Wizard’s Legacy Review (Meta Quest & Steam VR)

If you’re a fan of virtual reality and dungeon-crawling rogue-lite gameplay, you might be keen on checking out Wizard’s Legacy. Of course, VR, like most games on other platforms, can be a hit or miss. So, you’re probably looking out for reviews on the game before diving into a run-through. Well, just to be sure the game is worth your time, we’ve gone dumpster diving for you, highlighting everything you can expect in our Wizard’s Legacy review below.

Search for a Cure

The game kicks off with the player spawning on a hub area. Walking around, you spot two NPCs, a child sleeping under a tent, a treasure chest, a resource area where you can buy new skills and upgrades, and a portal into the dungeons, among other stuff. 

It’s unclear who the NPCs are or who the child is. We aren’t told why the child is asleep. I only got some answers when I went looking through the story description on the game’s Steam page. So, apparently, you’re a desperate father whose child has fallen ill. You’ve tried everything to cure him of the mysterious illness. 

Nothing has worked, at which point Hex ‘O’ Cura, a magical book, offers you the cure, but at a cost. He asks you to forge into a series of deadly dungeons to uncover the secret of the Corruption. The magical book gives you Gyratio, a mystical artifact that keeps your child alive but not permanently healed. 

With each run, you gain partial healing for your son. So, you have no choice but to return to the dungeon’s grim world on multiple runs, over and over, until you defeat the final boss, an ancient unnamed evil.

Potentially Intriguing

On paper, the plot sounds intriguing. Unfortunately, the details are scarce. You’re left with too many questions that the game doesn’t attempt to put at ease. Mostly, you’re wandering around, pushing buttons, and flailing your arms in anticipation of some story development. 

The NPCs at the hub area, for one, seem to have no significance to the story. One of them looks like a knight, and he has a yellow glow around him that suggests he serves a bigger purpose. Yet you cannot interact with them, whether by pushing buttons or using gestures. 

The other NPC, at least, has a menu pop-up that allows you to interact with them. They offer you health and potions that you can buy using in-game gold currency. Still, the potions and health don’t really tip the scales in your favor that much, with a minimal advantage gained in battle.

Bring it On

In the hub area, you’ll see a chest that gives you the freedom to choose the type of elemental power you’d like to wield. Some of your options include fire, ice, and lightning. While lightning allows you to inflict damage on multiple enemies at once, fire has more impact. 

You can only equip one type of elemental power at a time. Fire-based attacks inflict more considerable damage, with often a few attacks being enough to take down enemies, including bosses. So, you’ll most likely be inclined to equip fire-based elemental magic nearly all the time you forge into a fresh run.

In that sense, Wizard’s Legacy offers little incentive to experiment with all the tools at your disposal. Especially when you gain upgrades and buffs like the ability to inflict double damage, fire-based attacks run unopposed. Just two spells are enough to take down enemies and a few hits to take down bosses.

Level Up

Unfortunately, that’s as far as the value of upgrades goes. After each run, you gain rewards in the form of potions and extra buffs. You can also upgrade your skills and abilities at the hub area in exchange for in-game gold currency. However, the rewards and upgrades barely have an impact on the battlefield. 

Some of the potions are throwables that you can use, like grenades, to inflict area-of-effect damage. However, they don’t seem to chip away that much from the health of enemies. Instead, you’re forced to rely solely on your spells to take down foes. 

It would have been grand if you could then upgrade spells. Sure, you can string together combos. Wizard’s Legacy has been marketed as a VR game whose combat requires gestures to execute. The gesture for the lowest level of a spell-based attack works fine, although with some inconsistency at times. 

The gesture for the second and third levels, though, barely works. These are meant to be more powerful attacks you can use when you feel overwhelmed by enemies. But they don’t work at all, leaving you stranded as swarms of enemies come at you. 

Wonky Controls

It’s the most frustrating bit of gameplay because you have to stop to “summon” the first level of the spell you currently have equipped. Then, do the gesture for the second level and then the third. But neither of the latter two works, leaving you vulnerable to enemies, especially when they spawn in waves.

At some point, you’ll upgrade to a bow and arrow, but the controls for that, too, are shaky. You’ll also unlock secondary spells and ultimate ones, but with the basic ones being unreliable, it leaves little motivation to experiment. In the end, you’ll gain more in-game gold currency but lack motivation to buy new skills and upgrades because the payoff just isn’t worth the trouble. 

As for the enemies, they are pretty generic. They are all similar in their behavior and design. All they do is chase you while the archers shoot arrows at you. While the archers keep you on your toes, you end up spending most of your time running backward to evade incoming fire since you have no shield in the early stages of the game. When you finally do unlock a shield, the controls are wonky, too.

The bosses are a nice change of pace, though. The first boss is pretty fast and raises your adrenaline for the better part of the fight. But with the wonky controls, you barely stand a chance. You need more powerful spells to take the boss down, but the second and third spell combo barely work. Remember that you have to stop to make the respective gestures for the combo, leaving you vulnerable to the more agile bosses. 

Into the Dungeons

Visually, Wizard’s Legacy looks uninteresting. The hub area is sparsely designed, with barely intriguing features. The level design, too, is bland. After multiple runs, the arenas look the same. At some point, you can climb ladders and ropes. But they haven’t been integrated with combat to add an extra layer of strategy. If anything, combat is pretty straightforward, hardly weaving moments of thinking outside the box. 

Some of the sound effects are too loud and annoying, but you cannot tone them down or switch them off altogether. It’s worth mentioning also that the mechanics and overall gameplay are unintuitive. You can easily lose precious time trying to figure out how a specific skill works. And yes, the game does provide a tutorial section. But it still isn’t detailed and intuitive to easily find your way around the game. 

Wizard’s Legacy is a rogue-lite, meaning you’ll repeat the same runs multiple times, each fresh run giving you new skills and abilities. The rewards at the end of each run are random enough to keep the game enticing. You never know what to expect. Moreover, you have the freedom to choose which cards and potions to equip, which, according to Steam, will influence how the story unfolds. However, the resources gained didn’t seem to have much of an impact on gameplay. If anything, they felt like they didn’t have a significant impact on the battlefield.

Verdict

It’s tricky. Casting spells in virtual reality sounds pretty intriguing. You could easily tap into your inner wizard, perfecting your elemental damage-dealing prowess. Wizard’s Legacy attempts to capture the feeling of being a powerful wizard. It gives you a variety of tools to use at your discretion. Meanwhile, it throws you into a series of dungeons that crawl with ancient evils and dangerous bosses.

Unfortunately, the implementation of the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. The gesture-based combat system is pretty wonky. Most of the time, it doesn’t work, which can be pretty frustrating mid-battle. You end up losing a battle not because of a lack of skill but because the controls simply don’t work. The developing team claims to have patched some of the issues with the controls. They state, “We fixed the gesture drawing issue,” so perhaps the mechanics run smoothly now. They go on to add, “We are actively working to improve the overall gameplay experience, including level design, enemy variety, and boss encounters.”

Still, I would be cautious before diving into Wizard’s Legacy. There simply seems to be plenty of rough edges left to smooth. Level designs are uninspiring, and the story is nearly non-existent. If the controls are fixed, the level designs are more compelling, and the enemy variety provides more challenge, perhaps Wizard’s Legacy will offer a more worthwhile experience.