francis’s rewind idea with an eclectic cast of magical police-adjacent characters that range from freelance storm witches to riot priests, each with unique abilities that can be experimented with in different ways. One example is the navy seer. Blessed with the ability to see one second into the future, the seer can also throw a time-boost grenade that provides teammates with bonus actions. Another is the necro 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,” says Francis. “So as 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 XCOM’s freeform structure and base-building, instead telling a linear story that explores each character’s personality and motivations. “I wanted to know who these characters are,” says Francis. “Each one feels like they must have a story to them.” He likens the storytelling approach to the loyalty missions in Mass Effect 2: “To me, it was the most interesting thing in the game.”
Moreover, while Tactical Breach Wizards story is, according to Francis, “meant to be riffing [on] Tom Clancy stuff, Call of Duty stuff” it also strives to invert the authoritarian morality of such fiction. “I don’t like those stories. There’s not a lot of critique and self-examination,” he says. In Tactical Breach Wizards, the characters you command are not enforcers of the state, but rogues and pariahs fighting a consortium of elite organisations, including a religious military dictatorship and a private military corp. “I didn’t want it to be just soldiers in a country’s army,” he explains. “There needs to be an urgent reason for you to commit any acts of violence.”
Tactical Breach Wizards has been in development for six years – a huge investment for a small team. Fortunately, you don’t need to be navy seer to recognise the signs are positive. The game ranks highly on Steam’s “wishlist” chart, and Francis says the recently released demo received a positive response from players. “There’s a certain kind of person who you say ‘Tactical Breach Wizards’ to them, and it makes them laugh,” he says. “We knew that person existed, but we didn’t know how many of them there are. It’s very nice [that] a lot of people get it.”
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