Summary
- Breach! You and your ally move into a room filled with armed officers, helpless hostages, and… a traffic warden who can summon ghostly apparitions of New York cabs? Okay, ignore that last part. Get to work, agent. You move through the room with surgical precision, ducking behind cover and finding the best firing lines.
Just as you raise your weapon, an unseen foe shoots you in the head. Game over. Except, you rewind time and try again, taking that opponent out first this time around. Wait a minute… Traffic warlocks? The ability to rewind time? This isn’tXCOM!
Tactical Breach Wizards is not, in fact, XCOM. While it is mechanically similar to the grid-based tactical shooter, its presentation is far wackier, its dialogue far wittier, and its proclivity for defenestration unparalleled across the industry.
Defenestration is the act of throwing someone out of a window.
Rewinding time is the name of the game in Tactical Breach Wizards (I’m going to call it TBW from now on, like all the cool kids). This is your magic power. It allows you to try different things, take different approaches, and test different options before committing. Where XCOM proffers the roll of a die to see if your precious soldier lives or dies, TBW is more forgiving. After all, you only have two wizards to work with, at least in the demo.
This forgiving nature turns each combat scenario into a puzzle to solve. Additional bonus challenges add to this cryptic nature as you attempt to work out how to tick each box before exiting the room. Sometimes you don’t have the abilities required to complete them all at present. Other times a simple sealing ward on a door will give you the MP boost to let off one more magical bolt for a scenario-winning defenestration. I told you there was a lot of window-smashing.
The shooting mechanics are, obviously, different magic spells you let loose on opponents. This gives your pawns a whole host of possibilities even in the hour-long demo. From blasts that target enemies who step into their line of fire like an overwatch mechanic, to magic bullets that ping from brain to brain taking out multiple foes in a single action, there’s great fun to be had.
Each attack is a magical chess piece to manoeuvre, another clue in solving the puzzle. I can only imagine how much fun it will be to tinker with new party members and find synergies between all manner of mystical abilities in the full game.
The missions are held together by an intriguing, laugh out loud funny story. There’s a magical terrorist on the loose, and your colleague has some ancient connection to them. Obviously some kind of magician in their own right, your job is to track them down and defeat them before they can enact their infernal plan. It’s just a shame that tracking them down involves breaking into police headquarters to access classified documents.
With a watertight script and myriad mechanical options, what more could you ask from a game? Did I mention the sheer amount of defenestration in TBW? Oh, I did. Gotcha. It’s just that shunting multiple cops through windows is really fun. You’ll get it when you play it.
Tactical Breach Wizards is one of the best demos I’ve played in a long time. AndI’ve played plenty. It perfectly showcases the game’s mission statement, backs it up with an engaging tutorial and instantly-fun mechanics, and forces you into a chuckle during the intermission. If you’ve got an hour to spare, there are far worse ways to spend it.
