Suspicious Developments
Tom Francis and his Suspicious Developments team spent 6.5 years crafting the perfect finale to his defenestration trilogy, and it shows. If you liked blasting people out of windows in Gunpoint or Heat Signature—or snappy writing, endearing characters, wizards, turn-based tactical gameplay, and efficiency challenges—you are going to love Tactical Breach Wizards.
The game’s name is as efficient as its design, telling you a lot about its tone and distinct offerings. You play as a small team of magic wielders, each of which you can control, one at a time, in a world where magic use, mana, and all the rest have been militarized and corporatized. There are stasis hexes put on illegally parked cars and even a Traffic Warlock, who, after getting on his bad side, will try to mow you down with an entire ghost highway full of spectral drivers.
Tactical Breach Wizards launch trailer.
Luckily, bad guys like him can only hit you if you don’t plan accordingly. Owing to the powers of your teammate Zan, you can foresee everything that will happen within a round of combat (he’s a one-second clairvoyant). Move team member Jen to this square on the grid, have her chain-zap three guys, seal the door next to her, then see what that leaves Zan to do. Don’t like the outcome? Rewind repeatedly until you’ve gotten the most out of your team’s actions or maybe achieved one of the game’s optional achievements. You get “Confidence” for pulling off stunts like “knock three baddies out a window with one action,” but they’re entirely optional because Confidence only unlocks cool outfits, not powers or gameplay. The actual perks you unlock give you delicious choices to make, deciding which way to take each character’s powers to complement or offset one another.
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Everyone in the red will get hit, but where do you move? What position provides both cover and the right blast angle?
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Another example of a tricky scenario for your team, and your mind.
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Everything in this game feeds into its feeling of escapist fun, even the “Mission Complete” screens.
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You’ll have to do a smidge of thumbtacks-and-string plotting, mostly so that you understand the plot. But there are rewards for reading.
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Here come the mid-game heavies.
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You can get extra-clever and earn “Confidence,” but, blissfully, it’s just a quirky costume reward, and just surviving a level is okay, too.
Suspicious Developments
Compelling wizard banter
I’ve cleared the first three acts, and I’m almost certainly going to get through the rest of what the developers think is a roughly 16-hour game (on Normal difficulty) in sessions on the couch or in transit. The only thing that breaks up its session-able nature is the dialogue between scenes, levels, and acts, but I mean that in a good way. My achievement-craving brain wants to skip through the banter, and that’s possible, but the buddy-cop banter is just too good to pass up. While your wizards are self-conscious enough to recognize how ridiculous the events around them are, there’s just enough vulnerability and actual development to keep the plot from folding under its own irony.
The game looks good and sounds good, too, and it runs well on pretty much any modern system with 1GB of graphics power (that’s most of them). It’s listed as “Playable” on Steam Deck, and that’s accurate. The Steam Deck’s trackpads help a lot here, though you can use the sticks on any controller if you’re willing to nudge them around a lot inside a UI that was very much meant for a cursor.
Like Zan, you should be able to look just a bit into Tactical Breach Wizards ($20 at launch on Steam) and foresee just how much you’re going to enjoy it. Experiences help forge friendships, and there are few bonding experiences quite like chucking one more crooked wizard cop out the window than you thought was possible.
Listing image by Suspicious Developments