Wizordum 1.0 Playthrough: Chapter 3
1After replaying the first two chapters, it's finally time to witness the brand-new conclusive chapter released with 1.0.
We've finally reached the snowy mountain biome, and Chapter 3 introduces a couple of others, as well - including one that absolutely exceeded any of my expectations for what this game's engine would pull off.
Another aspect that exceeded my expectations is the secret level, which completely blew me away right from the start. If you were hoping for more 90s references, there are plenty to be found.
The final levels and final boss certainly manage to provide quite the dramatic conclusion. If anything, I wish the final arena didn't suffer similarly to the Chapter 2 boss arena in terms of fading out aggressively over distance - I seriously had to get up closer to the final boss just to get a good look at it, but doing so can be somewhat unsafe given a couple of its attacks.
I actually felt that the most challenging parts of the game were a couple of the arenas in levels before the final boss; there is one particular enemy type that I feel was maybe not particularly well-tuned, as it can get the jump on you from outside your field of view and sap a bunch of your health or block your movement before you even realize what's going on, because you're preoccupied with the other 5 enemies in front of you. It also didn't help that one particular arena featured patches of lava, which you're absolutely going to step in without realizing because 80% of the enemies in the arena will have you aiming upward, not to mention the lava patches sort of have ridges on the sides which make them easy to overlook until you're right on top of them.
The difficulty balancing has honestly felt rather odd, because for 95% of the game I was at over 100% health on medium difficulty, but then there were these few places where my health would just completely melt in 5 seconds. Of course, it doesn't help that I constantly forget to use my character's skills and basically never use the inventory, because there's too many things to choose from plus shallow caps on each item or extremely long cooldowns on each skill, which gets me stuck not feeling confident enough to consume them now rather than saving them for later. IMO the game would be more enjoyable with far fewer inventory/skill actions, and most of the time I played as if those don't exist. (To be fair, that's also kind of how I play Heretic - use Quartz Flasks and occasionally Tomes of Power, ignore almost everything else. The difference is Wizordum's stack limit is far lower...)
Ignoring my inventory/skill overload issue, I would 100% recommend Wizordum to anyone who likes early-90s-inspired FPS games, so long as you're prepared for levels that are closer to Quake in complexity (which for me was a welcome surprise). The graphics, sound/music, and level design are excellent.