I first saw Wizards & Warriors (under the name Swords & Sorcery) at the 1997 Electronic Entertainment Expo and was completely blown away. This was easily one of the best games of the show that year, featuring amazing graphics and what appeared to be very intriguing gameplay. At the time, the game was to be published by the now-defunct Virgin Interactive U.S. and when they stopped publishing PC games, I thought the game was lost forever. Nearly four years later, the game has surfaced again under the publishing mantle of Activision. I couldn't have been happier to hear that the game was going to actually be published, and while I'm happy with the results, age and dropped features have altered the game I saw in 1997.
Wizards & Warriors is a typical good vs. evil fantasy role playing game at its heart, but is so much more. The plot develops slowly over time, letting you immerse yourself completely in the developing world. If you were to do all the sub-quests and other fun things included, you could probably amuse yourself for 200+ hours in this epic-scaled game. The game is the vision of D.W. Bradley, most famous for the Wizardry V, VI, and VII games.
The graphics in the game are good, but not nearly as impressive as when the game was first conceived. This is a case of a game taking too long to finally be published. It is played from a first-person perspective and takes place in a fully 3D rendered world. The original specification for the game was to allow for play in both first and third-person modes, and the exclusion of third-person takes quite a bit away from the overall experience. As it stands, gameplay is much like a Might & Magic game - you cannot separate your party, they attack as a cluster and stand or fall together. Only the most recent 3D cards are supported, leaving MANY fans that still use the old standard Voodoo 2 card from running the game in accelerated mode. For those, the game may still be software rendered, which doesn't look nearly as impressive. The engine gives the game an organic look and, although dark, allows for decent visuals.
Sound effects are pretty good overall; many of the sound effects are accurate and distinctive. Voice acting ranges from excellent to overdone, but I was very happy with the amount of voice work included. While not every NPC has a voice to speak with, there are enough to be impressive, especially in a game this size.
The interface is not as intuitive as I would have preferred. While it is fairly flexible once you've spent some time with it, much could have been done to improve ease of use. The game has multiple difficulty levels and is playable in real or turn-based style. In real-time mode, the game speed is also very flexible. I am of the mind that RPG combat is best played as a turn-based system, especially in a game that allows for large parties where strategy requires some thought. While turn-based is an option here, it doesn't work perfectly. Enemies still hit out of turn, almost as if the real-time game has been slowed to a certain extent, but not stopped altogether. It's not as if the game were unplayable, it is still quite workable, it's just not exactly what you'd expect in something called turn-based. Personally, I think Baldur's Gate has the best idea - let the game run in real-time but allow for automatic pauses where you can plan the next move for each character.
While you may have only six characters in your party while out on adventure, you are allowed to create many more and leave them at a town inn. They may be swapped in and out of the party at will, and this allows for interesting strategies. The characters will advance at slower rates, but you may concentrate on traits that you may need for a certain task. Creating characters is easy - you choose a race, basic class, then allocate stats to them. Once into the game, your characters may specialize to become a slightly different, yet much more powerful sub-class. Barbarians, Paladins, Monks, and Bards are examples of sub-classes. Get to the higher levels of power and you may focus on one of the true power classes, then watch your characters fly through the opposition.
Wizards & Warriors has a very complex, yet highly intriguing plot that drives it. The game goes through numerous twists and turns as you make your way through it. It is a very satisfying game to play, and should be near the top of any RPG fan's list of games to play. While it isn't perfect and shows its age in many places, it is one of the better RPGs in terms of epic scale and playability. While I believe it would have been a better game if some of the excluded features had still been intact and the interface had been polished up, it's still well worth playing.
