Suspicious Developments have pulled off a magic trick combining two genres which shouldn't work together, but just do.
There’s nothing quite like the rush of a well-thought out plan coming together in a tactical game. Ah, how smart I feel when I lay down the perfect overwatch ambush in X-Com 2. The visceral pleasure of knocking enemy bugs left and right while playing Into The Breach, forcing them to waste their precious turns on their own forces.
Shame I’m pretty bad at regularly accomplishing these galaxy-brain feats of ingenious tactical planning. When I play tactics games, I’m often battling my own restless enthusiasm for the next round. Let’s see the outcome! What will happen next? Can I cast the magic missile spell already? Let’s do this thing! Oh no - I haven’t thought 3 moves ahead and now I’m mashing the quick-load hotkey.
My eureka moments tend to be flukes, a random chance of the stars aligning fate to offer me a glimpse of the true skill expression that some of the best youtubers and let’s players regularly demonstrate in the genre.
Thank god then for Tactical Breach Wizards, the new game from mastermind british game developer Tom Francis (gunpoint, Heat Signature). A game that satiates both the impatient part of my brain with its focus on story and character development with the moment-to-moment tightness of some of the best tactical combat the genre has seen to date.
Tactical Breach Wizards is a hand-made, bespoke tactical game. Thrown out the window (or shall we say defenestrated) are the staples of the genre - randomised levels & enemy encounters designed for endless replayability. They’re replaced with puzzle-box levels, designed to be mastered in a variety of ways, and with challenges to truly test your mettle and get your synapses firing. It’s the perfect sandbox to truly learn and master the genre.
TBW Takes place in a fantasy-world that takes inspiration from modern-europe but hey - we’re slinging spells here, no time for guns. We step into the boots of Jen Kellen, storm witch and failed private eye. Having washed out of her time in the navy-ops, she now spends her time looking after her pet cat and hoping to beat her streak of having l no clients as a freelancer. Very quickly Jen finds herself in a strange shoot-out at the local police station, a rag-tag group of mercenary mages have started blowing up the joint and the cops have responded by shooting everyone else. Not only that but her old ex-navy special ops squad member Zan has appeared smack-bang in the centre of it all.
While Jen’s abilities are focused around storm magic (chain lightning to throw people around, a storm-charged thwack of her baton to push enemies around) Zan brings with him the power of ‘farsight’.
Zan has the uncanny ability to see into the future, sadly it’s only 1-second into the immediate future, which sounds oddly useless until you remember that Zan’s operating in split-second combat encounters where 1 second means all the difference in the world.
Zan’s time-powers are baked into the game’s core combat systems through the ‘foresight/foresee’ mechanic. Each turn of combat in TBW is broken up into multiple stages. The first round is the player turn - where you can use all your movement and action abilities of your squad. All your squaddies can take their actions at the same time and you can easily swap between them in this round to work out the best order of attack.
The second round is the ‘foresee’ round, where zan predicts what will happen one second into the future. Enemies will spring to life, take shots at your squad and any abilities that you have set up that react to enemy movement (such as Zan’s predictive shot which goes off when an enemy crosses line of sight of his broomstick-rifle).
The final round (which also moves you into the next turn) is the enemy round. This is where reinforcements will arrive, enemies may throw grenades and set up the next round for you to respond to.
The genius here is that at any point in a turn, you’re able to rewind time and try out other attacks & unit positioning without any penalty. You can even flick over to the foresee round at any point to get a feel of whether your tactics will pay off. The only thing you can’t do is rewind back to a previous turn. Once you’ve committed to the choices made in an individual turn and moved on, you’re locked in and will need to adapt to the consequences from that point forward.
It’s both an incredibly forgiving and powerful system, allowing you to keep practising a single turn until you’ve nailed a wild combination of abilities and tactics in an extremely satisfying manner or to move on and see if you can turn things around in the next one. Since each level is hand-made, there are many optimal and sub-optimal solutions to play around and get-lost in.
Enemies have health, which can be whittled away with attacks, but the best way to deal with a threat is to defenestrate them - to shove them right out a window or door and out of the map entirely. Defenestrations are immediate K.Os, and each character has a suite of knockout and support tools designed to help push and shift enemies around the various levels.
Levels in TBW are made up of strung-together single-room encounters, with a quick break for a chat, banter and check-in with the squad before the next room is breached. Once a set of missions is complete, the squad head back to their home base ( a local pub, or maybe it’s Zan’s mum’s house?) for a debrief, an emotional check-in and to use the game’s string & corkboard system to plot out the next plan of attack.
It’s here, in the ‘unwind’ phase, where the game really comes to life. TBW’s core cast are flawed and loveable in a fashion that’s not often seen in the tactical genre but more often reserved for visual novels or big budget RPGS. You’ll learn more about how the crew discovered their powers, the grave fate that they’re fighting to change (it’s literally world war 5 that’s at stake) and start unpacking some of the more interesting geo-political worldbuilding happening in the background of the game’s plot.
It all coalesces in dream-sequence challenges, where characters find themselves dreaming-through anxiety scenarios that they must ‘fight out’ through tactical combat challenges that are separate to the main story missions.
These optional challenges often pit a character with clones of themselves in what the game coins ‘anxiety dreams’, where squaddies will literally battle their own internal demons. It turns the tactical-combat on its head too, as you’re forced to try and make a character's unique toolkit synergise with itself rather than the rest of their squad.
It’s a neat trick. A perfect moment of ludonarrative consistency in a very tight game filled with many ingenious moments.
