Tactical Breach Wizards is a turn-based, grid-based shooter in which you control a small squad of specialised characters, managing a “1 move 1 action” turn economy.

It is not an X-com clone.

It’s easy to make the mistake that all those similarities I just rifled off somehow make TBW an “X-com Like” but an easy mistake is still a mistake.

“X-com is a game fundamentally designed around failure and adversity, TBW is a game fundamentally designed around defenestration”

For every similarity that TBW has to X-Com, it completely flips the actual gameplay on any level. The game does take place on a grid, but we aren’t calling it a “Chess-like”. The game does feature “military” theming, but we don’t call it a Battlefield clone.

Frame Imperfect are here to clarify exactly what Tactical Breach Wizards is, and why it not being X-com is the best thing for it.

Into The (Tactical) Breach (Wizards)

If we’re going to start our explanation with a comparison, I’m going to choose one that makes sense. Tactical Breach Wizards is an Into The Breach-like, which uses transparent enemy information, guaranteed hits and small, pre-designed encounters to create “puzzle combat”.

Nothing in my opening paragraph was wrong, and nothing in the paragraph above was wrong, and yet they paint a picture of entirely different games. And that’s why bringing in comparison to a description is so powerful. Powerful, but misused.

TBW is focused on individuals with backstories and personalities given by the writers (very good ones, having played the demo) rather than given by the player. For X-com that would suck, because the entire game is built with systems for player involvement and building up your own personal style of military as you progress.

In TBW, it doesn’t suck, in fact that deeper characterisation makes missions with only 2 characters a blast as they riff off eachother, showcase quirks and relationships, and fight for seniority. This characterisation comes across in the gameplay too, which focuses on allowing these bespoke characters to kick ass.

A Tactical Game About Feeling Good

X-com is a game fundamentally designed around failure and adversity, TBW is a game fundamentally designed around defenestration (The act of throwing someone out of a window). While both are turn-based and grid-based, there’s no way they could reconcile such opposing themes and narratives with X-com style gameplay.

So TBW steps back and adds some much-needed certainty to the formula. A character in TBW will always know if an attack will damage, knockback, enrage or, of course, defenestrate an enemy. This transparency of information harkens to something like Slay the Spire, where percentages and chances are given up for certainty and tactics.

In TBW each combat encounter is a puzzle and your actions, abilities and movement are tools you have to move the pieces. There’s no 95 chance to hit here, you know the outcome of an action before taking it. This reframes the entire game to be about awesome wizards using awesome abilities to do stuff that looks awesome.

Measuring Difficulty in Time

That’s not to say there’s no challenge, since base health is actually very low, but that the challenge is more cerebral and less RNG. The game seems to value the rule-of-cool, and you can get away with tanking one hit for the sake of a great combo.

I completed the demo on Normal difficulty and never took a single hit, not from enemies or AoE or the final boss of the demo. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the game is too easy, as such…

Think about the game as a puzzle game again for a moment. The main metrics we can judge puzzles are 1) being able to finish them and 2) the time it took. In TBW, not taking any damage is essentially just completion, and it’s the real time as well as number of turns which really measures the difficulty. If I cleared a room not taking damage, but it took 6 turns and 20 minutes of IRL time, then the game was still “hard”, in that I had to juggle so much and spend so much time planning and puzzling-it-out. In that way, taking no damage isn’t the measure of if a mission was “too easy”.

Where to Play Tactical Breach Wizards

During Steam Next Fest TBW is available as a demo, and there’s a cheeky bonus for players who finish the demo and submit a response form.

The full release is August 22nd as per the Steam page: