The Wizards: Enhanced Edition

The Wizards Enhanced Edition is a pretty fun VR fantasy adventure that brings consistent thrills to the PSVR in its cool spellcasting and its polished presentation. You’ll feel like a real, powerful wizard slaying orcs and goblins and lots of other crazy creatures — and the launch price of $24.99 is pretty sweet too. The relatively short length and one-note gameplay might spoil the magic a little bit, but there’s no doubt that this is a VR game that all aspiring warlocks should consider trying.

The Enhanced version of The Wizards is an absolute joy to play. It has a great movement system with zero locomotion, the gesture-based battle is fabulous and the overall art direction and graphics are superb. We had some major issues when the game was losing track of the Move Controllers, but besides that, this is one of the best ways to feel like a true spellcaster.

Making gestures to cast your spells is amazing and very funny, even when you start noticing some repetitiveness while you progress in The Wizards - Enhanced Edition.

A light and entertaining alternative to heavy-weight shooters like Raw Data and In Death, The Wizards gives the player great satisfaction in creating spells with their own hands, and that's simply amazing.

It isn’t as accurate as a full roomscale VR experience, but nonetheless The Wizards on PSVR takes you into a world where you enjoy the power of magic as a result of your gestures.

The Wizards is a step in the right direction. Casting spells is a blast and very intuitive. While the game does have some of the shortcomings that plague most VR games, this one makes up for it with the fact that you get to play as a wizard. The game is pretty meaty and has plenty for you to do. It looks pretty good too, minus a few less than ideal animations. Unfortunately The Wizards falls a bit short of being amazing. A shallow gameplay loop and content that grows stale after a while. I learned all the spells very quickly and I found myself wanting a little more by the end of the game. This time, not in a good way. Despite all that, I still enjoyed my time with The Wizards. It really is a lot of fun. I’m just not sure when or if I’ll get back to it.

The Wizards: Enhanced Edition is a very exciting and addictive (at least while it lasts) first person action adventure now redesigned for PSVR (the PC version it´s already available over a year before this PS4 port). And it is one of the best games in its genre for PSVR.

On the gamut of magic-based first-person action games, The Wizards: Enhanced Editions is definitely one of the better ones. Its spell-casting system is interactive without being too cumbersome and the campaign mode packs a solid amount of content. Plenty of collectibles, a replayable Arena mode, and lots of mission augmentations add up to this being a really fun journey. But some of the repetition, relatively short length, and recycled wave-shooter-style mission structures left us wanting a bit more creativity. I absolutely enjoyed my time with The Wizards, but with a few additions it could have been the definitive VR spell-casting game.

The Wizards: Enhanced Edition allow you to live in a fantasy world. But HTC Vive and Oculus Rift could be a better choice than PlayStation VR for this game.

Overall, The Wizards creates a nice environment to explore and provides a short adventure to draw gamers into a magical land. Unfortunately, the unpredictable VR controls frustrate gameplay and are a distraction from totally enjoying an immersive wizard experience.

The Wizards offers a slight change of pace from the wave based shooters PSVR is flooded with. You're still taking out waves of enemies as they run towards you but this time you're using gestures to conjure spells and it works very well. It's quite short and even then the constant battles do become repetitive but the spell upgrades do give a decent incentive to replay levels.

Not only is it a lot of fun, as a magician, I feel really powerful when I throw my magic on my enemies with a single wave of my hand. However, they also have to be a real threat. Too often, it's the mass of enemies that bring me to my knees or the Playstation camera loses its connection to the Move controller in a hectic moment, sealing my failure.

Casting gesture-based spells is a great concept for a VR game but ensuring that the gestures register properly can make The Wizards: Enhanced Edition an irritating experience. That being said, it can be quite fun if you're willing to adapt to its frustrating aspects.

With above-average level design and usually enjoyable combat, The Wizards is an entertaining, but short-lived experience held back by technical inconsistencies. The immersion of the combat butts heads with the sometimes-cumbersome controls, but these issues didn’t detract much from the times I felt like a badass wizard showering hordes of enemies with lightning bolts and fire bombs.

The Wizards nails the dream of having magic at your fingertips, but never goes as far as to make the magic feel all that useful.

Beautiful visuals and a cool gesture-based magic system can’t save The Wizards: Enhanced Edition from an inscrutable progression system and some dire technical issues. Fantasy fans will find some enjoyment from the puzzles and the fun narrator, but some strange design decisions end up kneecapping the experience.

If you dismiss the more apparent flaws, then you'll find The Wizards: Enhanced Edition to be an average adventure title. The quest itself plays out fine and enemies are fun to defeat, even if they don't pose too much trouble. However, the accuracy issues are simply too great that they transform what could be a game-changing VR wizard experience into an exercise in flailing limbs. It isn't a terrible game, but don't expect something top-tier in the VR space.

The Wizards Enhanced Edition successfully plays its position, but it would be even better with more standout characteristics in its familiar fantasy genre.

The Wizards sounds awesome on paper and is a great idea but the unpredictable controls were more distracting and frustrating than I liked.

None of it is enough to keep you coming back for long, though; it’s stuck in the stone mage (sorry). [Issue#161, p.84]

As a brief VR experience filled with short bursts of play, you could do a whole lot worse, but anyone besides hardcore fans of sorcery and snooty accents expecting a longer-lasting and/or immersive experience should perhaps look elsewhere.