One of the biggest strategy hits of Steam Next Fest was born because its developer loves XCOM an awful lot – but might also hate it a little bit.
The Wizards of the Tactical Breach is an upcoming strategy game that brings a magical, detective twist to games like Into the Breach. Launching next month, it recently appeared at the latest Steam Next Fest, where it made a splash. It ranked 18th on Valve’s chart of most-played demos at the fest, and was one of the third-biggest strategy games available, behind Metal Slug Tactics and The Alters, the new game from Frostpunk 11-bit studio.
Tactical Breach Wizards’ compact maps and emphasis on crowd control are certainly typical of Into the Breach’s kaiju battles, but the game was born from a very different strategy game. In an interview with GamesRadar+, director Tom Francis explained that the idea behind his game “started with XCOM.” Confessing that he’s played Firaxis’ genre behemoth for “hundreds of hours,” Francis also admits that “I love it, but I have so many problems with it.”
“It really gets you interested, you get so invested in it, and it’s so captivating,” he explains. “And then a lot of times your characters die because you didn’t realize that if you moved them there, they wouldn’t be able to have that turret anymore. And you couldn’t have known that until you did it, and now it’s too late to go back, and now your best character is dead forever.”
I gave up on XCOM 2 for this very reason, and Francis is far from the only person mourning a veteran character who died cheaply in the game’s unforgiving, permadeath campaigns. Tactical Breach Wizards may have established itself as a different kind of game, thanks in part to its narrative twist, but after all those dead soldiers, it’s perhaps no surprise that someone would object to the meat grinder that XCOM can sometimes feel like.
Think you can do better than me? Check out our list of best strategy games.