After six years in development, Tactical Breach Wizards--the latest game from Gunpoint's Tom Francis and friends--is now out. You would be excused for missing it, because The Monkey Game has been sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but I'm here to remind you not to miss it, because it rules.
Tactical Breach Wizards is tactical brilliance distilled. Remember Into The Breach, and how it took games like Final Fantasy Tactics and stripped them back to the studs? This is like that, but for XCOM, putting you in control of a team of magicians who are simultaneously Call of Duty characters, in a world where the modern military and magic co-exist.
When I say this game strips the genre back to the studs, what I mean is that it throws away as much bloat as it can, preferring small rooms to sprawling stages and emphasising economy over all else; you're rewarded for completing missions in as few turns and with as few actions as possible. But you don't need to do this, because the game is also completely fine with you doing whatever you want to get the job done. There's a rewind button that lets you undo moves for free--one of your guys is a time-shifting seer, so why not--and the variety of weapons and spells at your disposal makes every stage less of a tactical slugfest and more of a puzzle you can solve in one of dozens of different ways.
Though many of those end up in the same place: blasting a guy out a window.
I could spend all day talking about the ways TBW absolutely nails this brief, about how good it is, how funny it is, how effortlessly it delivers on the absurdity of its setting. I might never shut up about how even the most mundane powers at your disposal, like its take on the tactics staple of overwatch, are now immensely satisfying magic tricks. It's all so perfect, and smart, and cool.
But there are lots of reviews saying that stuff already, so I instead just want to focus on one thing: breaching. It's one of the three words in the title, and it's the one thing the whole rest of the game is built around. Like I've said, TBW isn't a "big map" kind of tactical experience; instead it breaks down each engagement into small, bite-sized rooms that you tackle sequentially by quite literally smashing the door down each time you move through them.
Breaching is fun, no matter the scenario, the genre or the game you're doing it in. It's a constant highlight in Call of Duty games, for example, but as fun as that is, it's even better here. The combination of painting a magic rune on the door, blasting it, hearing a satisfying sound effect then getting some visual flair--a bit of flashbang then some zoom while the camera perspective shifts--makes it a blast every time. The opening seconds of the trailer below show what I'm talking about:
You will see this same animation plentyof times before you're done with this game, multiple times per stage, and it never gets old. It's both funny and deeply satisfying the very first time you encounter it, and it's no different the last.
Beyond the sensory satisfaction, it got me wondering why breaching is so cool. Maybe because, regardless of whether it's TBW or CoD, it's a fulcrum point, the moment the rubber hits the road, where plans become action, where calm meets chaos. It's important, and what comes after is generally a whirlwind of tactics quickly followed by satisfying execution.
I wanted to give it a particular shoutout here because I can't think of many other singular moments in video games like it! For me, every time a door blows inwards in TBW feels as special as a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater grind, a Burnout boost or a chainsaw kill in Doom. A perfect moment, no matter how frequently we're exposed to it.
We've opened doors in countless other games before, but after doing it so many times with explosive runes here it'll be tough going back to doing it the old-fashioned way.
