Wandness is a roguelike that’s insanely easy to pick up and understand. It’s a simple enough game that you’ll probably get how everything works within an hour, but I’m not entirely sold on what it has at the moment. Let’s talk about it!
Full disclosure, but I did get a review copy from the devs and gave it a fair shot for a few hours.
Simple is More
Let’s start off with the good part. I did like how the game is extremely easy to learn, especially if you’re already a huge fan of the genre like I am. While I can’t deny that it’s probably too basic at the moment, it has just enough content to at least make your runs feel varied.
Slinging Spells!
The game’s premise is simple: You pick a character, clear a level, get some new weapons/perks, and then proceed to the next area. Rinse and repeat until you either die or reach the final zone.
All of the weapons are just variations of wands, and their names speak for themselves. The damage wand hurts more, the critical wand has a chance to crit, the swift wand lets you dash more, etc. Each wand also starts with a random set of elements and classes, and getting more wands that match one another will unlock bonus passive effects.
For example, having two wands that are attuned to fire will cause a burning trail to follow you around at all times, hurting anything that steps on it. A pair of berserk wands will activate a perk that makes you deal more damage when you have low health. And so on and so forth…
The interesting part is that the wands themselves are only modifiers. Each wand starts with a (usually) random projectile. It can be a magic ball, an explosion, or even a sword made of pure energy. Both wands and projectiles can be upgraded, and you can mix and match them whenever you want!
On top of these, you can find components as you go through the levels. These are just extra modifiers that you can add to each wand, and they add stats like more damage, bigger projectiles, or faster attack cooldowns.
When upgraded, components can even affect wands above and/or below the one they’re attached to. With the right choices and placements, you can make some “overpowered” builds.
Grinding Unlockables
Like most roguelike titles, Wandness has a lot of stuff you can unlock by simply playing over and over again. You earn a number of stars each run, and as you accumulate more, you continue to go through the list of unlocks.
It’s a fairly simple system. As you play more, you’ll start to see new weapons, magic, and more as drops in each level or in the shops.
If you prefer doing specific challenges to unlock new content, that’s exactly how you can get new characters to play as. They each have their own unique starting stats and list of usable weapons. These challenges aren’t really anything deep.
You’ll probably unlock most of them without thinking about it at all, so if you’re a completionist, the only thing you have to worry about it the long and arduous grind for stars.
Strange Design Choices
Now come the parts that I’m not particularly fond of. Just to preface this section, I’m not claiming to be some expert in game balance, since I do love me some broken and imbalanced mechanics. However, in this case, my issue is more with how the game feels rather than how fair it is.
Cooldown Confusion
It took me a run to notice this, but adding components and upgrading your weapons makes you attack slower. Saying it out loud doesn’t as bad, since yeah, you’re trading attack speed for potentially more damage.
Well, that does sound like a good trade on paper, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel great in practice. It can even get you killed!
You see, the game is really fast-paced. Levels typically only last a minute, kind of like in Brotato, and enemies will start swarming you right from the start. So… you can probably imagine how having a slow attack speed works against that.
Unless you have a bunch of cooldown reduction perks, attacks can get ridiculously slow to the point where a wand might not even trigger more than ten times in each level.
Imagine getting a max level wand from a chest and finding out that it takes an entire business day to send an attack that’s only slightly better than the weaker version. Yeah, not so fun. I signed up for a roguelike power fantasy, not a bullet hell game where I might get a kill every quarter of a minute.
Anticlimactic End
Even if you can look past the slow attack speed, which isn’t entirely unmanageable, a finished run just kinda ends on a disappointing note.
Rather than having any kind of final boss, you just kinda play another regular area with a two-minute timer. Throughout the entire stage, a pair of elites will spawn, and they’ll just keep coming in pairs if you manage to kill them.
It’s not really an exciting end to a run. Once the timer’s up, regardless of how many enemies you kill (or not, if you’re too slow to do so), you just get a “You Win!” message and… that’s it.
Once I realized that this was gonna be the entire loop, I didn’t really play for much longer. As much as I appreciate the replayability and repetitiveness of the genre, this game in particular doesn’t really give me much reason to continue grinding it.
An Optimistic Outlook
While I don’t really enjoy it in its current state, I don’t think Wandness is unsalvageable. They could tweak things to actually satisfy that “power fantasy” feel that players often look for in these games, and just adjusting the attack speed mechanic a bit would help with that.
I’m not really a downer when it comes to most games, especially not with indie titles, so I’d like to think that the devs will at least change things around based on the feedback they’ve gotten. I’m not the first to bring up how weak you’ll feel in this game, and I definitely won’t be the last if it stays in its current state.
For now, I’d say at least wait for a sale before you try this out. It’s not in early access, so I can’t really claim that it isn’t finished yet. Let’s hope it gets updated at some point, and if it does, I might just give it another shot!