Wizard of Legend (2018)

• Playtime: 29 minutes

• Played: 2026

• Context: I like some 2D action games.

Intro

In Wizard of Legend you pick 4 skills and a relic and fight enemies in a randomly generated dungeon. The abilities are divided in 3 types; Basic (e.g. sword slash), dash, standard (spells), with the 4th slot enhancing a standard skill. Relics give extra loot, or reduce cooldowns, or do lots of other things. You gain dark coins (or w/e) in dungeons which are used to buy more skills and relics. The dungeons follow a standard pattern; battle, battle, boss.

Review

Combat takes place in small areas and is very quick. Some enemies roam around normally and aren't that hard to defeat. Others appear when you get trapped in a room. They will spawn right on top of you and you have very limited room to manouver.

There is no passive healing, no permanent boosts, no easy mode. It seems you have to find the right combination of skills to stand a chance. Multiple people said they couldn't even beat the game until they found/copied the right combo. I only tried twice and didn't even beat the first map. The trick seems to be to just deal a ton of damage quickly without much in the way of strategy. I'd rather just play a normal ARPG.

honestly not quite sure how to review this one... i enjoyed my time with it (for quite a few hours, up until i finished the last boss... three times i believe), but i don't think it's a game i'm going to be remembering a couple months from now.

the combat alternates between being on the fun side of "okay" and "kind of cheaply unfun actually" depending on your spell setups/preferences. when you're having a good time you're having a good time, but also the computer just kind of cheats and there's the usual stuff with "enemies grazing your hitbox damages you and not them", in a game where screen legibility is an issue. also has the usual stuff with proc-gen levels where i think some of the generation rules could've used a tiny bit more tweaking and cleaning up.

i guess i'd boil it down to: lots of interesting and fun mechanics, but surrounding a combat system that needs a good clean-up.

the art is serviceable if not much more, but it's at least not pretending to be more. the audio is pretty okay if a bit forgettable, which is honestly not too bad. the co-op mode is a fun mess that i had a great time with, but the game is really obviously not balanced with it in mind. also, this game suffers from the part where it's obviously crowdfunded, which means there's a ton of... out-of-place and not-that-fun memes in it from people making their own items. (that said, some of those are actually funny and neat, but they're a minority)

overall i'd say if it looks like something you'd like, you'll probably like it, and if it doesn't, you probably won't.

Picked this up on Switch. Here's the pitch: Hyper Light Drifter meets Transistor, as a roguelike.

So far, so neat. The thing I'm most into is that it has two currencies: one which can be spent within a run on items that you only have in that run, and another that can be spent on abilities you gain permanently. So you still get the roguelike "Wow, anything can happen in a run" feeling, but the game also gives you a way to get spells you really enjoy and keep them, which feels different than most roguelikes I've played where you start clean every time.