W.A.N.D. Project

Genre: Arcade / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Untold Tales)

Whenever a new style of gameplay is first popularized, virtually every game to come after it for a good while is naturally compared to the game that popularized it. After Super Mario Bros., every Platformer in the years after was held up against Nintendo’s plumber to judge its worth, and after Doom was released, the years that followed saw every First-Person Shooter called a “Doom clone”. This trend continues to this day – Oh, a deckbuilding Card Game Roguelike? How does it compare to Slay the Spire? Until the genre broadens out, the comparison is inevitable.

With the release of W.A.N.D. Project on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2024, I think we’re starting to see the signs that one of those genre broadenings is starting to take place. This game is an Arcade-style game with Roguelike elements in the style many have dubbed “Bullet Heaven”, and which became popularized by Vampire Survivors, whose shadow still looms over this subgenre to the extent where every game in this style will necessarily be compared to it. And yes, I will be doing so quite a bit here too, but unlike many games in this genre it won’t just be to talk about how it measures up to Vampire Survivors, but how it differs from that game.

Where Vampire Survivors’ theme was a Castlevania-esque “Medieval heroes vs. B-movie horror/fantasy monsters” thing, W.A.N.D. Project’s thing is anime-style magical girls vs. aliens (especially alien giant bugs). There’s some story here about a trio of magical girl, sentient magic wand, and over-the-phone helper managing spells, but the story and characters aren’t properly introduced, and I feel like this element of the game is kinda’ disposable.

While these characters are depicted in artwork using decent traditional anime-style portraits, the gameplay itself uses 3D visuals in a highly-pixelated low-resolution style that’s visually-stylish enough to set this game apart from the crowd even if it isn’t technically impressive. Unfortunately, as happens with many games in the “Bullet Heaven” subgenre on Nintendo Switch (Vampire Survivors included), the game chugs when you start getting really far into it and the visual effects start to really stack up, but even though it’s noticeable and distracting, it doesn’t interfere with the gameplay too much. All of these visuals are backed by a fast-paced energetic soundtrack that works well for the intense action the game has.

The moment-to-moment gameplay still follows the common beats of the Bullet Heaven genre – you’re moving a character around avoiding enemies while your loadout of increasingly frequent and diverse attacks automatically activates and targets enemies, although players who prefer can opt to make the use of abilities manually-controlled if they prefer by changing menu settings. This game adds a dash button that takes a moment to recharge, but otherwise the gameplay will seem fairly close to Vampire Survivors… at first.

However, there’s another major element here that recontextualizes the action. Between rounds or waves (more on this in a moment), players will be shunted off to a grid showing their magical spells laid out like a flowchart, and given the option to rearrange that flowchart, buy and sell different parts of spells, and completely retool how all of their attacks work, giving players a surprising amount of freedom to customize their playstyle.

There are three types of spell components – green squares are catalysts that determines what causes the spell to activate, such as dashing a certain number of times, staying idle for a set amount of time, or just automatically activating at regular intervals, just to give a few examples. Orange squares are actions, such as long and short-range attacks or protective shields. And blue squares augment those actions, such as by adding a burn status, healing the player, or increasing their accumulation of “essence” needed to buy new spell components. All three types of components have arrows pointing away from them in one direction, and orange and blue squares have a point of entry for those arrows in another direction, and to make an active spell, players must connect these boxes together, with spells requiring at least one green block and one orange block.

If that seemed dry to you, I apologize, but the possibilities it opens up are really exciting, particularly because you can chain multiple attacks to one catalyst (albeit with diminishing returns), focus on unlocking additional spaces on your board to enable separate attacks with their own catalysts, or pair together spell pieces of the same kind to upgrade their effectiveness. The game does limit how crazy you can get by having stronger and more complex spells come with a higher “cost” that effectively means they’re used less frequently, but you can mitigate this somewhat by upgrading the individual components.

What this means is that you can build your character’s spell arsenal to wreak chaos by standing still, or spread poison by zipping around the room with dashes, or regularly let out little burning fire tornadoes that occasionally spout lightning storms around them. By the time I got to later rounds, I would be absolutely filling the screen with attacks and feeling like a real powerhouse.

Speaking of rounds, each of the game’s maps is separated into ten rounds, with the tenth round being a boss battle. And while you’ll want to take out enemies both to survive and to collect their essence to spend on better spell components, completing these levels will require meeting different criteria. The first map simply tasks you with surviving for increasingly longer periods of time as enemies spawn, but the second has you running between magical lanterns to activate them, and the third has you bashing shielded enemies into the paths on oncoming trains. These different level goals not only add some good variety, but force players to rethink their loadouts, which I feel is an excellent way to push players to try different characters, wands, and spells, as each have their advantages and disadvantages.

While this game’s $10 price puts it at twice the cost of Vampire Survivors, I feel that’s justified given how much deeper and more complex the gameplay here is. However, that’s not to say I don’t have some issues with W.A.N.D. Project. I really wish it had a greater variety of… well, everything. More maps, more characters, more wands, and more spells. Furthermore, while this game does a good job letting players custom-build their attacks, I wish it did the same for your own characters’ stats and abilities. You do get some ability to upgrade wands’ boards to automatically unlock spaces and provide bonuses, but I don’t feel like this is enough, and you never really get the feeling you encounter in a great Roguelike of encountering a rare upgrade that completely changes everything.

Because of these issues, I don’t think W.A.N.D. Project topples the king of the “Bullet Heaven” genre, but it does enough interesting things that I don’t think it needs to, and it carves out a spot for itself within the genre that’s all its own, being different enough that it doesn’t need to be in Vampire Survivor’s shadow. And for anyone who enjoyed that game, or who’s looking for a fun and different take on that style, W.A.N.D. Project is absolutely worth a look.

tl;dr – W.A.N.D. Project is an Arcade-style Roguelike in the “Bullet Heaven” style of game that Vampire Survivors pioneered, but it manages to separate itself from the pack with its gameplay that has you combining spell components on a flowchart-like grid to create your own custom attacks for your alien-fighting magical girl. I wish there were more content and even more ability to customize your character’s abilities, but overall this is an inspired take on the genre that anyone who enjoys this sort of game should absolutely check out.

Grade: B+

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Roguelike, Most Overlooked

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