Rogue Wizards (PC) Review

Rogue Wizards is, fittingly, a roguelike RPG in which players take the role as a rogue wizard. After being summoned through a scroll to aid in a rebellion against an evil wizard, the main character is tasked with delving into dangerous dungeons to find allies, spells, and gain experience to prevent an evil wizard from seizing control from all the magical power in the world. It's a fairly stock premise, but it works for a conveying the setting.

Overall, it feels very much like one of the Mystery Dungeon titles, with grid-based movement and combat across a series of procedurally generated dungeons. Right from the outset, the choppiness of the animations is pretty noticeable, especially with the way the map processes new areas. Moving from area to area, either using the WASD controls, or even simply clicking with the mouse, feels more than slightly unresponsive. Clicking on enemies to attack is also pretty touchy, and can result in unintended moves.

It's not just the movement that feels uneven: the difficulty curve feels a little stacked right from the start. After the brief tutorial and a basic overview of the initially available shops back at the home base, the first dungeon immediately opens up. Unlike a lot of roguelikes that gate certain enemy types for later in the game, or limit what's seen in earlier dungeons, some early enemies that can spawn in the first couple of dungeons are entirely capable of wiping the player on the first run around.

It's really hit or miss for the first few areas. Grabbing a good early high rarity weapon can help clear the dungeon, and careful investing in the massive spell tree can really ensure safety through the first couple of dungeons. Despite that, there's still an alarming amount of grinding required, especially with how long the dungeons can go.

There's a wide variety of weapons and spells available, each with their own attributes. Weapons all come with unique attributes, largely related to their range or how many enemies they can affect at once. Bows obviously allow ranged attacks, and the helpful chakrams can be used to damage multiple foes nearby. Staves and swords seem to be entirely interchangeable, and that seems slightly odd, given the massive magic system.

Each of the six schools of magic has its own resource available to it, being the fuel needed to cast spells from that particular branch; fire spells use fire essences, ice spells use ice essences, etc. The resources needed for each branch don't drop from foes until the first spell from that series is learned, and it's hard to stress just how clunky the system feels in practice. The resources mostly just drop from defeated foes, but they have to be manually picked up like items after. It makes the spell system feel like a hassle, and for the most part, not worth using outside of the occasional buff or status spell.

Each dungeon has enemies and traps distributed throughout it, along with a heaping helping of treasure. There's experience bonuses for clearing all the enemies and for collecting all the treasure, so it's usually more than worth the time it takes to do so if progression is the main goal. What sets this back is the absolutely frustrating amount of backtracking required. Some of the maps are absolutely massive, even early on. It can literally take upwards of twenty minutes to completely clear a level in the first dungeon, just based around the speed at which the characters (and combat itself) progress at.

There's a real lack of a difficulty curve that's often seen in roguelikes. Early levels aren't any smaller in scale, and it's hard to be able to count on the amount of time it'll take to clear a level. There's no quick-move feature that allows movement across large areas of land, so movement ends up taking up a huge portion of time. Some levels do have tiles that offer as waypoints, allowing quick teleportation to and from them via the in-game map. Unfortunately, they don't do enough to reduce the tediousness of traversing the dungeons.

Really, a lot of the issues boil down to the lack of overall balance in Rogue Wizards, and the lack of elegance in the magic systems. While the core systems of exploration are good, and the dungeons have a variety that's really appealing to them, it can often feel really oppressive, trying to manage spell casts along with the frequently mindless allied AI. There's just not a great sense of progression, and it really throws off the experience.