The Wizards - Enhanced Edition | PS VR | Review

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Carbon Studio’s award-winning spellcaster has made its way to PlayStation VR in “enhanced” form - now featuring a new stage, new cutscenes, checkpoints, performance improvements and more - but do these tweaks see the game hold up one year after its initial launch?

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by Sam Sant

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@SlamShotSam

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Developer: Carbon
Studio
Publisher: Carbon
​Studio
Platforms: PlayStation
VR, Oculus Rift, HTC
VIVE
Players: 1

You’re a wizard, as you might have already guessed, on an action-packed quest to eradicate enemies infesting the fantasy realm of Meliora. Anything deeper than that is mere narrative fluff, despite efforts to flesh things out with additional cinematics, as you’re guided by a sagely narrator similar in tone to the boisterous voice of Rebellion’s Strange Brigade.

As you travel throughout three distinct regions - spanning an idyllic township, dark mines and a stormy desert - you’ll encounter a variety of nasties to be dispatched with your arsenal of six elemental spells. This is where we’d assert that battle mage better describes The Wizards’ protagonist, considering just how lethal they are.

Casting isn’t limited by any kind of mana resource, allowing you to unleash havoc as quickly as you can whip out the nuanced hand gestures required to summon each of the game’s upgradeable magic tricks. Utilising two PlayStation Move controllers, you’ll motion to weave the arcane into existence while channelling your inner sorcerer; without this simple step - which poses an initial learning curve, but fast becomes second nature - the game would merely feel like a colourful iteration of your bog-standard shooter.

The often tangible feeling of power only grows as you level-up each spell individually, courtesy of gems found hidden in the environment and awarded in proportion to your score at the end of each level. As you gain competence and become all the more invested, you’ll begin to look more and more akin to a complete goof, but, inside that headset, you’re a carefree kid on a playground.

That’s an experience which has largely come to define the best that virtual reality has to offer, but, unfortunately, at times it can feel like The Wizards - Enhanced Edition is held back by the PlayStation platform, specifically the aged motion peripherals associated with it. Most motions translate well, though too often more complex spell gestures catastrophically fail in the midst of frantic combat. These situations aren’t excusable, but are at least understandable, though when a simple twist of the wrist fails to summon a fireball it’s hard to be as forgiving.

New to this iteration of the game is an optional head-tracked form of auto-aim, which is enabled by default and that’s definitely a good thing. Throwing is a motion that doesn’t often play well with the Move controllers, at least not with any real degree of accuracy, so the slightly sticky reticule is a must for reliably guiding your projectiles to their target. What’s more, it does a pretty good job of discerning exactly where you’re looking, allowing you to easily pick out priority targets in a crowd.

In-game movement and real-world comfort are handled well too, as The Wizards accommodates both teleportation and free movement, alongside seated and standing play. Expect to fiddle with your height settings if playing seated, mind, as we had to register at a minuscule 80 cm tall in order to align with the UI.

Utilising two PlayStation Move controllers, you’ll motion to weave the arcane into existence while channelling your inner sorcerer.

Getting this right also helps to achieve the perspective required to spot traps and puzzle elements, which litter the game’s eleven brief and fairly nondescript levels. Punctuated by a couple of visually impressive, but mechanically underwhelming boss encounters, the three-to-four hour adventure is fairly replayable due to the inclusion of Fate Cards. These gameplay modifiers are found hiding in chests and can be activated to turn the tides in or against your favour, most notably applying score multipliers to help with climbing the online leaderboards.

Then there’s Arena mode, which tasks you with defending three crystals, once again sights firmly set on outlasting the competition in order to climb leaderboards relevant to each of the three maps. It’s very familiar territory and, without co-op, it doesn’t really have legs.

At its best moments, when you’re fluently fighting off a swarm of ogres without feeling like the real battle is being waged with imprecise motion controls, The Wizards is an intoxicating realisation of any long-held magical fantasies. The PlayStation VR version can cause that illusion to crumble though, which is a burden not entirely shouldered by inferior hardware, as other games have managed to pull off the transition  just about seamlessly.

Pros

• Satisfyingly gesture to summon spells from thin air
• Auto-aim alleviates the pain of inaccurate throw gesture tracking
• Accommodating comfort and movement options
• Fate Card system lets you tweak difficulty to your exact liking...
• … Combined with online leaderboards, that’s reason enough to come back for more

Cons

• Motion controls are too often unreliable
• Story falls flat, despite being “enhanced”
• Run-of-the-mill boss encounters
• Arena mode gets dull pretty quickly

7/10