turn-based strategy

tactical-breach-wizards-weaves-engaging-tactics-with-lively-dialogue

Tactical Breach Wizards weaves engaging tactics with lively dialogue

gaming, Gunpoint, heat signature, strategy games, tactical, tactical breach wizards, tom francis, turn-based strategy / /

In case of boredom break glass —

An arcane combo of witty dialogue, turn-based tactics, and magical friendship.

–

The player has a lot of agency in this game to choose exactly how snappy their responses will be.

Enlarge / The player has a lot of agency in this game to choose exactly how snappy their responses will be.

Suspicious Developments

Tom Francis and his Suspicious Developments team spent 6.5 years crafting the perfect finale to his defenestration trilogy, and it shows. If you liked blasting people out of windows in Gunpoint or Heat Signature—or snappy writing, endearing characters, wizards, turn-based tactical gameplay, and efficiency challenges—you are going to love Tactical Breach Wizards.

The game’s name is as efficient as its design, telling you a lot about its tone and distinct offerings. You play as a small team of magic wielders, each of which you can control, one at a time, in a world where magic use, mana, and all the rest have been militarized and corporatized. There are stasis hexes put on illegally parked cars and even a Traffic Warlock, who, after getting on his bad side, will try to mow you down with an entire ghost highway full of spectral drivers.

Tactical Breach Wizards launch trailer.

Luckily, bad guys like him can only hit you if you don’t plan accordingly. Owing to the powers of your teammate Zan, you can foresee everything that will happen within a round of combat (he’s a one-second clairvoyant). Move team member Jen to this square on the grid, have her chain-zap three guys, seal the door next to her, then see what that leaves Zan to do. Don’t like the outcome? Rewind repeatedly until you’ve gotten the most out of your team’s actions or maybe achieved one of the game’s optional achievements. You get “Confidence” for pulling off stunts like “knock three baddies out a window with one action,” but they’re entirely optional because Confidence only unlocks cool outfits, not powers or gameplay. The actual perks you unlock give you delicious choices to make, deciding which way to take each character’s powers to complement or offset one another.

  • Everyone in the red will get hit, but where do you move? What position provides both cover and the right blast angle?

    Suspicious Developments

  • Another example of a tricky scenario for your team, and your mind.

    Suspicious Developments

  • Everything in this game feeds into its feeling of escapist fun, even the “Mission Complete” screens.

    Suspicious Developments

  • You’ll have to do a smidge of thumbtacks-and-string plotting, mostly so that you understand the plot. But there are rewards for reading.

    Suspicious Developments

  • Here come the mid-game heavies.

    Suspicious Developments

  • You can get extra-clever and earn “Confidence,” but, blissfully, it’s just a quirky costume reward, and just surviving a level is okay, too.

    Suspicious Developments

Compelling wizard banter

I’ve cleared the first three acts, and I’m almost certainly going to get through the rest of what the developers think is a roughly 16-hour game (on Normal difficulty) in sessions on the couch or in transit. The only thing that breaks up its session-able nature is the dialogue between scenes, levels, and acts, but I mean that in a good way. My achievement-craving brain wants to skip through the banter, and that’s possible, but the buddy-cop banter is just too good to pass up. While your wizards are self-conscious enough to recognize how ridiculous the events around them are, there’s just enough vulnerability and actual development to keep the plot from folding under its own irony.

The game looks good and sounds good, too, and it runs well on pretty much any modern system with 1GB of graphics power (that’s most of them). It’s listed as “Playable” on Steam Deck, and that’s accurate. The Steam Deck’s trackpads help a lot here, though you can use the sticks on any controller if you’re willing to nudge them around a lot inside a UI that was very much meant for a cursor.

Like Zan, you should be able to look just a bit into Tactical Breach Wizards ($20 at launch on Steam) and foresee just how much you’re going to enjoy it. Experiences help forge friendships, and there are few bonding experiences quite like chucking one more crooked wizard cop out the window than you thought was possible.

Listing image by Suspicious Developments

Tactical Breach Wizards weaves engaging tactics with lively dialogue Read More »

songs-of-conquest-is-the-heroes-of-might-&-magic-rebirth-we-all-deserve

Songs of Conquest is the Heroes of Might & Magic rebirth we all deserve

gaming, heroes of might and magic, heroes of might and magic III, songs of conquest, strategy games, turn based strategy game, turn-based, turn-based strategy / /

Just one more turn, with dozens of things in it —

Every choice in this game has a cost. Choosing to play it seems like a good bet.

–

Hexagonal battlefield covered in fire and magma.

Enlarge / Battles get a wee bit involved as you go on in Songs of Conquest.

Coffee Stain Publishing

There are games for which I have great admiration, pleasant memories, and an entirely dreadful set of skills and outcomes. Heroes of Might & Magic III (or HoMM 3) has long been one of those games.

I have played it on just about every PC I’ve owned, ever since it chipped away at my college GPA. I love being tasked with managing not only heroes, armies, resources, villages, and battlefield positioning but also time itself. If you run around the map clicking to discover every single power-up and resource pile, using up turn after turn, you will almost certainly let your enemy grow strong enough to conquer you. But I do this, without fail. I get halfway into a campaign and the (horse cart) wheels fall off, so I set the game aside until the click-to-move-the-horsey impulse comes back.

With the release of Songs of Conquest in 1.0 form on PC today (Steam, GOG, Epic), I feel freed from this loop of recurrent humbling. This title from Lavapotion and Coffee Stain Publishing very much hits the same pleasure points of discovery and choice as HoMM 3. But Songs of Conquest has much easier onboarding, modern resolutions, interfaces that aren’t too taxing (to the point of being Verified on Steam Deck), and granular difficulty customization. More importantly for most, it has its own stories and ideas. If you love fiddling with stuff turn by turn, it’s hard to imagine you won’t find something in Songs of Conquest to hook you.

Songs of Conquest launch trailer.

Songs of Conquest has you move your horse-riding Casters (the Heroes of its inspiration) and their armies around a world map, using each limited movement point to liberate a new resource, pick up some treasure, get a temporary power-up, or engage in battle. When it’s battle time, you switch to a hexagonal grid, where your troops trade blows and you choose spells so your Caster can help. Win the battle (either manually or with an automatic “quick” decision), unlock a new area, harvest new resources, recruit more troops, and repeat until the map is clear or some other condition is met. You’ll get multiple Casters, new kinds of troops, and tons of new spells and artifacts as you progress, and you’ll follow a very swords-and-dragons story.

  • Moving click by click through a dark world, choosing paths, stopping by fountains for temporary boosts—the overworld is heavy with Heroes of Might & Magic III memories.

    Coffee Stain Publishing

  • But not everything is the same. Building your central hub is more visually appealing, and likely more complex as you go on.

    Coffee Stain Publishing

  • Your caster can do a lot to affect battle outcomes. You’ll have complete control over which spells they can wield, branching off into different schools of magic.

    Coffee Stain Publishing

  • A map editor lets you torture your friends and random downloaders with constant which-way-to-go decisions.

    Coffee Stain Publishing

  • The game’s campaigns have short cinematics and evocative stills.

    Coffee Stain Publishing

The art is a mixture of intentionally granular (and pleasant) pixel art, throwback scroll-and-stone interface elements, and cutscenes and dramatic stills with a deliberate hand-painted look to them. Even if each element looks nice, I’m glad the game mixes it up, and you get a break from each. The properly medieval music seems well done, although it’s at a disadvantage, as my brain is making 45 decisions per minute and tends to block out brass, strings, and choirs.

There are four campaigns in the game, each with its own lands, enemy casters and units, spells, and lots of other new things to uncover and throw into your mental strategy RAM. It’s a good variety, especially combined with the difficulty and other campaign options you can set. Coming to this game from HoMM 3 memories, I’ve found the variety of map items, town/castle building, and Caster types new and engaging. My biggest quibble with the game is that managing the spells and upgrades of the Casters is too rich a field for me, somehow just one rich system over the line. Deciding which type of magic a Caster should specialize in and remembering the huge variety of spells available to put into their quickbar overwhelmed me.

As I noted up top, however, I’m not actually good at these games, I just enjoy the spell they put on me. Songs of Conquest is a rich new chapter for Heroes of Might & Magic fans, but it’s also a good jumping-in point if you’ve never been tempted before by the series with the unwieldy title and harsh difficulty ramp. Unlike your Casters, you can roam about its thousand little things at whatever pace you like.

Listing image by Coffee Stain Publishing

Songs of Conquest is the Heroes of Might & Magic rebirth we all deserve Read More »