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 17
Which do I recommend, Rift Wizard or Rift Wizard 2? I honestly can't say, because they are both sufficiently different to be hard to compare. I can understand why the dev chose to make this a sequel instead of an update or a DLC. I prefer RW2.
In RW1 the meta is to have a handful of extremely upgraded spells with multiple damage types. Once you discover a strategy that (sometimes) works, you can reliably execute that strategy most of the time. Because of how daunting and large the spell list is, there's very little incentive to branch out to new strategies or to invest in niche spells.
In RW2 the meta is to have a wide variety of spells that synergize with your gear. You're heavily encouraged to invest lightly in a wide variety of niche spells. Because much of the power of spells comes from RNG items, not player chosen upgrades, it's very much up to RNG which strategies will work best (many strategies still work well enough even without items).
Both games are very difficult. In both games the difficulty feels mostly fair - most of my deaths are due to misreading tooltips, being stingy on consumables, or losing track of how much damage I'm taking per turn. Between the helpful tooltips and the battle log, the only things I can blame are my inexperience and complacency.
I got 100+ hours out of RW1, and I suspect I'll get another 100+ hours if not more out of RW2. That said, this is a game best played in SMALL doses.
Steam User 33
Feeling lukewarm about shrines and spell circles in RW1? Imagine the fun and depth of RW1 but with the excitement of finding game breaking items like in STS.
RW2 tapped into the tried & true roguelike traditions that made the classics fun as hell. What a glow up from rw1, which has almost no replay value when you've seen all the spell combos. Glad to see the game embrace the RNG powerup system, which puts this over the edge into my top 3 fav rogues of all time.
Overall It seems a bit too easy so far with a few broken spells, but I'm having too much fun. Will be following closely for updates!
Steam User 14
At first, I was skeptical when I learned that the developer was working on a sequel to Rift Wizard (RW). It seemed to me at the time, that the best path forward would be to keep working on improving the original, but the developer explained that he wanted to do drastic changes that would heavily affect how the game plays and he did not want to alienate players that liked the way the original game works.
I really like the original game, but its determinism always led me to try the same builds and after finishing a run I would usually end up trying something similar on the next one. This kind of led me to play the game only occasionally, and it never really pulled me in like some other roguelikes had in the pass. I am glad to say that the changes in RW2 dramatically improves the game. Among other things, the addition of items and limiting the number of spell upgrades to one really changes how the game plays, there is now a lot more run to run diversity and it is very hard to stop playing because each time it is something slightly different and you just want to try one more time.
Overall, although the game is still in early access, I can definitely say that I enjoy RW2 a lot more than RW and hopefully it will only get better. In that sense, I think that the changes from the first one already show that the developer knows what he is doing and that the game is heading in the right direction.
This game is basically (IMHO) a masterpiece already.
I just want to finish this review with a heartfelt thank you to all indie developers for keeping on innovating, exploring new things, working on passion projects and ultimately for keeping the essence of gaming alive. In the time of live service games, microtransactions and other harmful practices you show the world that there is still hope.
Steam User 25
(Review written in EA Build 2.)
Short version: It's good! But Rift Wizard 1 is far more interesting.
RW2 is simpler, lets you force a build, and recover faster from mistakes. You heal after every level, progression is "named trinket" based, and (tragically) you can only pick one upgrade for each spell.
RW1 on the other hand compels you to improvise, make every move count, and treat everything as a vital resource. Your spell combos can seemingly get more ridiculous. Trying to just force a build will frequently work out worse than running with the cards you're dealt.
I think RW2 is "Rift Wizard Arcade". Which isn't a bad thing! But unfortunately, when I want Rift Wizard, I want the RW1 experience. I might be an outlier there though.
Interestingly, I went back to look at RW1 news, where the developer describes the changes to RW2, and that description is almost the polar opposite of my experience. I certainly don't know more than the dev, and I'm far from a good RW player, so maybe I'm really off base. Who knows!
Steam User 20
Considering the first one was already the pinnacle of roguelike design, and the second does not drastically change gameplay to alienate an already existing playerbase (like other games sometimes do), it is understandable that this is, still, an absolute masterpiece, a work of art, and one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences you can have if you like thinking, getting punished for your mistakes, and seizing sweet victory from the jaws of defeat.
The new tunes are nice and the big monsters are really cool looking (but imo they should hit a lot harder, some can fit the whole wizard in their mouths!)
There is some things i wish it had, like a search function for the bestiary, or the ability to make a simulation from the bestiary to try stuff vs certain monsters, like a training room. But i have almost no complaints from a gameplay perspective. I have finished one run and i didn't notice a lot of winding corridors, the ones that were the bane of most of my builds in RW1. Big monsters that move also don't like those, which means some of the later levels will not have a ton of that.
The removal of shrines and circles in favor of loot, pets, and free spells/skills as part of the level loot is very, very cool. You can be going through a standard run and then BAM free Arch Conjurer go summon some stuff or add the appropiate summon to what you're doing. Or it can help you discover cool stuff like Master of Space, which is perfect for so many builds.
The game is different enough from 1 that it's worth it to get both, if only to compare the differences. I do think some quality of life changes, like the vastly, vastly improved targeter this game has and the similarly improved turn log should be ported back to 1.
I am very excited about my upcoming time with this game, and I'm deeply grateful to the developers for making this, and for letting me try it early. In a better world, people that make stuff like this would be set for life. Alas, i should be satisfied with the fact it exists. 10/10.
Steam User 9
This is a game I'd give a cautious recommendation. Right now the balance isn't great, and while the idea of what RW2 is trying to do with the gear (make each run feel more unique) is something I like, right now it isn't really landing well. A lot of builds are so good they barely need the help from items, and on the flip side a lot of items are very boring big numerical bonuses that just make you end up doing 5x the damage you were in the first place but not really changing up how you play on a fundamental level.
I think the game could use some big underlying changes if it really wants to play to its strengths - reduce the power of numerical item bonuses and enemy late-game huge HP accordingly so the power curve isn't quite as wild, and turn some skills into items to make build opportunities more dynamic and require players to adapt more.
But honestly the core is still decent and if you're in the mood for a pretty quick to get into "watch a build come together and all the cool triggers go nuts murdering everything" roguelike it'll probably still be good either way. I just think it's trapped in limbo right now where it's trying to have everything RW1 did while adding on top of that, and that's undercutting some of what I think would be a great way to develop, which is to make runs feel more unique. Right now WAY too much of the unique content is in the always-equally-available spellbook rather than the different-every-run items, and that means apart from rare exceptions (like certain gear types that summon allies when you cast certain spell types or deal a certain damage type) there are pretty much no builds that are really made possible thanks to finding the right gear... they just tend to do more numbers, and "do bigger numbers" is the most boring part of every RPG ever.
Steam User 7
Great game but everything depends on excessive identifying of threats. Early game is slow and rare to survive than you are suddenly thunder god after that i fail to recognise bad matchup and it is over.