The Wizards – Enhanced Edition (PS4)
Virtual reality games are a perfect place for getting us a little closer to living out our childhood fantasies. The Wizards on PlayStation VR is the kind of game made for anyone who’s ever held their hands out hoping to cast a spell, fireballs and lightning now actually appearing when you do so in the game world. The magic is getting ever nearer to being in the palm of your hand, or at least in this game’s case, at the end of two PlayStation Move controllers gripped tightly as you wave your arms around like a spellcaster.
The Wizards – Enhanced Edition has six (or perhaps technically seven) spells for you to learn and utilize for some combat in a fantasy world, each of them cast with specific motions. If you want to bring up a magic shield to deflect fireballs, you pull one hand in front of your chest like you were defending with a real shield. If you want a fireball in your hand, just flick your wrist to the side and you’re now holding one. One of the most satisfying motions though has to be how you tap into electrical powers, the player needing to pump both of their arms back like they’re charging the spell up before unleashing a huge beam of lightning in front of them for quite a bit of time. For the most part, the wind-up of every spell is pretty natural, the only one that feels a bit too complicated being the Arcane Missiles, but appropriately so. If you wave your hands in front of you in opposing circles, a set of magical shards appear before you, which you then tap to send them homing in on any foe nearby. The difficulty in using them is essentially being cool under pressure and properly executing the required motions, most of the other spells instead leaning on aiming to determine if your powerful magic will do its job properly.
When it comes to aiming though, your spells can be a bit hit and miss. That fireball you can generate actually needs to be thrown like a ball, and while the game will try to assist your aim a bit by locking onto a foe you point your spell at, the need to pull back the fireball can mean you lose the lock-on and end up missing. You can’t exactly pitch it like a baseball due to how the VR tracking works, but thankfully, you get a different fire spell that is much more reliable and satisfying, the player expanding a large ball of flame between their hands before lunging it forward in a way that is much easier to aim properly. Archery with the ice bow you can conjure works fairly well, the game expecting you to draw arrows properly but that means it feels close to what you’d expect from using a VR bow. Lightning is so incredibly quick and easy to use though that it feels guaranteed to be your spell of choice for all but the most distant targets, but the game grants you a temporary spell for its final three levels and unfortunately it’s the clunkiest of all.
The last spell allows you to conjure and hurls spears, some spectral enemies only able to be harmed with these special spears. However, you can only cast the spear conjuring spell when you have it, and you need to rip the aether of your hands to regain access to the rest. The game will mix regular orcs and goblins with the spirits, the player having to find aether points to regain the spell if they dispensed with it prematurely, but the spirits are particularly annoying because they fly freely through objects. You can’t avoid them for too long because of this, but throwing a spear with the PlayStation Move controllers sadly isn’t quite there yet. If you mistime your throw or the game doesn’t read the motion since it moves the controller out of the tracking area because of the action, you’ll take some annoying damage that can start to add up since the shrouded ghosts come in waves. Healing is possible to find and up until this point in the game, level checkpoints were usually enough to prevent repeating too much. You’ll have to push through these sloppy fights or work to find an odd position where the game can read your intent when trying to toss spears, but it can be said the game’s heart was in the right place because it did recognize that your usual stable of spells can make most other battles a bit easy.
The Wizards – Enhanced Edition mostly has you facing variations on goblins and orcs, goblins trying to rush you quickly but being quick to take out while armored orcs and giants will lumber slowly towards you but hit hard should they survive your spells long enough to reach you. The game allows you to pick if you want full freedom of movement or just the Virtual Reality style of teleportation where you aim for a spot and press a button to appear there, and teleportation does do the job well enough. Even though it’s limited in combat to prevent you from overusing it by shortening how far it will move you if used in quick succession, it can also still be chained together for multiple tiny leaps forward to flee from danger as necessary. The Wizards – Enhanced Edition does overuse its standard enemies, many of them not really that dangerous on their own once you have your full slate of spells on hand. Instead, the real danger will come from enemies on high perches. Orcish spellcasters, magic statues, or really anything that fires projectiles are where difficulty is derived from. While it’s enjoyable to roast the common monster men, the enemies on the high ground launching their homing attacks at you require you to move at the right time, deflect, or vary up your spells and find windows of opportunity. Skirmishes can sometimes come down to just trying to clear out the projectile fighters quickly and then cleaning up the less threatening rabble, but there are some other small complications like fights on metal floor that might heat up to keep you from standing on certain sections for too long.
While this VR spellcasting game can have some visceral fights where you’re whipping around trying to find time to cast your magic, it also mostly is just fight after fight, some of which don’t have the necessary ingredient to make them more than a one-sided slaughter. The plot does have you face two bosses, neither of which pack strong enough battle options to overcome a player who is paying attention, although the game does let you find special Fate Cards that can be activated before a level to make it easier or harder and providing a penalty to your level score or a boost to it depending on how you tinker with the difficulty. Earning points and finding hidden treasures will help you unlock upgrades for your spells that do make them even more thrilling conceptually and give them nice new visual effects, but they do feel like they’re in need of something tougher to test their potential. Occasionally, the story will try to throw some puzzles in your path, some like standing on switches to open gates not really a good fit and the spells feeling underutilized in making progress outside of battle situations, the game’s magic-focused ideas mostly consisting of just breaking down damaged walls or powering a device with your lightning.
The story of The Wizards – Enhanced Edition can sound a touch complicated despite there not being many major developments to follow. You have been recruited by a wizard named Aurelius stuck outside of time who has already helped end the orcish invasion of the realm of Meliora, but because he used time travel magic to alter history, that means another wizard can try and do the same and set things back onto the path that favors the monster men. You need to track down this other wizard while also working to foil the invasion, but what this mostly leads to beyond having reasons to head from a village to a mine and finally a desert is your ally narrating parts of the adventure. He’s an occasionally funny companion and better than the quiet of lonesome travel, his presence giving the game some personality when it otherwise doesn’t do much unique with its fantasy world.
Funnily enough, where the game shows most promise is not in the structured story, but in the separate Arena mode. Arena mode is all about the combat, something that should sound a bit repetitive after the main adventure mostly strings together fights for much of its action, but the Arena isn’t always structured in the same simple way. One does have you standing in a single space, trying to hit enemies with spells as they aim to walk towards the local village and destroy it, this perhaps the weakest offering since it’s essentially a magical shooting gallery. Where the game gets a bit more adventurous are with the crystal defense variation and the crystal destruction mode. Crystal defense has three large crystals you need to try and keep from being broken apart by waves of the orcish army, and the longer you last, the more enemies come in at once and the more paths they have to reach the crystals. With freedom of movement and multiple areas to protect, it can get a bit heated trying to survive, although the crystal destruction mode feels far more exhilarating. In that mode, crystals will gradually appear in a cave, the player needing to destroy them since they’ll start casting damaging magic on you should too many be present at once. The cave’s shape will change over the battle and enemies will appear to defend the crystals, the player needing to speedily navigate the halls, destroy crystals quickly, and manage the hordes, never really able to stop for long if they want to last a long while. The Wizards – Enhanced Edition does unfortunately separate the main adventure and Arena a bit too strongly, your spell upgrades don’t transfer over and must be earned separately by just replaying the three arena types and hitting score thresholds for lasting longer, but with Fate Cards and their associated score bonuses also unlockable, you can speed up the acquisition of power and then properly tackle these better structured battle challenges with the full might of a mage.
THE VERDICT: The Wizards – Enhanced Edition gets the sensation right for much of its magic, a few spells not controlling the best but others like lightning and the frost bow entertaining to use just because of their responsive and might. The conjured spears being required makes them an unfortunate part of your arsenal when other less favored spells can just be freely ignored, but generally The Wizards – Enhanced Edition leans a little too much on constant combat with the same foes and some of the visceral thrill starts to fade. The Arena actually provides some change-ups in objectives that show where the game should have gone more often, but mostly this VR game is about going on a magical rampage for a few hours rather than exploring the depths of your wizardly powers.
And so, I give The Wizards – Enhanced Edition for PlayStation 4…
An OKAY rating. The Wizards – Enhanced Edition is an enhanced edition because it took some lessons from its original PC VR release and made sure the PlayStation version was a bit cleaner and had some additional content. Adding checkpoints, a new level, and other little touches certainly was wise, but the true enhancement would have been taking some cues from the Arena mode in how the story should be structured. Too often the fights are about being swarmed by some baddies and using your spells to waste them, the player being the target meaning you can often just move to safety, take out some enemies, and then move again to stay safe. The magic casters and their like were a step in the right direction, projectiles that track your movement naturally complicating a fight, but the Arena mode shows managing danger can be more entertaining when it’s not all focused on you. The main story’s puzzles are often small or not too interesting, but more chances to face unique trials or even find alternate uses for your spells could have really given the game the breadth of content it needed. The PSVR is doing some heavy lifting in still keeping it somewhat entertaining though, moving your arms to unleash powerful spells able to keep its novelty because the game was mostly wise in correlating appropriate motions to your various spells. Even though shooting electricity out of your arms is so simple and useful it helps in making battles a bit too easy, it’s also great to use because of the pumping motion followed by the plasma launching out in front of you. A few magical shields do make enemies resistant to specific spells, but that area also feels like it could have been better elaborated on without going into the territory that makes fighting the spirits with spears a notable weak point.
The Wizards – Enhanced Edition does grant you the VR experience of waving your hands and unleashing magic, it just needs to explore more ways to add context to its otherwise fairly effective efforts. It captures some of the thrills in wielding spells, but you don’t get as many intense magical battles as you’d hope for even when the game throws some big bosses your way. You don’t quite feel like the all powerful and clever wizard because Meloria isn’t the best for testing your might and wits, but there’s definitely still something appealing about the way it chose to implement its spellcasting that might draw you in despite the adventure’s simplicity.