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 27
(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
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. It's also very unfriendly to new players, bombarding them with a massive list of spells/skills without useful filters for those lists.
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, Wizards/Liches among all the other stuff... and it's absolutely critical to know where they are
- Summons are a very important part of the game. While it's possible to go without any, the *vast* majority of builds will use at least some. This can be annoying to players looking for more of a "solo wizard" fantasy
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
- Summons can get permanently silenced and become useless
- It's rare, but some enemies and abilities leave out critical information. That can result in a permadeath
- Filters for the massive list of spells/skills are *horrible*. They filter out extremely important, critical skills you need for your build. New players get screwed as they cannot filter to find critical skills
- Dev seems to be completely silent. No review responses or forum post responses
Some "final" thoughts after killing the boss several times: 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, dozens of silence aura enemies, enemies that attack through walls, "immortal" enemies, enemies with infinite attack range, dozens of enemies summoning every round, 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 because you're not trying to track dozens of enemies with thrice as many abilites).
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.
Steam User 21
Did not like the first one, the potion economy could not let me enjoy the game.... well he fixed almost every problem I had with the core of this game and it is now a brilliant work of art.
An amazing experience.
Steam User 13
Amazing game. Puts a lot of roguelikes to shame with the sheer amount of spells, items, and skills to choose from. I would also say that it is significantly better than Rift Wizard 1.
Don't listen to the reviews claiming that you have to use certain builds or spells to win. Anyone who says this is just bad at the game. I even saw someone claiming that Conjurations are bad... My two wins so far were heavy with Conjurations, and one of those wins was the Archmage Trial that limits your spellbook!
There aren't any gimmicks or exploits you have to rely on to win, the game rewards you for good planning, spell and skill knowledge, and execution. It has the traditional roguelike step-based turns, so you can take your time learning the game.
I would recommend not looking up guides or any sort of spoilers... Experiment with the spells and skills like a proper wizard would! The game is hard, but also quite flexible at the same time. Perfect game design in my book!
Steam User 11
I sincerely want to love this game, I really do; however in its current state its just not possible. In short the game is too difficult while hosting extremely difficult build orders to even have a chance at successfully beating the game. There needs to be a difficulty system that increases based on players' choice, sort of like an accession mode. Aside from this, I hope the game gets a lot more spells in the future.
Aside from this, I do really like this game, I want it to succeed but I am slamming my head into a wall trying to get even my first win.
Steam User 8
Great sequel to an already good game.
I just wish the developer decides to give some love to handhelds like Steam Deck at some point. Or even touch control support would do. I really want to play this when I'm away from my pc but so far it's a big burden.
Gameplay wise, it's already amazing.