Wands are so overrated; there’s nothing like a Wizard with a Gun. Incidentally, that’s also the name of the new game from Devolver Digital, the prolific developer with a knack for offbeat games, both small and large. This one fits nicely into the survival and roguelike labels, a cute but somewhat grindy mashup that could high-five the Don’t Starve series if they happen to find each other deep in the wilderness, except with more wizards.

Time Travel Wizardry

Your hapless wizard reluctantly turns out to be the only option to prevent the end of the world by traveling back in time in successive runs. But first, you must head to the tower that will serve as your safe house, the place where you are going to evolve, not ignoring a fair share of cosmetic additions on the side because there’s no place like home, even if a temporary one.

Customizing your wizard for the beginning of the adventure is the first step. With a decent selection of hats, robes, masks, and more, which isn’t quite bad for a character with a pitch-black face, you can make a first sketch of what you will turn out to be a few hours later.

Reaching the tower allows you to confirm that there are indeed a few strange contraptions in this place, one of them capable of rolling back time and giving you another shot at exploring the wilderness before all hell… actually, before all chaos breaks loose. There’s already quite a wealth of vicious creatures, but this is far from the full extent of it. Now, your task is to balance survival with the search for gears that let you explore more regions, find other bosses, and eventually put a stop to the forces of chaos.

You can learn more about the world by using your first edition tome to scan enemies and objects – some give you info, others unlock recipes for crafting. Upgrading the tome lets you scan more objects, many of these being furnishings for you to craft a cozy living spot inside the tower. To place an item you need the required resources, but also the tool known as Worldbuilder, which you will retrieve early on.

Inside the tower and even in the wilderness you also notice a very strange thing – some resources are simply beyond reach, with no solid ground to get there. Soon you are going to unlock a new tool, the Groundlayer, which as the name implies, lets you place tiles on the ground to form pathways. These come in different types requiring diverse resources, from grass to stone, so you’re not always locked into a specific one. This tool not only allows you to reach some resources and places that you previously could not, it may also come in handy to save a creature or two out there and reap the rewards.

The gameplay loop powering Wizard with a Gun is a solid and engaging one. You must roll back time to reset a new level with a procedurally generated layout, but you only have five minutes to get in and get out, as if a bank heist of cartoony style. You must search for the all-important gears to unlock new levels, the valuable arcane tomes, and collect all the resources you need to upgrade your research and crafting stations. There are quite a few mechanics at work and you must pay close attention to every single one if you want to upgrade your wizard, making him capable of taking out the stronger foes – sometimes their armor is so beyond your level that your shots don’t even make a scratch.

Let time run out and you lose all the items in your inventory, but thankfully you still get to keep your guns. The only way you can lengthen time and explore for longer is by finding these chaos creatures – or more truthfully, have them find you – and destroying them, with the resulting loot giving you a boost of varying amounts, including 30 seconds or three minutes, depending on the foe. With some luck and dedication, you can get that timer up to the double digits and have more than enough comfort to reach other biomes, including a swamp, tundra, and prairie.

The time pressure is an interesting addition to the game, a factor that you have to constantly juggle with your goals. You’ll often find structures that reveal a good chunk of the map and the location of a gear or other important objects, and considering the time it takes you to reach that and safely return to the portal – or finding another one – is what turns each run into a high stakes affair.

But it’s all a bit of a grind, that’s for sure. It does get somewhat tiring after a few hours of scavenging for resources, dealing with the limitations of the inventory, and having to return to the tower only because you must store some precious materials inside the chests or risk losing them forever. It’s a game that requires a few breaks here and there, and the appeal to return to it quickly isn’t quite there; it begs for some rest before finding the will for another sequence of runs.

Bullets in Time

A big aspect of Wizard with a Gun is, unsurprisingly, guns. Or in fact, the bullets that come out of them. You don’t have a great choice of guns to start with, only capable of crafting a wooden gun, with the rest found in the wilderness, including some machine wands, which are machine guns all but in name. However, you get an incredible array of bullet crafting and bullet customization options, which put quite a few twists to your exploration.

The normal bullets are the easiest to craft, but sooner you’ll find out that you have resources for incendiary bullets, poison bullets, electricity bullets, ice bullets, and more, each one with several possibilities for expansion with additional effects. Finding out the bosses weaknesses and which type of bullet is best suited for each creature is part of the game, with some interesting elemental combinations to use, such as turning a river into an electricity conductor, shocking the enemies. The frequent resource gathering and bullet crafting is quickly going to occupy an important slice of your gameplay.

One thing that somewhat irked me is the inventory limitation and issues inside the tower. As logical as they may sound, it’s a chore to adhere to such strict rules of crafting and rummaging through so many storage chests trying to find that item you need at the time. To further explain, to craft or upgrade one of the several things you need, only the items inside your personal inventory are taken into account. So, you must do some juggling to have those items ready with you, while the game could easily consider your overall stash – chests included – for the upgrades within the tower. This is a cumbersome and unnecessary design choice that deserved some extra thought.

Wizard with a Gun comes with a two-player cooperative mode that improves on combat, most of all, making all the dodging and shooting a lot more fun. While most of the time for this review was spent solo, the potential for a fun coop experience is clearly there.

Wizard with a Gun is a 2D isometric roguelike with charming stylized visuals, a heavy focus on crafting, and nice but somewhat repetitive resource gathering and bullet creation systems. It’s the kind of game that may sometimes feel a little overwhelming, forgetting that it should be more lenient with things such as inventory management to avoid frustration from setting in. Still, it’s fun in short bursts and overall a very solid game that gets more enjoyable the more you progress, the more time you get to stay inside the wilderness and discover all the surprises coming with the new biomes.

Rating: 8/10

Pros:

• Deep focus on crafting and customization
• Interesting gameplay loop
• Two-player cooperative mode
• Stylized visuals

Cons:

• Some heavy grind to be expected
• Inventory management isn’t ideal

Wizard with a Gun review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.