We continue to rummage through the debris caused by the horrendous pile-up of summer video game announcements. Among the wreckage, a release date for Tactical Breach Wizards, the funny strategy game in which you play a ragtag crew of uniformed magic-zappers clearing enemies in confined spaces. It’s not XCOM, but it is XCOM-ing soon. That’s about as good a joke as I can muster on a Monday morning. Don’t worry, there are funnier ones in the trailer below.
As the tray-tray reveals, the upcoming release date is August 22nd, and it was announced as part of yesterday’s PC Gaming Show, the festival of frolics put together by cheery RPS fan zine PC Gamer. Unfortunately, they used the wrong version of the game’s trailer and mistakenly announced the release date as two days earlier than it really is. Never mind, we know the real date now.
Mistakes happen. In fact, Tactical Breach Wizards is made by Suspicious Developments, aka Tom Francis, the creator of Heat Signature and Gunpoint. “Mistakes happen” could be the generalised design philosophy of Tom’s games. Or “systemic silliness” if you want to get all fancy schmancy. Wizards looks to be following that trend, with funny dialogue and colourful characters, at least judging by what Nic has seen in the game’s Next Fest demo.
“You know you’re in for a cracking time when, alongside scores for speed and efficiency, the results screen bookending each room tallies up your total, and I quote, defenestrations,” he wrote. “These compact room-levels are effectively just window delivery systems.”
The next question is: if you throw an enemy back through the broken window, is that a “refenestration”? I cannot be the first to have thought of this gag. I probably heard it somewhere years ago. Probably a Tom Francis game.
Disclosure: Tom Francis is a former PC Gamer journalist who has also written for RPS in the past.