My original plan for this week’s column was to end the year by breaking out the pile of shame: the games that I’d meant to cover in the column, but for whatever reason, did not. That turned out to be an unrealistically ambitious plan, both because I’ve been on the road for the holidays and because I spent all week playing Tactical Breach Wizards.
It’s likely that if you care at all about indie PC and/or turn-based strategy games, you’re already aware of TBW. It’s reportedly sold very well, has just over 7,500 reviews on Steam at time of writing, and is the latest project from Suspicious Developments, the studio that made Gunpoint and Heat Signature. This column is ostensibly about putting a spotlight on lesser-known games, but TBW is already at least a sleeper hit.
I want to write about it anyway, if only to highlight its elegance. That’s an odd word to use about TBW, which is a half-serious game about foul-mouthed wizards who solve all their problems by throwing people out of windows, but nothing else fits.
There’s a flow to TBW that immediately jumped out at me. From the start, it’s very careful to only give you as much information as you actually need. It sets up both its mechanics and worldbuilding at a careful pace, with natural conversations, great comedy writing, and bite-size introductory levels that introduce each new feature. It’s a master class on both in-game tutorials and narrative exposition.
TBW, as the name suggests, is basically turn-based Rainbow Six, but everyone in the squad is some kind of spellcaster. Its world is a sort of 20th-century western Europe with magic, set in several feuding nations on the brink of war.
You play as Jen Kellen, a storm witch and private investigator who was hired to find a missing person. She did, ten seconds after a doctor shot him through the head. Jen heads to the police station to find out why.
Subsequently, a strike team abducts the doctor, with Jen’s old acquaintance Zan on their heels. Zan wants to know why his old partner Liv, who vanished two years ago, has resurfaced as a commander for a shady PMC, and why they’re sending her to attack random police stations. With no real leads, no backup, and no money, Zan and Jen team up to find out what Liv and her new employer are doing.
Each of your characters in TBW is a different sort of wizard, and you gradually unlock a suite of different abilities as you progress. Jen is a storm witch, who does little direct damage but can knock enemies around with gusts of wind.
The combat really revolves around Zan, however, who has the ability to see one second into the future. Mechanically, you can use Zan’s foresight to rewind and fast-forward through each turn, to see the consequences of your actions and undo them as required.
You only have so many actions you can take in any turn, but Zan is essentially a mechanically-justified quicksave button. It’s easy to make a stupid mistake that gets a character killed, but you can always rewind to the start of your turn and try something else.
That’s one of multiple ways in which TBW feels like it was made for me specifically. I play a lot of turn-based strategy games, but bounce off many of them for one reason or another: big difficulty spikes, poorly-explained mechanics that suddenly become crucial, how a displayed 90% hit chance usually results in a miss, and so on.
As it turns out, I’m not the only one with that list of grievances. According to the developers, TBW is essentially an attempt to address issues that annoyed them about XCOM 2. They started with a laundry list of complaints about a game that they loved, then made something that systematically addressed them.
There are features of TBW’s gameplay and world that deal with problems that I didn’t know I had, like how you aren’t forced to bench half the squad at any given time, or how your team defaults to non-lethal tactics. It does help keep TBW’s overall tone intact when you know you aren’t actually dropping 10 to 16 bodies per map.
Naturally, I could point to a couple of things that annoy me. There are a couple of rough levels in the campaign and I’m not crazy about every character in the lineup. Dall in particular feels like she’s missing some crucial elements in her kit, especially as you close in on the endgame.
Despite that, Tactical Breach Wizards simply does most things right. It’s one of the most compulsively playable strategy games I’ve tried in years, and it navigates what could’ve been a worldbuilding nightmare with a casual confidence that I actually find a little inspiring. It’s an easy recommendation.
[Tactical Breach Wizards, published and developed by Suspicious Developments, is now available on PC for $19.99. This column was written with a copy of the game purchased on Steam.]
