Games

Tactical Breach Wizards is an instant classic – a thrilling, hilarious spec-ops game that refuses jingoism and glorification of violence. By Katherine Cross.

Tactical Breach Wizards an instant classic

A scene from the video game Tactical Breach Wizards.

Credit: Suspicious Developments

The game begins unassumingly enough with a shot of two special forces operatives, weapons at the ready, on either side of a metal door, ready to blast it open. Except the sniper rifle looks like a magic staff and their clipped military code keeps referencing magic…

Suspicious Developments’ Tactical Breach Wizards casts its enchanting spell almost immediately in a tactical game that combines the excitement of a military-espionage thriller with the humour of finely written comedy in a gorgeously realised world. It’s high fantasy in the information age, Tolkien with a liberal dash of realpolitik, slathered over with snark like Semtex.

You begin as Zan Vesker, a Navy Seer whose powers – as you might imagine – involve seeing into the future. Only for a second, of course. Even magic has a sense of humour in this game, with most people’s powers limited in strange and amusing ways that are still strikingly useful. You’re reliving the moment that Vesker was dishonourably discharged from the DSR Navy and got his commanding officer, the chronomancer Liv Kennedy, killed in action. Seemingly.

Fast-forward a few years and suddenly you’re playing as Jen Keller, a quippy witch PI in a police station trying to get her car unhexed and being grilled by the chief inspector for “interfering” with a missing person investigation that she actually helped to solve. Unfortunately for all concerned, her quarry was shot dead by a woman who’s now in the lock-up and who Keller desperately needs to interview. Just when she’s getting nowhere fast, the police station comes under attack from a pyromancer who casts mildfire. It’s fire, but it hurts less. He’s rather sensitive about it.

Hot on the less-hot pyromancer’s tail is none other than Jen’s old friend from the navy, Zan Vesker. This kicks off a thrilling mystery, with twists and turns that are at once wickedly funny (tailing a lavishly funded private army while relying on public transport) and deadly serious (aiding a militant resistance against a fascist theocracy). Along the way, Jen and Zan find new and unexpected allies, all of whom are beautifully drawn characters – in both senses of the word – and who add to the repertoire of tactical combos you can pull off during the game’s extensive combat sections.

Oh, right, the tactics. It’s like playing chess if all the pieces had snarky one-liners. For lovers of tactics-based games, this is an especially rich tableau with combinable abilities that are frequently funny – throwing enemies out of windows is a critical mechanic. You push enemies, pull them, send them through portals, but you very rarely kill anyone – except, perhaps, to then resurrect them with the aid of your necromedic. That’s right: your healer has to kill you in order to bring you back to life with full health. And if you’re not a huge tactics nerd, then this game doesn’t hate you. A diegetic rewinding mechanic allows you to see if your moves work and undo them if they don’t. Combined with the game’s sliding difficulty and the ability to skip levels entirely if you want to continue the story, it’s a maximally accessible game.

The game establishes an eloquent language with its mechanics and then elevates it to poetry. Some mid-game twists and challenges manage to be narratively expressive while also representing incredibly creative uses of your wizards’ abilities.

The mid-movie “All is lost” plot beat is resolved with a trick so ingenious that I was really pleased with myself for figuring it out without one of the game’s hints. It’s a masterful, almost symphonic, crescendo of design. The game builds up to this point, slowly adding abilities and wizards to your crew and offering a variety of levels in which you learn to use them. And then it is you who is weaving that poetry with the game’s mechanics.

It’s rare for a game’s writing and mechanics to sing in such harmony, building on each other with elegance. Those clever mid-game twists that you execute with creative uses of the mechanics? They’re also funny as hell. I cannot overstate how wickedly hilarious this game is: I laughed in almost every dialogue cutscene.

Tactical Breach Wizards’ world-building is also more than just a raid on genre tropes. Its magical world is not so different from ours and its geopolitical drama – the essence of its thriller narrative – is driven by dynamics of power and resistance, colonialism and capital, that are quite familiar. In this way, it comes by its thrills and dark humour honestly without ever seeming heavy-handed or preachy. Its politics and power feel very real without extracting you from the core fantasy: that you and your weird friends can save the world.

Among the many neat tricks this game pulls off is its presentation of a spec-ops thriller that is sure to satisfy genre lovers without jingoism or glorification of violence. The depth of its sensitivity is a marvel to behold: thoughtful explorations of trauma that, once again, embrace dark humour without either trivialising the suffering or wallowing in it.

Which brings me to the heart and soul of this game: its characters. I adore them all and wish I could list all my nerdy thoughts about them. The villains are all hilarious too – you’ll come to curse Steve the Traffic Warlock, Jen’s archnemesis, and cheer his defenestration. Yet it’s the dynamics between all the characters on your team that really makes the narrative glorious.

Aside from whip-cracking banter, each hero character has an “anxiety dream”. Except for one remarkably brilliant exception, the character talks with and fights alongside a clone of themselves in a tactical mindscape where they’re confronting something about their past or present traumas and anxieties. If ever there was an expressive mechanic in a video game, this is its Weberian ideal.

Which is one way of describing the whole game: an immaculate exemplar of its genre. The narrative is excellent and worth the price of admission by itself. But the way it harmonises with tactical gameplay and truly inventive world-building elevates this game from good to an instant classic that needs to be taught to aspiring designers. It’s the resonance between these domains that makes Tactical Breach Wizards operatic in its seamless combination of arts.

I want a sequel – and yet I dare not risk the spoiling of perfection.

Tactical Breach Wizards is available for Windows on Steam.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 9, 2024 as "Funny spell".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.

RELATED READING