Wizards of the tactical gap is a tactics game for people who don't like tactics games. Magically, it's also a tactics game for people who love them like no other. It's permissive and demanding; playful and tense. Its overarching plot covers conspiracies, private military corporations, and brutal theocratic dictatorships. It also features a traffic-summoning warlock named Steve who wears a high-visibility robe. He's discovering that An Absolutely Ridiculous XCOM Twistevery turn…and at the same time knowing that it's absolutely okay if you don't. Bottom line: It's one of the most fun tactics games I've ever played, and the only tactics game with a pyromancer so bad that he relies on making his enemies pass out from heatstroke.
Like all critical operations, Tactical Breach Wizard’s story begins with a door bursting open. Bad guys have a hostage, and Navy Seer is here to rescue him. The druid mob’s bush lord is wearing a camouflage suit. That’s despite the fact that he, as a timer-crumpling Liv Kennedy points out to fortune teller Zan Vesker, is already a tree. He’s tough, too, so Zan’s rifle isn’t enough to take him down in a single turn. Liv is left completely exposed, so Zan will have to guess the outcome to see if she can dodge the shot. Likewise, you’ll be able to foresee the consequences of each action before you commit to it. And if you decide later that it was a terrible mistake, you can backtrack, one move at a time, to the start of the turn.
Zan saves the hostage, but things get complicated for Liv and we're whisked away from the location to meet up with storm witch and private investigator Jen Kellen, who gets told off for meddling in police business. It's not long before the office suddenly catches fire, a fact Jen tells the cop the way you'd tell someone their pasta is boiling. A fight with the inept pyromancer leads to a reunion of Jen and Zan, a shootout with the police, and eventually a conspiratorial rabbit hole that takes them to the other side of the planet.
I lack those rewind powers I mentioned, so I'll first have to acknowledge a mistake I made in calling TeeBeeDubs' missions “eminently solvable, room-by-room discrete puzzles” when… wrote about the demonstration. You should read it anyway, because I used all my best window gags there, but that’s not how things work. There are still optional challenges and side stories that hew closer to set puzzles with an ideal, if not the only, solution. But, once you’ve expanded your team and unlocked some skills, things become a lot more improvisational. Have Zan get some intel for a mana boost, toss some extra-action grenades to Jen, and you can figure out how she’s going to spend them once she’s already ridden her broom to the far window to seal a reinforcement door. A completed quest means the feeling of having hit upon a single perfect outcome among many. And even then, having climbed to that point through your own personal chain of gleeful spontaneous spellcasting nonsense.
Fundamentally, this playful permissiveness is still anchored by satisfyingly tricky objectives and the need to juggle multiple priority threats each turn. You’re an unraveler, really. Jen absolutely needs to blast that heavies through a window before taking out Zan, because Zan can’t stay in cover when that other baddie has magic-nullifying lightning on Rion, who needs to transform into a dog so he can bite that second heavies, turning him rabid so he’ll attack the shotgun-wielding one who’s a huge threat to… and so on. It’s never been so satisfying to pull so many proverbial micro-USB cables out of their jellyfish-hair prison.
All of this is supported by optional objectives. Finish within three turns. Defenestrate (verb: yeet from the window) four enemies. Cause eight takedowns. The explicit reward is a resource called trust that you can use to buy new outfits for your team. The flashier your wizards act during missions, the fancier their outfits will be. They’re presented as voluntary challenges, described as “intended for players who find basic missions too easy to complete.” But I’d argue that this is the game selling itself. What they really are are creative writing prompts, in the John Wickens sense of pencil use; inspirational little details I’d use to give me a hint of what was possible. Once you know a single-turn victory is theoretically feasible, your brain starts reverse-engineering crime scenes so cool they don’t even have names for them yet.
And yes, all this means that TeeBeeDubs is not a difficult game. Strategy game to progress, but even the ability to skip levels entirely isn’t important. Such a bulging bag of rule-breaking magic tricks means you’ll probably never be tempted. It’s basic magic: you’re already dangerous enough to stir up tempests, the game is about harnessing that with enough finesse to make a soufflé.
That's not to say there isn't the classic joy of stretching every action point to the max, just that there's always room to get weird for the sake of showing off. Like those outfits, it's all about self-expression. It employs the rule of cool to make you want to create the cleanest, most elaborate plays possible. In this way, it incentivizes you to use your entire toolkit without relying on punishing difficulty. Normally, for a game to make me want to dig that deep into my bag of tricks would take enormous pressure. A sacrifice In the gap Play. Be invaded by a seemingly insurmountable force in XCOM 2Here, nine out of ten corners I felt cornered in were corners I was happy to teleport to. More often than not, I felt free in a toy store.
For context, I’m not always tempted by intrinsic elements, especially if I’m on the review embargo clock. Here, I found myself replaying turns just because I figured my genies would rather not get hit even once, if they could help it. You can finish a mission with your team bruised and battered with no consequences for most maps, and you’ll still start the next one healed. Still, even when it contorts itself to offer absurd flexibility, the game never strains or completely breaks its spine. The challenge is heightened through new details like alarms, locked doors, enemies who are rarely just “this guy again but more murderous,” and those who can sometimes break the rules just as hard as you can. An evil priest who retaliates whenever you attack his allies, but won’t fight back. A medic who can revive the dead. A riot-shielded heavy with a gas mask that immunizes them against your special recoil juice. If the basic rules of the game are its language, your and your enemies' abilities are both poetic and pun-filled.
When we talk about games that feel “human,” it’s usually an attempt to capture something resonant, fearless, or somehow authentic in the stories they tell. Tactical Breach Wizards succeeds, by the way. The writing quickly evolves from “this is funny” to “no, but this is really funny.” In fact fun.” It then evolves again from “I’m really having fun hanging out with these weirdos” to “is someone throwing onions out the windows here?” Each team member even has optional anxiety dream missions where, say, Jen taps into her own subconscious to work out her insecurities. But I actually found TeeBeeDubs’ hidden depth in, of all things, a menu screen.
Each of the five mages you'll eventually add to your party of wildly competent losers has an incredibly distinct set of skills, and as they gain experience through questing, you'll unlock perks that augment their standard abilities. Some perks are more mundane, though even an extra point of damage from Zan's shot ends up being transformative. Overall, though, reader: this shit is wildI stared at the perk screen, transfixed with joy, trying to imagine all the ridiculous scenarios that, say, Zan’s spectral clone, who can now interact with panels and doors, could generate. You can give back perk points whenever you want, but this conundrum is my experience with the game at its finest. A preemptive fear of missed opportunities, sweetened by a grinning, somber sense of thrilling possibility. Like being alive. With better hats.
It's not without its problems. Necrophage surgeon Dessa Banks has one ability that's so universally useful that I ended up anchoring my playthroughs with her for a good stretch, and it wasn't even the one where she can resurrect people by shooting them. The final missions prioritize story cutscenes over the final exam challenge I was hoping for, and I found myself drifting into autopilot even a few missions before those. There are probably too many icing smears on the cake-layered conspiracy plot to comfortably keep track of your first time through. But the fact that I'm even excited for a second I hope the 15-hour game I played for work has taught you something. Right now, I'm still diving back into it to check details and capture screenshots, and I 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 wow, what a nice window. Say “hello” as you come down.
This review is based on a demo version of the game provided by the developer. Tom Francis of Suspicious Developments wrote for RPS.
