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 48
If you are even considering this game after the screenshots, you should play it
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 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 26
(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 10
6/10
Unusual game. It's mostly Traditional Roguelike with a splash of old school Gauntlet, but with *tons* of spells and items.
But the difficulty inadvertently discourages experimenting with spells, which is unfortunate.
Pros:
- Huge spell list, all with upgrades available. One of the biggest spell lists I've ever seen in a game
- Creative items
- Can create just about any specific "Wizard" you could possibly think of. I'm working on an Ice summon / Ice spell hybrid right now that summons Ice Phoenixes while throwing out Blizzards and such. Very fun
Mehs:
- Music isn't bad, but it's not quite good enough or varied enough. The simpler a game's graphics are, the more important the music is
- Graphics are mostly fine, but it's kinda hard to see enemy spawners among all the other stuff... and it's absolutely critical to know where they are
Cons:
- Difficulty ramps up really quick. I wish there were some difficulty options or something. It's largely a matter of wasted time in trying new combos that are instantly doomed to fail
- Most choices will result in your death, so the huge spell variety is kind of an illusion
- if you don't specialize enough, your damage is too low to proceed, but if you DO specialize, you'll get screwed by immune/resistant enemies everywhere. There are therefore very limited viable builds
Some "final" thoughts: difficulty soon stops ramping up as quickly as your power does, but you'll run into some pretty ridiculous maps in the late game. Like a dozen or more enemies that swap places with you (and *only* you), dozens of ranged silence attackers, enemies that attack through walls, "immortal" enemies, enemies with infinite attack range, etc. It can be a fine line between rewarding challenge and tedium and this gets to be a bit annoying. (Ironically, it's the huge 3x3 or whatever enemies that tend to be the easiest).
If you didn't have to fight the entirety of every map at once, it would be more fun as more builds would actually be viable.