=What is it?=
Firstly, this is not a Wizardry game of old, or even similar to one of the new installments. This is a *mobage*, a Japanese-style mobile game that has been ported to Steam without the microtransaction nonsense. As long as you know what you should expect, you will enjoy yourself.

Wizrogue is in a subgenre of mobile games which I like to call a 'monster battler', a game that derives its mechanics from similar games like Puzzle and Dragons, DBZ Dokkan Battle, Summoner's War, or even Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Note that this game *does* require an online connection to play at time of writing this review.

=How do I play?=
The way it works is thus: You're given a starter party of some low-ranking (read: low max-level) heroes, you select a dungeon from a list, and you progress in rogue-lite fashion towards the exit, stabbing monsties and collecting treasure along the way. You will often find coffins which contain other heroes, or are rewarded on a per-dungeon basis with Adventurer Tickets which allow you to roll for new heroes. All heroes have a ranking associated with them, and naturally uncommon or rare have higher stats, higher max levels, and better beginning equipment than common ones.

Your characters will level up based on enemies defeated after completing dungeons, which consist of a randomization of 3-6 floors of half a dozen rooms per floor, maybe, which include treasure and traps and the like, and whose objective is usually either get to the bottom or kill the boss on the last floor. You'll notice that you'll accrue a small army, however, with a large batch of useless characters. These characters are 'fed' to other characters (through training) which will give them experience and help them level up faster.

The core gameplay is essentially similar to the Japanese console-style roguelikes like the Fushigi Dungeon series. You'll recognize many similar mechanics, like attacking mid-air in order to reveal a trap tile on the space in front of you, or zooming through hallways to get to the next room. There is one caveat: your party has a collective HW (Holy Water) guage which depletes with every action you take. Luckily, HW recovery items are plentiful, and while it does act as a time limit, it doesn't necessarily force you to find the exit before clearing a room of monsters or search the floor for treasure.

Despite this, the gameplay has a distinctive Wizardry flavor. The base classes and races are all there, the class change system is present, as is the trapped treasure chest mechanic and the massive amount of pain dished out by certain enemies. The first few dungeons will leave you wishing it was more difficult, but the challenge ramps up fairly quickly. You'll find yourself digging around in the town screen for quite a while in between dungeons training your team, reorganizing, and micro-managing equipment, trying to find the right balance.

=Should I bother?=
Depends. Do you want a wholly immersive, first-person RPG with obtuse puzzles and a high challenge factor where you custom-make a party of six? In this case, no. In contrast, do you want a somewhat casual social dungeon crawler that rewards you for coming back day by day with a distinct Wizardry vibe? Or maybe you just want a Puzzle & Dragons-like game without the freemium nonsense and a bit more depth to the gameplay? In these cases, yes.

Pros:
+Solid mechanics
+Fast-paced, turn-based gameplay remniscent (but not identical to) the old Wizardries
+Board game graphical style
+Fun, easy to pick up and put down for quick play sessions
+Sweet title theme music

Cons:
-Obvious mobile port
-Getting used to this alternative model of gameplay may cause old-school Wizardry fans discomfort
-No overarching plot to speak of (though one faintly exists)

I give it a hard Yes to recommend, but be sure you know what you're buying first!
(Thanks for reading this lengthy review! Friend ID: 000 194 564)

O game tem uma estrutura bacana, livre de bugs mas foi feito para o universo online e com o fechamento dos seus servidores perdeu seu principal elemento: a competição entre jogadores. O jogo solo fica estranho pois o game não tem quase nenhuma história, você entra em um labirinto, sai, vai para outro mais difícil e repete esse mesmo processo infinitamente. Toda o game foca na evolução dos personagens e pelo menos pra mim, depois de algumas horas de jogo meu interesse tá reduzido a zero, e não há nenhum estímulo pra continuar. Como paguei super barato, acho que a diversão que ele me proporcionou ainda valeu a pena e vou recomendar, com as ressalvas acima.

O jogo é um ótimo e desafiador dungeon crawler. Gostei do mais recente update, que adicionou um modo offline.
Recomendo a compra

This is your dime a dozen(except its 12 bucks) collect / upgrade monsters / heroes mobile "game". Microtransactions have been removed but from what i was able to see in 2h you have to excessivly grind for WJ (the premium currency in this one) instead. You are also being punished heavily for failing so you end up grinding low level dungeons over and over without a challenge to levelup your extremely generic roster of heroes. To top it off the UI is typical mobile and in "town" you play menu manager sim while also fighting the fremium model type limitations on bag size, roster size etc.

Not recommended unless 90% discounted. (and even then very questionable)

P.S: This has nothing to do with classic Wizardry titles like 6-8 which i have played for hundreds of hours.

I have played this game on the PC for about 5 hours now, and I really want to like this game. I like Rogue style games and was addicted to Wizardry in the day. It is a compelling premise to combine these worlds.

Likes: I like th character development, and the ability to spec out your characters with different gear and classes. I do not even mind that you have to "eat" lower level characters to level up your more powerful ones. The use of animated miniatures is pretty cool as well.

Dislikes: I am always WJ currency poor in the game, and the ability to unluck the most powerful characters is highly dependent upon the WJ currency. It feels like they ported the game from an in-game purchase model where the intentional shortage is intended to motivate players to purchase more currency with real money, except there are no in-game purchases anymore (which I love) and they did not change the trickle with which you make more WJ.

The game is buggy as hell. Somewhat randomly certain characters when you Fortify them (level them up) or change their class get stuck on the animation screeen in which the game either gives you no way off the screen or the botton you are intended to push does nothing. I have had to CTRL-ALT-DEL many, many times to get out of the screeen and thus, had to restart the game each time. Interestingly, the game itself is apparently still running fine, you just cannot get out of that screen.

Finally, I do not like that the backrow characters seemingly do nothing unless you specifically get one of them to use a particular ability (like case a spell or shoot a bow). They do not seem to involve themselves in any obvious way in the head-to-head encoutners. The front rowers all swing, do apparent damage and take damage, the backrowers do nothing even when you have ranged or far-reaching weapons equiped. Additionally, you cannot intentionally target particular characters in the opponent party, particularly the characters int he backrow. Thus, you regularly clean out the front row, only to have their backrow get an automatic attack on you every time. Why can't my archers or mages attack their backrow characters while my fighters attack their front?

Thus, as much as like the compelling idea, the execution of the game seems like they missed some really obvious features that would seem to be obvious in a party-based game of this nature. Perhaps with a patch they can fix these things, but at the moment the game quickly becomes so frustrating it makes me want to stop even though it is a game I would easily play a lot with these minor fixes.

Other then the name starting with "wiz" and the logo looking like the classic "wizardry" logo it has nothing to do with Wizardry.

Spells are randomly given at level up. My good priest started with create wounds while a random priest I found started with heal wounds and later learned create wounds within a level.

It appears to run off classic D&D rules in which a lower AC is better then a higher one. It also runs off of a limited number of spells per dungeon trip by level like spells per day. The lower AC might confuse some players as its not mentioned anywhere in game that I saw and limited spells by level instead of a mana pool creates a huge disadvantage to players. In the almost 2 hours that I played the game I was finally seeing more then just click attack enemies, I was seeing enemies with spells and abilities. They can attack the entire party in one go. Spells per trip limits your healing of the group, at least until you get something that can heal the party. Again spells are randomized on level up.Also there are rogue monsters that get multple actions, such as moving and attacking or attacking twice in the same turn. The party does not get that option.

If you die you age up unless you spend WZ, the in game currency, to prevent that. WZ is aquaired through quests, acheivments, and killing creatures.

There are Red, blue, and yellow dots on the player portraits and around their base that the game does not tell you what they do. I have yet to figure it out myself.

The over all gameplay is click to move and click to attack, buy limited gear in town, and run quests. Most of the quests I have seen are get to the bottom floor.

While moving through the dungeon enemies respawn up to either a set number of times or until you have explored the full dungeon. Again the game does not say which. While moving you use up HW, Holy Water, that protects your stamina. Should your HW run out you take 1 point of damage per step. The game is "kind" enough to randomly place two items to restore your HW on the floor you start on. The items can resture 1/4, half, or all of it. Again it is random as to which ones you get. You start with 9000 HW upon entering the dungeon but you lose about 12 each step. Why 12? I dont know. Two for every member of the party? Why not simplify it to one drop per party member and then cut the bar in half?

Lastly, the achievments alone should give you an indiciation on just how much of a grind the game is.

I wouldnt recomend this game. Its just trying to sell you on the name alone.

I was quite suspicios towards this game - for not few months I have just "walked by".
I knew Wizardry 7, 8, but I also knew that the game frenchise changed a bit when it moved to Japan.
Hence my scepticism.

I installed, started the game. I liked what I saw, my my scepticism stayed firm.
Tutorial dungeon - pretty confusing for me (expectations clash with real game)

I finished 3 tutorial dungeons and started to play with the starting party.
Ok, no hero/party creation (in the fashion I am used to - I am used to select class, race and then distribute stat and skill points)
Wizardrogue generates the heroes in pretty fully-automated way, their equipment and max level depends on the overall quality mark (C, UQ, R, SR, ... C=worst, SR=best)
I was also shocked that you can replace weapons + shields only (not armor and there is nothing else, no rings, no hats, helmets...nothing)
Funny fact, when you own one sword for too long, you are same or even more eficient with it than with new, but much more expensive sword (still it is worth replacing them, as you can grow proficient with the new one too, but with higher end-results)

So far all good, nearly everything is new, but I like it. There is perma-death, but with some luck you can avoid it fully (normally when your party is killed, it returns back to city... for free, ressurection is more tricky/expensive)

New is not bad, I start loving it.
Wizrogue brings back good old dungeon hype (plan each step and pray that your decision is really wise)
Damage spells, healing spells, buff/debuff spells - all combined can make your party super efficient, but:
- only thiefs can use ranged weapons (you don't buy ammo, each time you enter dungeon, you have set ammount of ammo, higher your level, more ammo you get, but when you shoot it all out, that's it)
- same for spells : each hero can cast only limited ammount of spells / tier / dungeon.
- melee : this goes infitie, but you can harm only frong line of enemies, so when the enemy group has some cunning casters in back rows - cutting em down in melee poses big risks.
- you have 'energy' with the code name of HW - this usually starts with 3000 and goes down by each step you make. Does HW reach zero - you are a goner (like killed) -> may sound nasty, but brings extra thrill in the game. (also makes you think twice before mindlessly running through the dungeons)

What the game does not provide in creation phase, returns in the promotion phase.
- leveling may also be automated, but there are plenty ways to gain XP (even by 'consuming' other, not needed heroes :D)
- leveling your C hero up to max level, unlocks an option to PROMOTE him - extra fun (extra costs too) . Should you not have enough money (or WJ - VIP currency), you need to rely puerly on your luck to gather 3 special artefacts, that are required to promote. But should you get them, you can promote your C hero to UQ hero (with adequate bonuses) and UQ to R and R to SR...
So the game begins to be fun not only in the margins of dungeon crawling, but also around your party / group management, overall economics (as you profile is not tied to one party, or few heroes - you can change / delete / hire them at free will - you will always keep your progress, resources, dungeon status)
Dungeon status : what levels you have unlocked.

And this is the point, where the simple looking game becomes nicely complex and worth each penny one paid for it.
I wish there wuld be more games like this.

Totally love this game.

Wizardry was a series of RPG games that lasted 20 years, from 1981 to 2001, and despite being born in the West, caused and still causes a very large impact in Japan. It’s possible to get lost amidst so many japanese tributes. The games of the Wizardy Empire series, Elminage and Etrian Odyssey are just some of the many homages made in the land of the rising sun. Wizrogue - Labyrinth of Wizardry, developed by Taito, seeks to re-imagine this series as a roguelike, and despite having emerged as a free game to play for mobile platforms in Japan, is now available worldwide on Steam, in a premium version, and compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.

First of all, I need to clarify that this game has little to do with Wizardry. Sure, you control a team of six characters at the same time and the spells and some monsters are alike the ones seen on the Wizardry games, but that’s all. Also, Wizrogue isn’t a true roguelike per se. Of course, the game is turn-based and has procedural generation, but the permanent death works differently, as you can revive your characters. The exception is when you don’t have such amounts of gold or WizJewels enough to guarantee a 100% success rate on the revival and you need to try with your luck – if it fails, your character dies forever. This is a hell of a punishment when it happens, since it takes too long to level up your team.

But after all, which definition would be better for Wizrogue since it has a bit of Wizardry, a bit roguelike, but It’s not exactly neither? I like to think of Wizrogue as an RPG where grind is the focus, that is - the focus is always to train and train to raise characters more and more - as well as in Disgaea, Cladun, Siralim, among others. The reason of this whole grind, however, has more to do with the game's past than with a design choice of developers.

When Wizrogue was on Android smartphones, when it was exclusive to Japan, its model was free to play with microtransactions. These microtransactions were to buy WizJewels, which are super hard to obtain and take a lot of time to accumulate enough of them, which forced players to open the wallet to progress faster. The gold is obtained in the dungeons fairly quickly, but it has little value in the game, since WizJewels are essential for important things like recruiting elite heroes or increasing your inventory. The conversion to the PC has adopted the premium model - there’s no microtransactions, but even so a thoughtful conversion into better WizJewels earnings was not well done. This point is a watershed that can make you hate the game (if you prefer something with a faster progression) or have fun with it (if you like grinding).

The gameplay consists of breaking down different dungeons, which can be played over and over (but always with a different design thanks to the procedural generation) or in the so-called Master Labyrinths, which are special dungeons that can be completed only once and have rare loot. After winning nine common dungeons, the tenth always brings a boss battle or some special goal that needs to be completed to win. After that, you will raise one level on the ranking, and there are 15 rankings available in total. From the second ranking is how things get pretty brutal and you're going to need a lot of your characters to get ahead without dying all the time. You start the game with six Bronze tier heroes that can reach up to level 15. Silver tier heroes can reach up to level 30 and gold tier heroes up to level 45. I suggest you to start saving WizJewels as soon as possible to recruit elite heroes (Bronze and Gold tiers), which will make your life much easier without gambling on death.

Not everything is grind in Wizrogue. When you complete a dungeon for the first time, you get some rewards, such as tickets to recruit more heroes or to buy materials to fortify your team, plus a small amount of WizJewels. If you play in online mode, which is still for singleplayer (there is no multiplayer mode), from time to time you can find other players who are also in the same dungeon as you, and in those encounters you receive a special skill that will last only for that match. The online mode also brings a bit of free to play past of the game, giving random rewards every day you log in. If you prefer, you can also play in offline mode, which was added after many players requested in the forums, but the offline mode does not have these cool details of the online, which makes the game also more difficult. Anyway it is a good option to be able to play without internet connection, especially since we will not stop playing if the servers are closed, which has happened already with the mobile version.

Finally, Wizrogue is a game that can please you if you are looking for an uncompromising RPG that yields a daily match here and there, taking into consideration that the main goals are grind and battles. If you're looking for a good story you won’t find it here , since the plot of the game is extremely simple and the story develops only after the end of each ranking or in certain dungeons at higher ranking levels, and yet leaves many gaps.

Pros:
* Fun and quick to play
* Great to play while you also do something else
* Completing a ranking is quite rewarding

Mixed:
* Gameplay focused on grinding (which may please or not)

Cons:
* Elite equipment is so rare that it’s almost nonexistent
* There is no keyboard or controller support. It’s only possible to play with mouse

Summary: Overly simple party-based dungeon crawler
Multiplayer: Not really
Completion: 40+ hrs
Cards: Yes
Cloud: Yes

Wizrogue is a 3D roguelike party-based dungeon crawler. That alone caught my attention, and there's a lot to like about Wizrogue. I love the presentation in this game. It looks good, it runs well. The game has a a decent amount of polish for what it is. By all rights I should have loved this game. Unforunately the gameplay leaves a bit to be desired.

I recommend running the tutorial at the start, as it does a good job bringing you up to speed on the basics. The controls are simple enough, and can be played entirely with the mouse, unfortunately the game does not support keyboard controls, which would have been useful for finding traps and such. There are no reach weapons in this game, hence the back row should be dedicated to a support, or as backup in case someone in the front dies.

When a character dies, you may attempt to raise them in town, but there is risk of failure unless additional funds are provided. Failure means the character turns to ash, which you may then attempt to revive again, but a failure this time means the character is outright gone. This is only a minor inconvenience, as the cost to revive is generally inconsequential, and makes me wonder why it exists.

At the main menu, the game bombards you with login bonuses. It's originally a mobile game, and it shows. The game will constantly throw bonuses for everything up to a point. The main story takes place under the Normal Labyrinths. It's mostly standard faire save-the-land, but story segments are scattered so far and few that it's easy to forget what happened by the time the next one comes along. The dialogue tends to be weird, as a character may speak in fantasy faux-English, while another one speaks very modernly.

As a roguelike, dungeons are procedurally generated. It's an overly simple generation, as there's only two architectural features you will ever see - rectangular rooms and thin hallways. The tiles don't change much either, there's only two types as far as I know. Sometimes maps may include fancy features like teleporters or incredibly annoying dark rooms that periodically light up. It's still a repetitive experience though.

One of the most baffling decisions I've ever seen is the fact that treasure chests will physically block the square it's on. It interrupts the flow of combat, as you must open the chest to move on if it's blocking a hallway. It will eat up haste turns to open chests. It could even be possible the item in the chest is unwanted. Worst case, the chest may be trapped, and you have no choice but to open it. They make good improvised walls I suppose, allowing an opportunity to rest, but I'd rather have chests I can walk over.

Equipment is out of whack. It's surprising how quick it is to buy the best gear available. New equipment won't be seen for a good chunk of the game, if at all. At that point, only character levels will be the source of further improvement. The magic in this game is out of whack too. Curing weak afflictions consumes high level spell slots. Healing and attack spells do not scale, unless it heals to full or kills instantly (which tends not to work anyway). As health approaches several hundreds, these spells won't do much at all. However, magic will become very important for progress later on, and if you can get your hands on bishops, by all means use them.

Leveling up is out of whack too. Trying to gain levels in 90% of the content would be a painfully slow process. To address this, there are daily gem dungeons which provide ridiculous amounts of experience (seems to be based on rank? days played or something) by comparison, and are easy to complete. New players wouldn't know about this and would struggle to even gain useful spells. Even then, trying to hit high levels takes a very long time.

Even with strong grinding, the later dungeons are just brutally difficult. Critical hits from ninjas and others are capable of killing a character outright, regardless of their HP, and can do so with regularity. On top of that, they and other thief types are able to move/attack twice per turn. Other enemies may have huge health or inflict large AoE damage. Battles become all about attrition, and enemies are much more expendable than you are. Encounters become so dangerous or resource-intensive that it becomes a better idea to avoid encounters as much as possble and go straight for the dungeon boss if any. This is where magic ends up being a necessity, as you can use spells to cloak yourself from enemies, find stairs, reveal traps, and more. Or you could make use of what has to be a bug to essentially never die.

This game has an interesting feature that allows you to change classes, retaining spells you've learned previously, but there are many caveats to this that the game does not tell you at all. HP growth plummets to +1 per level once changed. Your stats become the absolute minimum to become that class (though all characters can max all stats eventually by leveling up). Your previously learned spells will be capped at 2 per level, though there's supposedly a way around this, but it involves... more grinding! ...And that's not really worth it.

The game graphics are pretty good. I like the miniatures look, and all the 3D models look nice. It's a shame that there's basically only two dungeon tilesets, and that all maps have the same two types of structures - rooms and hallways. It would have been nice to see grass or outdoor environments. How about a few trees, rocks or ponds here and there? The music is decent enough. It's about what one might expect out of a fantasy dungeon crawler.

While the game hasn't crashed on me, there are some bugs. For one, every created character is a male, despite portraits suggesting otherwise. It may very well be a common fashion choice in the world of Wizardry, but there is a curious amount of male adventurers in this world. Conversely, all story characters that join you and the special random samurai are female. Other random bugs: Sometimes I can't close a character screen until a short while. On one Party Status screen, everything was in Chinese. I've been stuck in the same square as an enemy before. I also noticed certain things were not priced the way they should be.

I have a lot of mixed thoughts on Wizrogue. They clearly put effort into making it look pretty, it's just that the gameplay feels remarkably lacking compared to other roguelikes. I give Wizrogue a C-. I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel to this game. If they do, I'd like to see much more environments, a more balanced combat system, and significantly less grind. One last note, those who played the game before achievements were added will have to start a new game to get them. Or at least I had to.

I picked this up on sale for two bucks. For two bucks? Not bad.

It's very much a mobile game, converted to remove the whole monetization scheme. It's Wizardry in name and flavor only - it's more of a pseudo-roguelike dungeon crawler. You got six duders, you equip them with stuff, you run dungeon after dungeon with a "time limit" in the form of spaces moved while having "holy water" (i.e. "movement points" that you can increase with items). The advanced currency trickles in, so it'll take quite a while to get what you want, but at least there isn't an overall energy meter. You can play to your heart's content.

I'm giving it a tentative thumbs up, if you can catch it on sale. It's a nice time waster and has the "new Wizardry" smell on it.

The lady singing the intro theme probably deserved more money than she was paid.