The Wizards: Dark Times (2020)

When I first picked up an Oculus, I admittedly did so on a whim without specific plans other than to play RE4 in VR. But one of the things I did expect to enjoy otherwise was pretty much games just like this where you get immersed in a first person viewpoint of a fantasy world you can interact with in fun ways as a literal "hands-on" experience. While I think this game hits on a lot I was looking for in that, it mostly was just okay as a holistic experience for a number of reasons.

First the good, you can tell the main thing they focused on in designing The Wizards: Dark Times is the spell-casting. You get around 10 or so spells, some of which can be manipulated into stronger or modified versions that are all activated based on different hand gestures and sequences, for instance tilting your palm up and holding the trigger to form a fireball or thrusting both hands in front of you with both triggers to activate a powerful continuous spray of lightning. This mechanic is an awesome idea and does generally feel really good in practice. While some spells are definitely quite overpowered, I really appreciated the variety and the gradual unlocking of spells that gives you time to try out and learn them. My only major complaint with the spells is that by the end you have several and the controllers got repeatedly confused about what I was trying to do with the more complex motions. I kept activating lightning when trying to get my frost bow out near the end, despite the latter being one of the earliest spells you learn and one I had not trouble with early on. This was really frustrating near the end when fighting multiple enemies with elemental weaknesses where I couldn't for the life of me get the spell I wanted. This was mainly only with the frost bow though, if this problem were more universal, it might've ruined the game but the spells mostly work okay for the bulk of the game. While this is really the only element I considered exceptional in the game, it was good enough to carry me past a lot of the bad parts so that should speak for itself.

As for the more neutral aspects: There's not much to say about the story. It's very basic and fairly generic and it's not explored in a lot of depth. That said, I didn't consider it "bad" and it feels like it simply isn't really the focus of the game as it's not belabored and intrusive to the point it gets in the way. The art design I think is generally good with lots of variety of fantasy environments and creatures that mostly have a distinct look to them. The areas are sometimes even quite massive and looming. However, given it's a VR game with a lot going on, the graphics are still a bit eh and make a lot of things look mildly ugly, if not atrocious. I felt ambivalent on the length as well. I took me a little under 4 hours and while that feels quite short, the fast pace of everything made it feel like I played a lot longer than that. For better or for worse, I wasn't particularly craving more when I finished it. The combat itself is also hit or miss. The spells are pretty fun and cool but their versatility means a lot of fights can be cheesed from afar. While I generally don't want to cheese combat, getting up close and brawling is awkward. Most enemies use range so you're still mostly being on the defensive with a shield and watching for projectiles while poking, all of which you can usually do fine at a distance. The mini-boss elemental enemies put you more to the test but they feel more random as they mostly just spam a ton of projectiles at you and backing up can be awkward when you run into a 2-inch tall rock and get stuck. There are definitely some intense fights and combat is pretty much all the magic is for so it benefits from what's cool about the spell-casting, but there is a lot of jank that gets in the way from making the combat really awesome.

The bad is unfortunately coming from numerous sources. The sound design is quite awful. The spells mostly sound decent but everything else is somewhat grating and repetitive. Enemies make slight variations on like 1 or 2 sounds OVER AND OVER. The music is fairly generic fantasy music but it also starts and stops during combat when you are a little too far from the surviving enemy to register and such. There's very little enemy variety and what's there feels like it was mostly made intentionally very easy to make up for a bit of the broken gameplay. The enemies have no brains whatsoever and mostly just stand there pelting you with ranged attacks till you kill them. Just the way the game works, making combat more intense might've been hard without it getting overwhelming, but it's noticeable how silly the enemies look just standing there or walking very slowly at you. The environment is generally not very interactable which is a thing VR gamers tend to enjoy playing with. Other than levers and a few little collectibles that don't do anything, you can't pick up basically anything. It just feels like it needs something more to encourage exploration and doing anything other than just following the main path to killing the main mobs. This, along with most of what's in this paragraph just leaves the game feeling unfinished and like a very solid foundation for a better game that just never got added to.

As an aside, I also struggled with motion sickness a lot with this game. This is mainly on me as I'm still a baby VR gamer and the vast majority of my experience is with Beat Saber which hasn't seemed to do much for developing my VR legs. But even taking some Bonine, I rarely played more than 30-40 mins at a time and usually I had to keep it to about 15 minutes. This <4 hour game took me about 3 months to actually get through because I rarely felt like dealing with that.

The Wizards: Dark Times is overall a very mixed bag. It excels greatly in some ways but most everything else tends to be lackluster at best. I'm glad I played it as the cool aspects felt really unique, but it's not a game I see myself wanting to replay and I'd be hesitant to recommend it to most people. I have heard that other than the graphics, the first game is supposedly better in pretty much every way. That does sound like typical gamer hyperbole so we'll see, but I would be up to try it considering the things I did like about this one. That said, I'm not in any particular rush to get to that given how this one went.