Wizard Defenders (DSi)

In Wizard Defenders, an army of colorfully clothed mages stand against wave after wave of monsters, but these wizards can’t cast spells on their own. To muster up their offensive magic, they must be standing with the other wizards dressed in the same attire, lining up either horizontally or vertically because this DSiware game is actually a match-3 color matching puzzler.

During a game of Wizard Defenders, nearly identical mages are differentiated by their dominant color, trickling in gradually during play to form up to eight rows of ready defenders. To try and rearrange them so they can begin to fling magic though, you’ll first need to turn your DSi sideways, enemies appearing on the left screen while your wizards are on the right. Using the stylus you’ll need to pick up and move the colorful spell casters around to make those vertical and horizontal matches, the girls starting to fire off attacks once they’re in a suitable group. While lining up three wizards activates a spell, making larger matches will make their attacks more powerful and if you can get a chain of matches done in quick succession a similar boost will be applied. There is more to the matching than just putting the women in the right colored robes near each other though. You’ll need to consider the range of the magic spell they’ll be casting, monsters also appearing in eight lanes so you want your matched wizards to actually fire in the right lanes to hit the incoming monsters. If girls are arranged vertically they’ll fire a wider spell to hit multiple targets, but a horizontal match will pierce through the row of foes for more damage. This sounds like an interesting enough way to make your matching more thoughtful, but it doesn’t quite gel with the game mechanics at play.

First and perhaps the most consistently damaging is how the wizards can be moved around. Once a match is made, the girls responsible for it start casting their spell, now locked in place and not allowing you to drag any other mages around them. A horizontal match can thus split the available characters in half until the spell is complete, the same possible with a vertical column as no girl can slip over to the other side while the other wizards work. This heavily limits the combo potential while also disincentivizing making matches that are bigger than three girls, the space they occupy while at work preventing you from doing much until they cast their spell and leave. There are other unfortunate limits on moving the girls too, like how you can’t drag a girl further than the limit of the line she’s in. If you want to drag one wizard from the back of a six lady line to the back of a seven lady line and there’s a row with only three wizards between them, the game will force the wizard you’re holding into spot four and you’ll have to shuffle her through the pack. The game resists attempts at diagonal movement and prevents any moving through open space so you’ll be shoving girls around all the time, possibly even making accidental lines that end up restricting your plans and firing attacks where they might not be useful.

Actually managing your defending wizards ends up a clunky affair, but at first it is manageable. Early enemies are slow and weak and then go for reasonable escalations like having more at once or upgrading the incoming creatures to be able to take an extra hit before going down. Despite your limitations, you can adequately repel them, at least so long as you use most of the time you’re not match to hold down the button meant to summon in more wizards more quickly. The game often does a poor job replenishing your ranks, especially given how a good sized spell or chain can leave you with hardly anyone to match with afterwards, so holding down the on-screen button to bring them in faster also takes away from time you could be trying to set up matches for the next wave of monsters. Being short on wizards when something tough does show up can be aggravating as well since the amount of back-up is mostly out of your hands, but if a monster does reach the end of their lane, their impact is at first manageable. Depending on the monster’s strength, the columns you have wizard women in will be shoved back to be replaced with crystalline barriers. These limit how many ladies can be on screen so they’re an effective punishment, but performing a match next to them breaks them so they’re not a death sentence. It can even be wise to bolster your ranks and let a slime slowly head over to make its crystal column just so when the real threats show up you then have a battalion beefy enough to repel something you don’t want making crystal walls.

That bit of strategy can ensure that Wizard Defenders doesn’t sink too soon, but then the game introduces enemies with specific resistances. Birds who will dodge anything but spells from vertical matches and golems who will only be hurt by horizontal lines strain the limitations of the matching mechanics far too much. Trying to make multiple horizontal rows to push back a horde of golems is a nightmare because of the matched wizards blocking others from moving past and the game taking its time providing you more wizards to match with means you might not really have the numbers for a proper counterattack. Vertical spells at least cover three rows minimum so you can space it so multiple birds go down, but the golems feel like they were made in complete ignorance of how limited the player’s matching potential is, to the point it’s more of a relief to see big boss monsters or the fast charging hogs since at least you don’t need specific line matches to counter their otherwise greater danger levels. Taking out monsters does gradually build up power for a super move though, the player able to drop a meteor to wipe out most anything but boss creatures as well as breaking a good deal of the crystal barriers to boot. This pressure valve can keep the golems from being incredibly damaging, but it’s a weak way to make up for some bad color matching gameplay.

After its interactive tutorial which serves as a pretty decent test, you’re free to play Wizard Defenders to see how far you can get before at least one full row of wizards has been replaced with the crystal spikes instead. You can set the pace of the action as represented as the numbers 1 through 20, but 1 isn’t all that slow for long and you certainly need time to arrange your fiddly wizards. 20 is almost guaranteed to have greater golem problems that make that speed setting more a curiosity than a real way to challenge yourself, but the more interesting way to alter play is through altering the difficulty setting. Easy only has four robe colors for your wizard army to worry about, normal adds a yellow robed wizard to the mix as well, and then Hard adds two more to that with its girls in white and black for a total of 7 colors to concern yourself with. Funnily enough, despite all the difficulties being nominally harder to manage because more colors are in play, I reached the same wave in all three for my high score as the mechanics are the greater limiter to potential than the amount of colors you need to match, and with only one music track backing all the action, it becomes hard to really get invested in trying to go back to score better and get further once you know the design issues that are a greater determinant for success than your own skill.

THE VERDICT: Wizard Defenders was already at risk of being an unsatisfying and rigid match-3 puzzler due to its limits on moving your wizards and the slow replenishment of your resources, but once it comes in conflict with the monster defense angle, things truly start to crumble. When it demands some specific match types like horizontal ones in the lane a golem is marching through, you start rubbing up against how restrictive the character movement actually is. Combo chains, often a cornerstone in a color matching puzzler, are almost discouraged and actual impediments if they happen accidentally, so while you can actually put up a fight when the waves of monsters just require you to concoct a simple counterattack, when Wizard Defenders wants you to do something exact, it feels like it stands in contrast with the actual abilities it provides you.

And so, I give Wizard Defenders for DSi…

A BAD rating. Wizard Defenders is a game of technical walls, be they ones on the mechanics like how you can’t get your girls around currently executed matches or progress walls like those waves of golems that don’t take into account how poorly the game supplies and arranges your wizards. The game probably would already be difficult enough if you had every row of wizard automatically filled to capacity because of unfortunate ideas like how you can’t move girls diagonally or through wizards who are winding up their spells, but needing to wait on the reserves to trickle in while demanding you actively hold a button instead of managing wizards if you want to speed it up further exacerbates the game’s major issues. Perhaps one way the game could have become more bearable without reworking the mechanics would be to have no full-on invulnerabilities at play, golems perhaps instead taking reduced damage from vertical matches so you’re rewarded for doing the less helpful match but not doomed if the intended one can’t really be pulled off. The game at least has the good sense not to go in too hard on how tough or fast its foes are at first, but you’re still feeling the impact of the rigid movement controls even when making matches is a lower pressure affair and the added monster defense angle isn’t interesting enough to really make Wizard Defenders more appealing than a standard color matching puzzler because of its restrictions and rough ideas on how to challenge its spell-casting format.

Wizard Defenders could be said to be uniting match-3 action with monster defense, but more often it feels like these components are resisting each other with the design choices made for them. Certain enemies being completely invulnerable to an attack type ignores the restrictions on how easily characters can be matched, and the fact you can’t really call in wizards quickly means some foes like fast charging boars can appear and attack when you didn’t have time to put together a proper counter. Some concepts like the meteor spell at least mean it’s not constant agony, but it’s always a shame to make it rather far only for the incompatible elements of the game’s two halves to rather aggressively push you towards failure.