Wizard of Legend

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG / Roguelike

Players: 1-2 Co-Op / Competitive (Local)

.

Review:

Wizard of Legend is a Top-Down Action-RPG with strong Roguelike elements that places you in the role of a would-be wizard attempting to pass a series of trials. This game was released on multiple platforms in 2018, including Nintendo Switch.

This game has a decent presentation, with nice pixel art visuals and a fittingly energetic soundtrack. There’s nothing too flashy going on here, but the spell effects are varied and nice-looking, which is pretty noteworthy given just how much of a wide variety of them there is.

For the gameplay itself, this game advertises itself as a “fast-paced dungeon crawler”, and the pacing is indeed fast… sort of. You’ll need to be fast on your feet to evade enemies, who are constantly targeting you or swarming you. However, your own attacks aren’t nearly as fast, with nearly everything in your constantly-expanding repertoire coming with a frustratingly stingy cooldown timer. I was constantly finding myself waiting for all of my attacks to recharge save for my melee, and while you could argue that this is a good way to encourage liberal use of melee attacks, I found that melee attacks in this game were too slow, short-ranged, and weak to be all that fun or effective to use.

That’s not to say that the gameplay here is bad. I appreciate the amount of variety present here. Unfortunately, it seems like players are only allowed to change up a small handful of things, and there’s little in the way of “Roguelite” elements to provide the promise of things opening up much as you keep playing – you get access to more spells and equipment, but not necessarily better spells or equipment or even the ability to use more of that stuff at a time.

In the end, I thought Wizard of Legend was a decent action-packed Roguelike, but… well… perhaps I’ve been jaded by games like Hades and Children of Morta, which in very different ways both do what this game aims for so very, very, very much better. As a result, while I thought this game was decent, it’s hard for me to recommend it next to other games in the genre.

tl;dr – Wizard of Legend is a Top-Down Action-RPG Roguelike that has you creating a loadout of spells to challenge randomized levels in a series of “trials”. The fighting here is fast-paced, but your cooldowns unfortunately are not, and while this game certainly isn’t bad, there are others in the genre that are far more deserving of your time.

Grade: C

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}