- Publisher: Suspicious Developments
- Release Date: Aug 22, 2024
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Oct 25, 2024Brilliantly written, witty, with an engrossing story and a fantastic world. Tactical Breach Wizards is an incredible turn-based game that hooks you effortlessly, combining the very best the genre has to offer.
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Aug 23, 2024Suspicious Developments' latest builds a witty, wonderfully generous adventure around a smart, rewarding, and endlessly imaginative turn-based tactics core.
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Aug 20, 2024It’s a game in near-perfect balance, a lean and distinctly not mean ode to turn-based tactics that embraces the genre’s creative puzzling while repudiating its worst excesses. Tactical Breach Wizards lets you see the future, raise the dead, and burst through windows on a witch’s broom. Yet amid all that, its most powerful spell is empathy.
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Aug 19, 2024Tactical Breach Wizards uses great writing, genuinely well-executed humor, and subversive takes on genre gameplay and pairs it with a super unique setting to make what is one of my favorite new titles.
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Sep 4, 2024Tactical Breach Wizards masterfully blends the use of magic abilities with the tactics of a modern SWAT team. The gameplay is brilliantly clever, easy to pick up yet with a lot of depth. As an added bonus, the story and characters are highly engrossing, with well-written humour and an interesting plot.
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Aug 19, 2024Tactical Breach Wizards is one of the cleverest and most enjoyable tactics games I've played in a long old time. A handful of useful features remove some of the genre's most frustrating pain points, and the forgiving structure lets you experiment with all manner of off-the-wall solutions, even if there really is just one ideal path forward. It's a blueprint for how tactics games should be designed, and I can't wait to dive back into it again.
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Aug 19, 2024Tactical Breach Wizards review: Excellent turn-based tactical combat wrapped up in a joyful, tightly-written story.
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Aug 26, 2024My ultimate takeaway from Tactical Breach Wizards is that I simply didn’t expect it be so refreshing.
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Jan 8, 2025An absurd concept but an inspired turn-based tactics game that, quite unexpectedly, has one of the best scripts of the last 12 months.
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Edge MagazineSep 5, 2024Whatever tactics game you've enjoyed most in recent years, you're likely to find some element of it refracted somewhere in here. [Issue#402, p.116]
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Aug 21, 2024Luckily, though, you’ll spend much of Tactical Breach Wizards in the heat of battle, and that’s where it functions best. Few of the scenarios are difficult, and intentionally so; the game is less about raw challenge than having you experiment in pursuit of efficiency and style. Many of the optional, more difficult objectives encourage you to squeeze 15 actions into a single turn or complete a map without letting the enemy ever fire a shot, which means constantly refreshing your actions and movements several times per turn. Even when the characters are patiently waiting their turn, there’s always a remarkable sense of speed to Tactical Breach Wizards.
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Aug 19, 2024Tactical Breach Wizards is a wonderfully refined turn-based tactics game with fantastic humor and clever combat design that offers challenges for casual and hardcore players – and a lot of defenestrations.
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Aug 19, 2024Tactical Breach Wizards doesn’t demand knowledge from lost magical tomes to conquer its character-focused missions, each of which is filled with lots of doodads to fiddle with and not a lot of space to do it in. Being easy doesn’t mean it isn’t fun though – in fact, the very opposite is true here, thanks to the creative kits on every unit and how dynamic the combinations between them can be. Wrap that up in a vibrant and weird world with some truly incredible writing and it’s hard not to get entranced in its spell.
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Aug 19, 2024A lack of content isn't an issue here as it might have been with Suspicious Developments first breakout hit, Gunpoint. Tactical Breach Wizards is the largest and most ambitious game the studio has worked on yet, and the extra time it took to get here has certainly not been wasted. It presents familiar tropes of the tactical turn-based genre and removes a lot of the friction that acts as a barrier to entry, without sacrificing the fundamental thrill of formulating a perfect turn and executing it. Coupled with an incredibly personable cast that is brought to life through witty and hilariously written dialogue, and you'll find it hard to resist the urge to breach into battle just one more time after each well-deserved victory.
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Aug 19, 2024It’s not free of issues. Necro-surgeon Dessa Banks has an ability that’s so universally useful I ended up anchoring my plays with it for a good stretch, and it wasn’t even the one where she can resurrect people by shooting them. The ending missions prioritise story setpieces over the final exam gauntlet I was hoping for, and I found myself drifting toward autopilot even a few missions before those. There’s probably one too many fat smears of frosting in the conspiratorial layercake plot to comfortably keep track of your first time through. But the fact I’m even excited about a second playthrough of a 15 hour game I played for work should hopefully convey something. This very moment, I keep diving back in to check details and grab screens, and end up replaying entire missions. There’s more! Survival maps. Optional puzzles. The same level editor the developer has, with the option to share your maps with others online. Hard mode. Is this all window dressing? Maybe. But man, what an absolute treat of a window. Do say "hi" on your way down.
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