Ah, what can I say about this RPG classic? The graphics are terrible, even by the standards of the time, their crude 16 colour EGA awfulness being quickly surpassed by the 256 colour majesty of Westwood's Eye of the Beholder, which followed but a year later.

Moreover, in defiance of even the most slender of expectations, variation in tileset is extremely limited - expect to see castles, dungeons, jungles and mines rendered in the same undulating grey brick, with faded tapestries, rooms filled with rotting furniture and the stygian underworld described in bright yellow text rather than sprites. While far more attention was lavished on the animations of your enemies you should be prepared to see the same yellowish-greyish-pinkish tones portray a multitude of demons, rats, amazons, dwarves and dragons.

The sound too is also terrible, with no music to speak of and only a limited selection of digital samples to relay the clash of steel on steel, ancient enchantments and the death of your foes. Lest that sound too exciting, be warned this is a game where your enemies die with a bang, literally expiring like popped balloons. Indeed, this was a game where the sound was quickly disabled and the mouse driver not loaded, cursor keys and imagination being far better accompaniments.

The plot is borderline nonsense, but expansive and remarkably mature, if such a thing can be said about story involving adultery, murder, madness, a pen that can re-write reality and a half naked she-devil.

And the game itself is unrelentingly punishing - this is the only game I can think of where your ability to access some of the more advanced classes, so temptingly described in the manual, at the beginning of the game rests entirely on a combination of luck and pig headedness. It is also one of the few games I've come across where a party of six stalwart heroes can be bested within seconds of starting their adventures by bats, rats and weeds, where they can fail to pick a lock and find that door locked for good. It is a game where if one of your characters dies of poison then you better hope you have some means of curing them in addition to resurrecting them, because if you don’t they’ll only die again.

However, if you've read this far and you consider yourself to be one of the few 'hardcore' CRPG gamers left out there, then you owe it to yourself to download this game and persevere. Nearly 25 years after its release, it stills holds the same dark attraction of stats and skills and spells and equipment and deep, turn-based, party-focused combat that for a few years in the mid-1990s seemed to represent the high point of aspirations for RPGs on the PC.

Once you’ve beaten the rats and bats and zombies and Zulus and taken on hell itself and battled through a climatic series of encounters against bosses that feel more like something from Streets of Rage 2. And once you’ve ditched the sticks and rags and found the Avenger and Maenad’s Lance and you’ve got a mage able to launch a tier six nuclear blast capable of incinerating waves of enemies at a time.

Then you’ll have found yourself neck deep in that borderline nonsense plot, playing a game that never fails to keep you on your toes, that rewards intelligence and strategy and speaks to the same desire for challenge and depth that until recently games had somehow managed to neglect. You’ll be hooked and you’ll want to take that band of misfits you’ve so carefully tended for the last 40 hours onward to Wizardry 7 and 8 and the fact that you’ll have to spend more than 100 hours to find out there’s no Wizardry 9 will be a bitter-sweet pill to swallow, but probably one you’ll swallow all the same.

This is quite a good game, granted it is old school, real old school. I will caution if you want to play this and start out the Wizardry Trilogy...patience is something you must have! Either that be from making characters that can survive the first parts of the game(even well into the end of the game...) or constant reloading cause you don't want anyone to die from a fight(and thus lose 1 point of Vitality), which is a constant danger, Even with a little bad luck you are in a frustration.

With all that aside, I will say never has a game given it a real sense of victory for gaining a level or beating a group of foes...or even beating that game! Frankly you'll need the guide provided to make any regular progress, otherwise you'll lost for a long time.

So if you want a real old challenge...this is it! Let this be the start of a real adventure!

Ah, Wizardry 6. Or, as I like to call it, Locked Doors: The Game. Maybe it's just me, but the doors in this game seem a little hard to open. Having to save before every door is a given; having to reload a save because every door is made of titanium shouldn't be. When you finally pry the door open, you'll be treated to old school monsters like bats and rats that will dodge your every blow as they lay in gentle slumber. No worries, however, for if things get too hairy for you in the depths of this 1990s castle, your characters have the option to run away; which was the default operation of graybeard D&D players who cut their teeth on the 1st edition of the pen-and-paper game. Unbeknownst to you, however, is while you spent thirty rounds swinging in futility at sleeping enemies before they awoke to tear your hide apart, you were set upon by other enemies who ambush you as you run away. Whatevs, you think, I'll just run from them also. Well, when these monsters come to gangbang a party of inadequately-statted paper tigers, they come in droves.

Then, inevitably, Death and his SoundBlaster call, as he stands over your tombstone. Yes, a single tombstone, because in the 8-bit era, your horde of characters are buried in the same hole, piled one upon another like firewood, except firewood is useful and characters in the game of Wizardry are not. But, you, my friend, are a true old school RPG fan, and you never give up. You spend hours rolling another party and head down into the depths, uneasy at the strange feeling that you are not playing a clone of Dungeons & Dragons but of the RPG Paranoia, where the Dungeon is not your friend and the assembly line of heroes who engage in suicide-by-bushwhacker is moving faster than that conveyor belt in I Love Lucy.

You will never give up, not until you beat this damned game. Because it CAN be beaten—can it? Or is this game like the module Tomb of Horrors, an exercise by game developers to assume the role of a merciless and antagonistic god, presiding over a world whose populace is comprised solely of doomed heroes fresh from the womb that see the gates of a hungry dungeon and shudder at their fate.

Addendum: Apparently, there is a tool to boost your ability scores during character creation, which will save you the tedium of hours rerolling your team like I did. It isn't necessary, but welcome, especially on a subsequent playthrough.

READ THE MANUAL!

(Right-click on the game in your library, Properties, Local Files, "Browse Local Files")

This is an old-school game. It's not going to hold your hand and explain things as you play. It is too hardcore for that.

I feel like I should preface this review by saying that A) Bane of the Cosmic Forge is the first first-person dungeon crawling crpg that I've ever played to completion, and B) I did this with the express purpose of importing a party into Crusaders of the Dark Savant. Also, this was within the last year, I wasn't alive when these games came out originally.

Bane of the Cosmic Forge is something pretty unlike any other cRPG I've ever played. Sure, it looks uglier than sin and the character design has aged like ♥♥♥♥ and the story is complete nonsense BUT! The dungeon design, while really brutal in the early-going, consistently surprised me. Essentially the whole game takes place in a single mega-dungeon type area with several different subsections. The design of these individual subsections and the way they wove together at times was clearly the work of a group of designers who knew what they were doing. Once you've got a handle on the mechanics of this game, exploring these areas becomes so much fun. Some of the puzzles were pretty obtuse if you werent drawing a map (or unless, like me, you cheated and used the automap mod) but this is the age of information and if google's at hand you'll be fine, there's tons of resources for this game.

The character creation in this game is pretty cute, you have to roll high in specific stats to qualify for individual classes, like so many cRPGs from this time. The thing is, as you level up your stats will advance and you can actually switch to these classes at level 1 later on, while keeping all of your skills, which is a neat feature.

Honestly though, having played through a good chunk of this game's frankly incredible sequel, Wizardry 7, I can't say that this one is too worth playing. There's one tileset, the sound sucks (I just muted it and listened to podcasts while I played), and after a while the tedium does start to set in. Still, coming out the other end of it is pretty rewarding (even if the final boss that I experienced was kinda lackluster).

Basically, it's pretty good, pick it up if you already have any interest in DOS cRPGs, and the ability to import your characters into Wizardry 7 with some of the neater equipment from this game is fun. If you get bored of this one though, it's packaged with its sequel which just takes all of its ideas and improves on them, with several more tileset and beautiful VGA pixel art. Plus it's dirt cheap so if you don't like it or it takes you a while and a few tries to even play the damn thing, like me, you're not losing too much.

This is a great game from the olden days where a game wasn't afraid to kill your characters in the first battle. Arm yourself with the included manual and hint book (and don't forget to arm your characters while you're at it...they enjoy walking into dungeons without donning their armor or weilding their weapons). sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

Despite the lack of modern graphics and sound, if you give it a chance, you'll really enjoy it and you can carry your band of characters from Wizardry 6 all the way through 8. Unlike other RPG's you'll feel a sense of accomplishment because you helped create these characters and develop their own storyline rather than letting the game decide it for you.

Finished the Super Nintendo version of this game with fan translation patch[www.romhacking.net] (link to patch only, you have to provide your own ROM). I recommend it over the DOS version sold here since it has (slightly) better sound and graphics and... automapping! (It does have however the big downside of not being able to transfer your party into Wizardry 7 and then 8, which is the only way to get some items). The SNES version has JRPG-style controls, too, and a simplified dialog system... which might be a good or bad thing depending on your tastes.

Liked:
- Designing, equipping and leveling up your 6-character party is just great
- Combat is extremely challenging and super enjoyable with a great deal of strategy, many spells and character/monster abilities
- Position of characters in combat matters, only ranged and pole weapons or spells and special abilities allow attacking from the back rows
- Very good writing in the non-silly parts of the story
- Nice sense of exploration

Disliked:
- Too many random encounters
- World is a nonsensical patchwork of various mythologies, novels and just plain silliness
- Dungeon graphics are boring, the DOS version has basically one wall texture for the whole game, SNES version has at least some variation
- RPG system has some well-known exploits
- The optimal way to play if you want the best party/items to carry over to the next game requires reading a lot of spoilers

Overall the game grabbed me enough that I soldiered on until the end, but the overall experience left me slighly disappointed. Still, you can't beat that combat and party management, I really want more games in this turn-based style to come out now that we have Grimrock for the real-time side.

Once upon a time, cRPGs didn't care about your feelings. They crushed you and overpowered you with insanely hard battles... which forced you to find ways to survive and, with luck and perseverance, maybe win. "I can't beat this game" was a perfectly valid option, which didn't automatically mean you hated the game or would not recommend it to others; in fact it made the game more badass in your eyes; maybe after a few months or years you'd try again, with different tactics. Your path to success was often different from what the game designers had in mind; this is only possible with a complex enough system, a true sandbox of character development in which you could find the small cracks to break the game, or at least find optimizations that made you strong enough to survive the challenge. Because in this game, merely making a "standard party" with fighter, mage, thief, etc and them leveling them up "intuitively" and default-attack all anemies will almost certainly mean failure. As an example, without a bard in the early areas you're likely doomed, and without some kind of planned multiclassing you'll suffer a lot in the end-game.

I know many will read this and think I'm a victim of masochistic nostalgia, but damn, how I miss the challenge! those were the days. Killing an early "giant snake" in Wizardry 6 is more satisfying to me than killing level-scaled dragons in modern RPGs; the dragon was there for me to kill it and make me "feel good", while the snake was placed there to kill me, yet I figured out it can be blinded and then it's vulnerable. Those of you longing for such a feeling, this game is what you want to play.

Beyond difficulty and complexity, the area design and writing from D.W. Bradley is noteworthy. The descriptions are very well written and interesting, making me look forward to see what's in the next room. From the screenshots the game may seem monotonous, but the game feels rich with unique locations thanks to this.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=896034903

I actually finished this game with the SFC Remake, (Wizardry VI - Kindan no Mafude) which has far better graphics and good musics. The story and gameplay of that version are nearly identical to the steam version, but other aspects are greatly improved.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=895826458&fileuploadsuccess=1

The steam version has reused some same sprites for many different characters. For example, the steam version has all these 9 characters look identical (AMAZULU，MEI-LAI，BRIGERD WOLTAN，VALKYRIE，AMAZULU QUEEN，KUWALI KUBONA，AMAZULU ARCHER，SHAMANESS，PRIESTESS), while the SFC Version has them all look very diffirent.

The music of the SFC version is also very cool. (One of the bonus contents of the steam version is the musics from the SFC version in MP3 format, you can check up if you want to know how good the musics of the SFC version are.)

Now that I have beaten the SFC version, I do not intend to play the steam version through. But it is good to have. The pdf manual and hint book are cool. The cooleset bonus content is the mp3 musics of the SFC version. I originally intend to buy this cd from Amazon. This Wizardry buddle saves me some 100 dollars or so, by giving it as bonus! Now I can listen to these cool musics when I drive to my working-place.

Above all, the steam version is cool, the SFC version is far cooler. I really hope that one day, the SFC emulated version of this game can be bought in Steam.

It is very old but if you can get past the crunchy retro graphics there is a long satisfying dungeon crawl here.