Vieo said:
Speaking of FPS Dungeon Crawls, has anyone ever played this one?
I never played it myself and only remember the game because it has the same name as that classic NES game everyone(?) loves. I was always tempted to pick this game up, but some reason I didn't. IGN seemed to like it a lot and said the game takes 100+ hours to complete.
Wizards & Warriors PC is a realtime first-person RPG that has no relation to the NES games. It was made by David Bradley, who also made Wizardry V-VII and Dungeon Lords (a more recent hack-and-slash game).
I got this game not having any idea about if it would be good or not, but was very pleasantly surprised. While it has some very real flaws, which affected its scores if you look at some reviews, once you learn to live with them the actual game is really, really great. The most obvious problems are that the interface is clumsy and requires more effort to use than it should, there are no keyboard hotkeys for anything (except, thankfully, movement), and the game wasn't quite finished, even patched, so there are some missing features or strange design decisions (the shop interface is a pain, some types of armor look cool but have almost no use without specific skills (that is, just use the highest AC armor that that character can wear, not something that seems to have been designed for that class, unless you've got a skill that makes up the difference), but the actual gameplay is fantastic, and it's a lot of fun. It's a complex game, with a six-character party, numerous skills and classes (and a three-tiered class system, with base classes and two levels of upgrade classes you can upgrade to if you follow the proper quest trees with that character), six schools of magic for the mages, etc... because of all the depth, it is much better if you have the manual and map that came with it. I found myself frequently referencing them, and while there is ingame mapping, it only reveals what you've explored, not the whole overworld like the paper map has, and the game doesn't have help for all of the skills and stuff ingame, only in external text documents I think and the manual. And unless you print them out those external text documents are useless while you're playing the game because of bugs that make it impossible to task-switch away from the game and come back... the screen just goes black and doesn't recover when you try to switch back. (There are also some issues with running the game in Windows XP; I don't have XP, but the site/forum link below should help you if you have problems -- the game can be made to run in XP if you know how.)
Despite its flaws, (and they do affect fun sometimes when you have to remember to back out of multilayered menus and switch characters just to do guild quests with each character, listen to the repeating "this is your next quest" speech each time you do so, etc...) though, the actual core gameplay is great. The graphics... well, they're good enough, in the overworld. Not amazing, but good enough... the dungeons clearly got most of the attention, though, and they really are the game at its graphical best. Between the fantastic dungeon level designs, challenging-but-not-too-challenging difficulty level, great soundtrack (some of the best "it can loop over and over and I don't even notice" music ever, I thought...), and fun real-time combat (it is slightly annoying that despite supposedly controlling a party of six characters to use ranged attacks you must back up and to use close-combat ones you must move forward, instead of being able to attack at range with the ranged ones and melee with melee attackers at the same time, but oh well. It works fine.), it's a great game. Don't let the issues scare you away; it's DEFINITELY worth playing for any first-person dungeon game who wants something that has some stylistic similarities to the old Wizardry games without being anywhere near as cruel to the player...
Best forum about the game I know of: (vital info for getting the game running in XP available there)
http://www.ironworksforum.com/ubb/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=4&submit=Go
Anyway, any fan of these games should buy it... but if you can, get a copy with the manual and map!
bengraven said:
However, this game looks great. To anyone who played it: How freeroaming is it? It gives me a Daggerfall vibe and that can only be good.
It's much more like Wizardry with real-time combat than Daggerfall (while real-time, the combat isn't hack-and-slash like TES -- you choose attacks and choose enemies, you don't swing the sword to attack or anything like that). There is a bit of free-roaming aspect, as there is a overworld (not TES massive by any stretch of the imagination, but decent sized for a normal RPG) and dungeons and at times you don't have to do them in order, but the game has a progression and you'll have to complete the quests in one area before moving on to the next one. I'm not much of a TES fan though... too nonlinear, I get bored, so I definitely preferred a more structured game like this one. Still though, try it. The story is solid, if not original, the voice acting is pretty good (all the dialog is voice-acted), and those dungeons... awesome stuff.
Reading this thread made me want to buy it and now I have, hopefully it's in good working condition as the Seller has great reviews with great positive feedback. Can't wait to play an Etrian Odyssey type game on the PS2 
