Wizard With a Gun Demo Preview

Wizard with a Gun was the game that intrigued me the most from this year’s Devolver Direct. I was excited to give this demo a shot and jump into the stylized world crafted by the developers over at Galvanic Games.

Wizard with a Gun takes place in a fantasy realm that has been completely devastated by the forces of chaos. At the start of the demo, your wizard unlocks the power to meddle with time allowing you to continue exploring the world while leveling up your equipment in order to defeat the chaos. While the story is clearly not the focus, there is still effort placed into making the world feel alive with the use of cinematics and musical tracks that deliver on the old west theme.

Wizard With a Gun‘s gameplay is built around an expedition loop that will have you jumping between the real world and an extradimensional wizard tower. The tower acts as both a home base and a safe zone. While you are in the main world, you are tasked with gathering more gears from mini-bosses, gathering resources to continue advancing your spellcasting ability, and building new structures within the tower.

The survival element is another key aspect of the gameplay. You only have a limited amount of time before the world is destroyed which will cause you to lose all your items. This forces you to return to the tower before time runs out or destroy chaos portals to add time to the clock.

While I like this idea in concept, it doesn’t play out all that well given the base time limit is only five minutes. The timer continually ticks down even while checking through menus. Additionally, some chaos portals barely add more than thirty seconds to the clock but take longer to destroy with the basic starting weapons. As a result, you’ll often be finding yourself making little progress and the feeling of exploration is greatly diminished. Areas (although randomized) are often similar enough that you may find yourself retreading similar territory and wasting valuable time.

I was annoyed by the time it took to gather the most important resources like wood or metal. For some reason, you aren’t given any sort of tool-crafting equipment from the start and your weapons do barely any damage to objects with lots of harvestable resources. After you advance your weaponry this becomes less of an issue. However, it left me feeling as though the game was more directly balanced for cooperative play rather than single-player expeditions given the additional hands mean double the resources.

Nonetheless, there are still some great elements here. The wild-west-meets-fantasy aesthetic is fantastic and allows for creative character design. The controls feel responsive but the movement is slightly floaty. Gunplay is fun with precise aiming and easy weapon swapping. There are also dozens of weapons to master and a large array of bullet types that can no doubt be combined to craft a variety of build options.

I enjoyed the base-building aspect of the game and customizing my own personal tower was quite satisfying. While I wouldn’t say Wizard With a Gun lived up to my personal tastes, I do still think it can be quite fun with a friend. There is a lot here in terms of progression that I think is very enjoyable so check it out if you haven’t yet.