Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom

"Not for everyone, and definitely not for me."

I know that I am not the right person to review this game, and if mysteriously there is someone reading the crap I write here better know that this is the first time I play a Wizardry game, and that it is also the first time I play a game like this (I have played Arcana which is a first person rpg but it is also completely different from classic first person rpgs like this one). So, if you are a Wizardry fan please keep in mind that this is just an honest review from someone that has played the game and didn’t liked it, I am going to try to describe why, but I have nothing against the series or the genre.

Wizardry V is a dungeon crawler, and the main objective in a dungeon crawler is to profane tombs to steal their treasures, only that in this game you won’t have time to steal anything because most of time you will occupied trying to figure out where the hell you are. I don’t know how is it possible not to get lost in this game, I haven’t seen a map or anything to help you orientate, where the hell is the map?. Ok, I know that making your own map is something very fun, but what isn’t fun is that everything in this game is monotonous and repetitive, all the dirty corridors in the dungeon look the exactly the same, they never change, once I managed (I don’t know how) to reach the entrance of a temple or a brotherhood, and I realized that it was a temple only because there was a little text that said so, because all the doors and walls were the same from any other room in the damned dungeon.

The gameplay is also terrible, the encounter rate is not very high, but the enemies always come in very large groups and you have lots of party members, so battling is a very long and tedious process, then you will always end up poisoned or with any kind of annoying and deadly status ailment, so if your group mysteriously survives the poison or whatever will kill you before you manage to go back to the town to heal.

The plot is non-existent and the character interaction is below zero mainly because there aren’t any characters aside from the heroes you create at the beginning of the game. Am I missing something here?, how can some people say that the plot is brilliant I there isn’t the slightest trace of story at sight?, not even a little text explaining that someone wants to conquer the world or something. I can only assume that something happens at the heart of the only dungeon in the game, because that dungeon is called The Maelstrom and the subtitle of the game is Heart of The Maelstrom, or maybe not, like president Bush would say if someone ever ask him about the number of states his country has : ”I haven’t got the slightest idea”.

The graphics are mediocre, the enemies are very cool but their sprites are very blurry and there aren’t any animation for both normal attacks and spells. Talking about the spells, the game never explains what the hell are they used for, that was fine with Nes rpgs, but we are not talking about Nes games here. The music is good, but nothing out of this world.

As I said before, I tried to like the game I swear, at the beginning I liked to wander around the dungeon, but only until I realized that it was everything the same all the time and that the enemies are all the time poisoning you and that all the chest have traps and that, in general, it is basically impossible to survive for more than five minutes.

No matter how hard I try, I just can’t imagine someone playing a game like this.

”My lack of vocabulary and grammatical errors (if there’s any) are because I’m not from an English speaking country, sorry about that.”

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 12/15/03