Wizards and Warriors

Good evening fair travelers. Welcome to my inn. Inside you may meet some adventurers from far off lands. Perhaps a tale or two from our local wizard shall regale you. Come eat, drink, and by all means be merry. All are welcome and if ye need to take to the road yourselves, please come back and visit us for all your needs. Welcome to the world of Gael-Serran.

Or so the introduction to Wizards and Warriors should go. Developed by Heuristic Park and published by Activision, W&W; is the one of the newest PC RPG’s to come out this year. The question is, what sets it apart? And a good question it is. Definitely a fun game on all counts, there isn’t anything spectacularly new about this product. The basic low down on the story is this. Centuries ago, in Gael-Serran, there were wars of great magnitude among all the creatures of the land. To end the fighting, a warrior with a magical sword took to the field to destroy the creatures that were causing the fracas. Upon defeating the evil in the lands, the warrior passed on and the sword either disappeared outright or was stolen. Now, centuries later, another great evil has begun to loom upon the horizon. Without any specifics and little time for preparation, a local town’s wizard approaches your party. He asks that you take a quest upon your rag tag group and search out the Mavin Sword and use it to set things right.

Starting off in the game you are given your task and told to go to the inn to form your party. Selecting a party can be quite tough if you haven’t played too many RPG’s before. You can have 6 members in your group and can select from a variety of different races to play. Humans, dwarves, tiger men, and rat people are just a few of the diverse groups in the game. Each race is given certain bonuses and restrictions to their abilities; certain races might get a plus 2 to their strength for example. The classes you can pick from at the beginning of the game are rather limited and you can’t specialize in any field. As you progress however, your characters can join guilds and start to work towards a specific field of study. This allows for Rangers, Warlocks, and other such interesting classes. You also get special abilities as you develop your group. Add to this the fact that you can augment your skills by picking up magically enchanted items.

Combat in the game is not too hard to grasp. When you encounter monsters or the like usually they attack outright. All you have to do to mix it up is move close in to your target and begin fighting. You can choose to fight via spells or weapons depending on what your selection of characters are proficient in. Casting a slow spell on a quick moving skeleton can really help out your group by allowing them to get in more attacks on the foul creature and leaving it virtually defenseless. One of my big complaints with this game, and this stems from my like of games such as Baldur’s Gate, is that when you are fighting all your characters are assumed to be together in first person perspective. This can be quite a factor in how you fight a beast. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if you are close enough to your enemy or if you are too far away to hit. If some of your characters are using ranged weapons and the others using melee weapons it can be frustrating to hit the target with all of your party. There are many quick buttons for attack though, and you can change weapons while in combat by going into your inventory screen. There’s even a little window in the top right hand of your inventory that shows you what’s directly in front of you in first person view. This is nifty so you won’t be caught totally off guard when rummaging about in your nap sack to grab that healing potion that you had squirreled away. More often than not though the danger isn’t right in front of you. It usually sneaks up from behind you. Be wary and don’t take a lot of time trying to grab 8,000 items.

One of the things that really bummed me out when I first started playing was the limited amount of gold you start with. You can’t really outfit your party overly well. Of course, I’m not expecting to get the most powerful suit of armor at the beginning of the game but to be able to adequately afford to get all my characters into at least leather armor would have been nice. The way the system works is that you get 200 gold per character you have created and put into the group with you. Now with that limited amount at the beginning of the game you’d think there’d be a few quick enemies that you could defeat to gain more gold and items. Now I’m not saying that there aren’t more than enough enemies to fight but when you do fight things at early levels and they drop an item, that item needs to be identified to see if it’s of any value to your party. Since your characters don’t posses this ability early on it costs some coin to get it identified by people in town and you basically break even after ID’ing and selling your treasures. One other thing that bothers me about the money in the game, is that every time you go into a buy screen you have to remember to hit the button that groups all the party’s money together. I can’t see why this wasn’t turned on automatically from the beginning. Either that or have a group pool that is always drawn from.

Also at early levels monsters don’t seem to be overly difficult to beat (which is a good thing) but it seems almost like no challenge to vanquishing a beast. The only time you really get in trouble is when there are huge mobs of villains. This does happen often, but by just focusing on one baddie at a time it’s usually short work for your six intrepid adventurers.

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Genre: RPG Release Date: Available Publisher: Activision Developer: Activision ESRB: Teen System Requirements : Processor: 233 Windows 95/98: RAM: 64MB Hard Drive: 880MB CD-ROM Drive: 4X CD ROM Video Card: Direct X 7.0a Keyboard: Windows compatible Mouse: windows compatible Sound Card: Windows Compatible