Rift Wizard 2
Rift Wizard 2 is a tough as nails traditional roguelike wizard simulator. You play as an immortal amnesiac wizard who must journey through the cosmos to defeat his nemesis. Each run, you’ll build a unique repertoire of spells, passive skills, and magical artifacts.
A massive list of unique spells, skills, and equipment means there are myriads of potential builds to explore, and procedurally generated levels mean every run presents the player with different challenges. Your wizard will grow incredibly powerful by the game’s conclusion, but tricky foes will attempt to grind whatever elaborate magical engine you have built to a halt. You must not only consider the end goal of your build, but how you will get there, and how to navigate the challenges along the way without derailing your spellbook into a useless pile of antisynergy.
Rift Wizard’s unique portal system means the player always has agency over what challenges they face. You choose which levels to visit, where to start, and how to spend your resources. There is no stealth or stair dancing in Rift Wizard: you must face each level head on and obliterate your foes with whatever tools you possess. Rift Wizard eschews randomness and complex combat formulas in favor of puzzle-like simplicity, where every game piece is easily understandable. Every victory is earned, every death deserved.
New in Rift Wizard 2 is the equipment system, allowing the player to find unique and powerful items each run that interact with the spells and passive skills in deep and exciting ways. Randomized equipment can perform crucial bridging functions in your build, allowing access to playstyles not otherwise possible: you could for instance, find a helmet that redeals all your ice damage as poison damage, opening up completely new uses for your poison spells. You could find a staff that converts fire damage to free Mercurize casts, unlocking a Mercurize-fire damage build which surely would make no sense in any other run. Or you might just find massive numbers of radius bonuses that make your fireballs way larger than normal. Every run perturbs the balance of the game in a way that emphasizes player creativity and on-the-fly decision making over the execution of pre-existing builds.
Rift Wizard 2 adds many new enemies to the game, including massive multitile monsters, new wizards, and procedurally generated variant monsters. You’ve fought ogres but have you fought Fae Ogres? Lich Ogres? Burning Ogres? Wereogres? Immortal Bone Wizards?
Along with the equipment system, the basic game mechanics have been rebalanced and revamped. HP and spell charges are recharged at the end of every level, but potions are much rarer. Damage redeals no longer work through immunity, demanding more carefully diversified spellbooks. SP is much harder to come by in the early game. Spell upgrades are now much more powerful, but limited to one per spell, encouraging bigger spellbooks that spread skill and equipment bonuses over many spells.
The goal of Rift Wizard 2 is to continually place the player in high pressure tactical situations that challenge their creativity and analytic abilities, and to create a strategic sandbox that rewards brilliance, experimentation, and adaptation to constantly changing circumstances. To create a sandbox that generates an infinite sequence of challenging and engaging wizard puzzles.
Game Discussion
Steam User 20
Look. This is a good game. I'm enjoying it a lot. But I HATE the fade out after death!!! HATE HATE HATE IT!!!
It's faster to close the damn game and re-launch it. What possible purpose does it serve in ANY GAME, nevermind in a game where you're guaranteed to die repeatedly??? It's just in the game to piss me off, and make me ponder uninstalling rather than doing another run.
Steam User 11
I am too stupid for this game. If you have a ripply brain like the ocean waves during a storm this will likely be for you. 10/10 Ego Check.
Steam User 10
I might be statistically one of the worst players to ever touch this game with nearly 100 hours played and zero dubs, but this game is tight if u like classic-style roguelikes with a heavy focus on strategy, immense build variety, and infinite replayability
Steam User 8
Maybe the best puzzle game on Steam. It's the kind that gives you a box full of Lego and a new shape to make each time. You could do it any which way with a whole bunch of pieces, but the fun's in grabbing a new bunch each time and figuring out how they'll fit together. Maybe trying to do it in as few pieces as possible, that kind of thing.
It's kind of a roguelike? But it's just pure tactics - if you ever played Hoplite on iOS/Android it's like that times a million.
You'll know within the refund window if you click with it, and if you do then you'll get your money's worth for sure.
All of the above also goes for Rift Wizard 1. Do a bit of research on which you'd prefer as they're very similar games that go in different design directions. 2 doesn't nullify 1, it's less of a sequel and more of the dev's do-over of an already great game.
If you want even MORE build synergy focus and less tactics, Path of Achra is that way.
Steam User 6
If you like Rift Wizard, then this sequel is a more robust and interesting evolution of that experience. Spell upgrades are impactful and unique and encourage repeat plays of the same spells as different builds. The equipment too, expands the build potential in fun directions. The challenges will push you to adapt to the play conditions in fun ways. The new game modes are also great, custom run allows anything to happen!
If you never played the first game, just jump in here and enjoy the superior experience! As of this review the game is still getting regular updates. Not little ones either, since release we have seen massive updates with new spells, skills, gear, and upgrades!
Steam User 5
Feels harder than the original which I don't have a problem with, but it's not necessarily harder in a good way, which I do have more of a problem with. What I mean by all that is the difficulty feels a tad opaque. It's a little tricky to explain this but essentially I would describe the distinction in terms of the fact that a game's difficulty comes down to "how many times do I need to have a crack at this before I get the hang of it?", whereas the transparency/opacity of a game's difficulty comes down to "how much of my improvement at this game feels intentional versus just throwing random ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks?". A bit convoluted but hopefully that makes sense, and I found that with Rift Wizard 2 the very much welcome increase in difficulty level was accompanied by a very unwelcome feeling the difficulty is significantly less transparent. I would say all told that if you've never played Rift Wizard before, you could give this title OR the original a whirl and I think either option is pretty good. If you're a super fan of the original and desperate for just any additional content along the lines of the first then of course this is similarly a pretty easy recommend for you. However, if you're a player who wasn't entirely convinced by the game play of the first title and you are hoping this might perhaps deliver an improved superior experience, I'd have to say I very much doubt that it will cater to anybody fitting that description. So all in all it's a happy Recommend from me, although YMMV depending on the finer details of your circumstances.
Steam User 5
Rift wizard 2 is a pocket sized goodness, even though it's advertized as "tough as nails" it's one of more easy to get to roguelikes out there, thanks to quite witty design decisions, bringing depth where it's actually needed and realizing general problem of genre such like this.
Some might say it's "simplified", but my response would be "it ain't that bad tbh", it throws away adventure, leveling and mainstream classes, replacing it with fast to understand progression system focusing on only wizard (and summoner) class. And what do wizards love? Casting spells and NOT dying. Travelling 10k tiles is for losers, inject dose of magic blue orbs into my brain please... Also there are a LOT of spells and choices to go through, so you won't be bored of spelling around.
Speaking about things that are simple(GOOD), UI and controls, finally a roguelike that doesn't feel like i need to read "how to operate" manual before i even start sniffing tiles.
Text is colored, hover over stuff to know what you are dealing with and because progression is already quick, it makes sponging up knowledge not needing 100 deaths before i understand what the hell i'm doing wrong, very neat.
The only gripes i have would be that some types of enemies are unfun to deal with(ones with silence debuff specifically) and that RNG can straight up bone you sometimes, which is still not that bad, you can choose where you end up or reroll.
Otherwise it's great, knowledge based, roguelike wizard sandbox that has bite to it, while presenting itself in neat package.