Tactical Breach Wizards and the last laugh

[Editor’s Note: Brandon Walsh is back with another guest Backlog. Please enjoy his take on Tactical Breach Wizards, a game I recommended to him without actually playing it myself, which is always a risk. We’re close enough friends to weather a bad game recommendation, but thankfully this one didn’t go that way. —Grayson]

Writing humor is hard. It’s hard to get the beats right, tough for the delivery to land when it mostly takes place in the reader’s ear, and especially hard to get much more than a chuckle. It’s rare, for me at least, to find a piece of written text that is so effective that I’m actively laughing aloud. Rarer still is the work that I reread whole swaths of text to experience the jokes again for the first time. 

Tactical Breach Wizards is just such an experience. A comic masterpiece that also happens to be a great video game. If you have any intention of playing a tightly crafted tactics game with a serious funny bone that delivers a satisfying 20 hours of playtime then please: I beg of you. Stop reading now. Go play the game because you won’t want any of the jokes spoiled for you. If you’re still here, I’m sorry that you are broken inside, but the game will still be worth visiting. Your lack of surprise may actually work to the game’s advantage, as Tactical Breach Wizards is built around the joys of knowing what is coming next.

Released in 2024, Tactical Breach Wizards is very much in dialogue with classics of the genre like Final Fantasy Tactics or XCOM. But, where those games can feel overblown with layer upon layer of mechanics and endless variability, TBW opts instead for a much more streamlined approach.

In TBW you control a team of SWAT commandos aiming to clear out room after room of enemies using a narrow range of character-specific abilities, each of which has their own equally narrow set of upgrade paths. While other games might ask you to upgrade gear and select from a portfolio of skills to work with, TBW only gives players a half dozen points to distribute among a handful of abilities. Your tank can specialize in ramming enemies to fling them across the room or in crowd control. Your teleporting witch might get even more mobile, or she might deal more damage.

Tactics games often suffer from paper-thin stories, because they privilege the actual mechanics over the narrative. In XCOM, the story never gets deeper than humans vs aliens. But that’s fine because you’re there for the tactics. In the worst cases, I often find myself rapidly paging through dialogue just so that I can get back to the joy of playing out the systems, like being forced to reread a bad short story in between your Sudoku puzzles. The magic of TBW is how clearly it plays into this trope—your characters virtually only ever talk to each other before or between missions—while making you hang on every word by going somewhere completely unexpected. 

A first example: your SWAT commandos? They’re also wizards. 

This comedic, pseudo-fantasy flavoring deconstructs the Tom Clancy–style, hardboiled espionage right from the jump. Your medic can perform miracles, but only because she is a necromancer who has to kill you to resurrect you. That tough-as-nails lone wolf assassin who maybe can’t be trusted? He’s actually a dog whose magical power is to turn into a human, offering a delicious answer to every child who ever wondered what their pet would be like if they became a person.

The game even plays fast and loose with mission objectives, playfully inserting new goals after the fact that you have clearly already failed in and commenting, “Well, maybe you’ll get that one next time. We threw that one in for fun.” TBW takes a breach rune to the fourth wall.

The result is that the game oozes personality. It’s as much fun flinging enemies out of windows (defenestration is both an ongoing objective and the loose subject of the trilogy this game is a part of) as it is just listening to the characters talk. The game is aware of these strengths as well as the tension in the genre. In the final mission, your team is up against an overpowered enemy who can use every single other mechanic that your other characters can, including predicting your actions before you take them. The best plan the team can come up with is simply to talk to her a lot while they fight because doing so will piss her off and she will probably make a mistake. And, unlike the player, she isn’t afforded infinite retries—only nearly infinite. (Okay, like 10. Maybe 11.)

It’s nothing new for tactics games to give you the option to undo your mistakes, though often there’s some sort of penalty for it, a punishment for mistakes and lessons learned. You can only do undo actions so many times before restarting the whole level, or you lose some accumulated resources along the way. Not so in TBW. One of the main wizards has the power to see into the future, a clever narrative layering that encourages you to see the outcomes of turns and rewind back to the past constantly. The game uses this mechanic to produce a range of challenges that will keep you coming back for one last breach, searching out the perfect turn that will throw everyone out a window with no damage. But mechanical challenges like these aren’t what helped the game to get its hooks in me. If I come back to the game, it won’t be for the thrill of magical explosions. I predict I’ll be trying to zip through missions just so I can spend more time with these goofballs.

After the credits roll, the player is treated to a non-diegetic photograph of a scene that does not take place in the game. The game has ended, the characters given their epilogue, and the developers deliver the button to their project: a note from the game's developers that reads “John Roberts made this and Tom couldn't find a way to make it canon but loved it too much not to use it so here it is.” The last image of the game is a fantasy postcard from a headcanon beach episode. And it works. Because beneath all the tactical puzzles the game stitches together its potentially disjointed silly vignettes with a lot of heart. Because TBW knows you'd put up with just about anything to see that gruff asshole in the speedo on the left get a little ice cream as a treat.