Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

Do not buy this game. Not because it's the original Wizardry, which I love with all my heart *because* it's soul-crushingly difficult and grindy and doesn't hold your hand, but because the damn thing keeps freezing and forcing me to kill it via task manager. It's criminal to charge $35 for this bug-ridden mess.

Fun game, decent version except for a couple game breaking bugs. Combat frequently gets hung up on enemies turn, never to move forward. Have to hard quit out, and then of course fight isn't saved. This is especially annoying on mobs like Murphy's ghost where the fight can take a while at low levels. Shame something this mechanically simple has critical path bugs.

コンピュータRPGの始祖、名作として有名ですがそれも過去の話。 どうせ令和の世にプレイしたら古臭くてつまらないんじゃない？と半信半疑でした。 でもwiz系ゲームはほぼ踏破している身。これは通らなくてはなるまい、と購入。 結果、すごくハマりました。 もっさり戦闘のおかげで評価がいまいちみたいですが、今はアプデで高速戦闘が実装されています。 アイテムの種類が少なく、色々と大雑把です。 例えばこれも有名な話ですが、実質攻略するのは1,2,4,9,10階の5フロアだけで、他は行く必要がないです。 １週間足らずで全クリ出来るんじゃないでしょうか。 でも探索とキャラ成長のテンポがよく、思わず何度もゲームを起動したくなります。 レベルが１上がるだけでかなり強さが変わるのでまさに凝縮されたTRPGって感じです。 名作と言われるだけありますね。 もちろんベタ移植でなく、オールドスクール設定といって、現代風に色々設定を変更出来ます。 例えば不可逆的な「宿に泊まると加齢する」という仕組みは誰も得しない面白味もないものだったのでオフに出来ます。 このようにかゆいところにはちゃんと手が届く親切設計になっています。 （もちろんそれで実績が取れなかったり、変なペナルティを食らうことはない） 個人的には右下にアップル版の古い画面が表示されるのが良かったですね。 昔、亡き父がテレビの前にかじりついて本作をプレイしていたのを思い出します。（ファミコン版でしたが） 父と肩を並べてゲームをしているようで、なんだか懐かしい気持ちでした。 ２や３もリメイクしてくれたら嬉しいですね。

The game is real buggy. I find a new GUI issue every time I play and the mainstays are annoying enough. I have had soft locks, and had to ALT+F4 because none of the keys or GUI were working. I would also prefer to have an option to chose when I save, rather than making back up save slots, granted that's a minor gripe, however if ever I were to get into a game breaking situation then it might matter more. It's been out for 2 years and haven't fixed these issues so I imagine they're here to stay. While I'm having fun with the game it has very glaring issues so I wouldn't recommend it unless they fix these issues. Check the date on this post as they may EVENTUALLY update the game and make this short warning pointless.

TLDR: Cannot recommend due to game-breaking bugs. This adds a lot of accessibility to the game, including more intuitive/modern controls and an automap. However, it's also extremely buggy, tending to softlock both in combat and when reordering your party at the tavern. It's almost like they didn't playtest this at all, or maybe rushed an update and then abandoned it, because I've seen reports of these issues going back a couple years now. Also, the core game is of course crushingly difficult compared to the later entries in the series that I'm more familiar with. You have to hike back to town to rest (regaining HP and spells) and level up, making magic an extremely finite resource. Only thieves can attack with weapons from the back row, making the finite-ness of magic even more excruciating. In order to give your casters something to do during the 80% of the time that they otherwise go unused in combat, Digital Eclipse added an enemy inspection metagame element. It's interesting, but doesn't add much. Also a lot of the stuff you discover about enemies is relayed as symbols, and I have NO idea what most of them mean. I have additional quibbles with the modern UI. For example, enemies swap positions, but the UI doesn't seem to provide any explicit indication of this. Also, it's weird that they didn't just reuse the main enemy group list as a picker when attacking/casting. Wizardry 6 somehow did these things better in 16 colors at 320x200 resolution. It's interesting how they changed the DUMAPIC spell to "bank" your automapping progress into a static map that can be viewed at any time, but annoyingly your current dynamic automap still resets on level changes and gets confused by teleports. I get that they were trying to make the DUMAPIC spell more useful, but why not provide the option for a richer / more persistent in-game automap system when it's trivial to just look up the maps online anyway? It's great that they give you options for tuning your experience, but personally I don't hate myself enough to turn off any of the modern conveniences lol

wish i bought something else. even the wizardy daphne free version was more appealing. this game just doesnt want you to have fun. i get it old nostalgic feeling. but for players who are new to wizardry. i had a better time playing version daphne instead. the gearing system on this version is a joke. i was very confused when my mage ran out of mp after using 3-4 spells. for the entire run. you cannot replenish it. you need to backtrack your way all throug the dungeon to get out and sleep at an inn to get more mp. now you go back into the dungeon. get as deep as you did before. just to realise your mage or priest ran out of mp. and are now useless LOL. ok now backtrack to town again. get as deep and then do it all over again. int stats doesnt increase damage. btw your mage has only 1 skill that will deal 1-8 damage. that can miss. in early levels. im so done with this game

ONLY BUY THIS IF YOU WANT A GAME WHICH FREQUENTLY FREEZES. I've read about the game freezing in the review, but it usually never happens to me so I bought it. The first 2 hours were fine, but after I got characters to level 5 and started to use spells in camp, the game froze on me several times and I had to kill it by task manager. I'm an original Wizardry fan, but I don't want to have a game that freezes almost every time when I camp and use spells, so I requested for a refund, but they couldn't because at this point I had the game for 3 days. So now I'm stuck with the game which frequently freezes and I'm not gonna play that.

way too grindy and utterly unforgiving. It lacks the main thing I need in a game - fun. I have no issues with failing in a game. I have issues when recovery is too painful. Thanks but no. Uninstalling now

Coming off of Legend of Grimrock 2, I thought this would be pretty similar. It is not. There is a "Darkest Dungeon" menu-style home base, and the dungeon. In the dungeon, you walk and get pulled into random battles. This gets boring very quickly.

Despite what the sales material tells you, this is not an OG experience. If you're looking for that, because that's something you had, then this might not scratch that itch. For me it failed because there were two things about the original Apple II Wizardry experience that were core to my childhood that cannot be reproduced in this version. The main one is that the Bishop trick doesn't work. It simply can't be done. The UI blocks the attempt. The second is related: this was the game where my dad taught me how to hexidecimal to modify save files for a less time consuming start. Saves time doing tons of rerolls in hopes of getting really lucky so you can have a level 1 ninja. I don't even know if ninjas made it into this game. If either the save files were open for editing or (ideally) the bishop trick had worked, I would have kept the game. The QOL stuff looks like it would be genuinely helpful. Graphical facelift looks great. While I think the UI for the town is more obtuse than I remember--it was genuinely challenging to remove people from a party to get a single person party to attempt the bishop trick--I could have worked with that. But without both of those, for me, this is pretty much replaceable with other similar dungeon crawlers that won't have the personal baggage of not having that little bit of "secret" lore. It was my first taste of such knowledge, so it was the most important part to still have for the nostalgic romp I was hoping for. This is like re-releasing classic Doom without "idspispopd".