The Wizards: Enhanced Edition

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.