"Ah, the good old days. Back then everything was better, and now
everything's worse. If only things now could be like things were
then." If you've ever had thoughts like that about the state of
computer RPG's, then Wizards & Warriors from Activision and the
development team at Heuristic Park might just be the game for
you. Sporting the name of D.W. Bradley, the driving force behind
Wizardry's 5, 6, and 7, Wizards & Warriors is a throwback to
another era. Back then, computer RPG's came on floppy disks,
barely had graphics, and made funny little beeping sounds come
out of your pc speaker. But while Wizards & Warriors comes on
CD's instead of floppies, it doesn't take long before this game starts
to show its age.
Wizards & Warriors hits you with a whole lot of story right from the
get go. Fire up the game for the first time and you're treated to one
of the now standard intro movies. In a pixilated dream sequence
that bears an odd resemblance to a cubist painting (and not in a
good way), you find out that some big-bad-evil-guy has risen once
again and it's your job, as the chosen one, to stop him. Of course,
big-bad-evil-guy can't be taken out with just any old weapon.
Noooo, it's never that easy. You've got to get yourself the Mavin
Sword, a blade crafted from twin metals; one cursed by evil
(pronounced EeeeeVil in the local dialect), the other blessed by
the divine. Well great, there goes the weekend. If it were up to
me, I'd probably just go back to sleep and let the world sink into
darkness. How bad could it be anyway? But being the
save-the-world, hero-type that you are, you decide to lace up your
boots, pick up some adventuring pals at the local inn, and set off to
kick some butt.
Staying true to the tradition of the old Wizardry games, W&W
offers a wide variety of choices for character creation. With six
characters in a party, and the ability to create a stable of up to
fifteen heroes, there's a lot of room to do your own thing. Races
range from your standard humans, dwarves, and elves, to the
more unusual gourks (think orcs, but with a 'g' and a 'u') and
oomphaz (elephant men with a tendency toward deep thoughts),
each with different attribute modifications and traits. Starting
characters can only pick from one of the four basic classes of
warrior, rogue, priest, or wizard, but can advance to elite roles,
such as barbarian, paladin, monk, and ninja, through quests given
out at the various guilds in town. Characters can go through any
number of different classes, but once you move on to another class
you can never go back. The guilds also offer quests that improve
your standing, and you'd better get to work, because only high
ranking members can learn anything but the most basic skills.
You may train and shop in town, but outside is where you earn
your money. You walk the earth, like Cain in Kung-fu, with the
help of a 3D engine and first person perspective reminiscent of
recent Might and Magic games. What worked for M&M, though,
doesn't quite do it for W&W. A simple combat system that allowed
for a seamless switch between turn-based and real-time in M&M is
replaced by a weird mishmash of styles, dubbed Adaptive
Time-Phasing, which is anything but seamless. Monsters move
around in real-time until they take an attack, after which they sit
around, apparently contemplating the nature of the universe,
while you're free to take your sweet time before returning the
favor. Turn-based wackiness ensues from there. Ranged combat
and moving fits into the system, somehow, usually allowing you to
toast tough enemies at extreme range without retribution, but, all
in all, the end result is not terribly successful. Throw in graphics
that are, at best, adequate, and some shortcuts, like fog to limit
range of vision and 2D backdrop fillers, taken to stop your
processor from going on strike, ala Ultima IX, and what you've got
isn't going to excite a lot of people. No-frills sound means no help
there either.
But many an RPG has been saved from the scrap heap, despite
lackluster graphics and sound, by strong role-playing elements.
And that's exactly what this game is supposed to be about. When
you stamp the name of D.W. Bradley on a game, talk about old
Wizardry games, and throw around words like 'epic' and
'legendary', you're giving story and plot the hard sell. Most
tragically, this is where W&W really falls short. The mainline plot is
functional, in a do this, do that, kind of way, but it's nowhere near
the kind of depth necessary to make up for so many technical
problems. The real killer, though, is the interaction with NPC's,
which consists of picking keywords from a list. Instead of a
conversation, you get line after line of barely related canned
monolog. To make sure you wring every last bit of information out
of someone, you are forced to mindlessly go down the list of words
and hit every one, many of which produce repetitive and
redundant responses that frequently repeat themselves (you get
the idea). The overall effect is a feeling of drudgery. Your actions
don't have any real effect, serving only to advance the plot, just for
the sake of advancing the plot. There are tons of mini-quests to do
for the various guilds and NPC's, but almost all of them fall into the
extremely generic categories of either "kill this" or "take this
there". I enjoy a good bounty hunt as much as the next guy (Boba
Fett is still my hero) and I've got nothing against being the
fantasyland delivery boy on occasion, but enough is enough.
Wizards & Warriors is a game with one foot firmly entrenched in
the past while the other stumbles blindly forward into the future.
Like a bad game of Twister, W&W is wrapped up in itself and
headed in too many different directions from the very start. I still
have warm memories of old games like Bard's Tale, and Legacy of
the Ancients, but come on. Reality check here, I played those
games on a computer without a hard drive. W&W sports an engine
that runs like a mixed up version of the one from Might and Magic
6, except M&M 6 came out five years ago and it still managed to
play better. And as much as I want to say graphics don't matter,
they do, and W&W just isn't very nice to look at. This puts W&W
with a lot to overcome with story, character, and gameplay, and
the problem is it just isn't there. I wanted to like this game, but
every time I started to get into it, something else would pop up and
frustrate me; be it cookie cutter quests, annoying NPC's, or, the
kicker, a bug that prevented me from finishing a quest and forcing
me to restart my game. If you're a really hardcore RPG fan, and
you have a high pain tolerance (for all the times this game makes
you bang your head against the wall), you will find some decent
nuggets of RPG here. If you're anything but the hardest of the
hardcore, my advice for you is run. Run from this game like you've
never run before. It will taunt you with happy memories of the past
and then it will break your heart. It certainly broke mine.
By: 
