Wizard with a Gun is an online sandbox survival shooter that features crafting and roguelite elements, set in the wastelands the forces of Chaos have left behind. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Wizard With A Gun Review Overview
Wizard With A Gun Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Gameplay Changing Ammunition Combos True Sandbox Experience |
Underwhelming Survival Aspect Lack of Challenging Bosses |
Wizard With A Gun Overall - 78/100
The game offers a unique mix of survival shooter sandbox, base building, and crafting. It also incorporates the farm-run-based approach popularized by roguelites. It sounds exciting, kooky, and ambitious, but sadly Galvanic Games wrapped all this up into a relatively dry bite-size of those many things.
Wizard With A Gun Story - 5/10
There's less focus on the story and more on the gameplay loop. The story is simple: the world is in chaos, and you, as one of the last wizards, must help restore the Chronomancer’s Wheel to prevent the apocalypse. Much of the world’s lore is uncovered through environmental storytelling and cryptic NPC dialogues.
Wizard With A Gun Gameplay - 7/10
Wizard with a Gun offers a hosed-down, experimental gameplay that blends shooter sandbox, building, crafting, and rogue-lite elements. It throws you into action with a straightforward premise: you have five minutes to turn back time, defeat Chaos, and save the world. How you spend these five-minute intervals is your choice, whether it's gathering resources, battling mini-bosses for gears, or retreating to the Tower for research and crafting. You can explore, fight, and enhance your loadout before resetting the clock and venturing out again.
Wizard With A Gun Visuals - 10/10
The visuals in this game are spectacular and ambient, featuring highly stylized cartoon aesthetics that strangely give off a moody, occult vibe. The day and night cycle in the game makes the colors pop in different ways and overall makes the game pretty to look at.
Wizard With A Gun Audio - 10/10
They hit the nail on the soundtrack. The somber, almost Johnny Cash-like guitar riffs, combined with the solid, steady beats that bleed through the background, elevate the atmospheric feel of the game. The trite dialogues from NPCs are sparse, but it adds to the eerie loneliness in this post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Wizard With A Gun Value for Money - 7/10
The game offers an enjoyable enough experience that will let you dip your toes into the various genres it aims to be. Outside of the main quest, you can spend time on building your base and crafting ammos. However, the gameplay feels bogged down. But with the right updates, this game can reach its full potential.
Wizard With A Gun: A Dry Bite-Size of Many Things
Wizard With A Gun takes you through a Sci-fi Western-inspired world where wizards use enchanted bullets imbued with arcane magic in a survival crafting rogue-lite. The adventure lies in the five-minute expeditions into the procedurally generated maps of the Shatter. During these brief quests, you must explore and gather resources and scan objects, enemies, and characters to unlock crafting options.
Survival hinges on facing off against enemies and returning to The Tower via the Gateway before the forces of Chaos, quite literally, obliterate everything. Chunks and sections of the map progressively get destroyed and disappear, which sometimes provide a decent enough challenge in getting back to the gateway portals.
The Tower serves as both your base and a hub for crafting and upgrading your wizard. This is also where you’ll find The Chronomancer’s Wheel, a structure that turns back time and makes everything A-okay again. You must supply the giant wheel with "Ancient Gears" that drop from bosses or other enemy gunners in the Shatter.
For a shooting game with magic, the selection of guns is rather simple–there’s the Revolver (Pistol), Machine Wand (SMG), Wanderbuss (Shotgun), and Carbine (Rifle). With six slots for weapons, you can experiment and tailor your loadout for encounters with increasingly tankier enemies. However, as the game progresses, combat encounters become repetitive. This is due to how fast your wizard can scale with upgrades, ultimately resulting in a lack of challenging boss fights down the line.
Progress is directly tied with building and crafting, for better or worse. I think this decision made the experience with the game feel muddled. The quest system falls short of exploring the game's lore and instead serves as somewhat like a checklist of objectives on base building and crafting more ammunition.
Wizard With A Gun encourages you to explore the Shatter extensively within the constraints of a five-minute countdown. While you can prolong your time by defeating Chaos rifts and gaining a bonus of 30 seconds to the timer, the risks often outweigh the benefits. The game's map isn't excessively vast, and heading back to the Tower early doesn't carry significant penalties. The level design lacks the complexity found in other roguelites. The only notable change is the altered layout of the Shatter upon your return, which doesn't impact gameplay significantly.
The base building and crafting don't reach their full potential either. Apart from the Worldbuilder gun, there’s no other tool to customize your base. Everything produced with it is set up in one orientation as well–it doesn’t let you get as creative as you’d want to be in this aspect.
Pros of Wizard With A Gun
| Things Wizard With A Gun Got Right |
|---|
| Gameplay Changing Ammunition Combos True Sandbox Experience |
Gameplay Changing Ammunition Combos
The guns and gunplay themselves are fairly standard, but it's the ammunition that adds a unique twist to the gameplay. Ammo consists of spells and powders. Spells come in elemental types like fire, ice, lightning, poison, and other stat effects, such as fear and charm. These spells can be combined with powders, each adding effects such as critical damage, larger area of effect, faster or slower projectile speed, and other synergistic effects.
The two ammo chambers in guns open up a world of possibilities for creative combinations. The game encourages experimentation with your ammos to enhance the gameplay and produce some surprising effects. For instance, you could have area-of-effect oil bullets in one chamber, and fire bullets in the other to basically become a gunslinging, pyromaniac wizard. This makes it easy to just burn down several enemies or to collect resources like wood or charcoal by (deforestation) burning down the trees you see in the Shatter. It makes taking out enemies fun as well by letting you orchestrate various hazardous situations. For instance, you can load up on lightning bullets to easily take out a band of creatures blocking your way in swampy water areas.
True Sandbox Experience
Wizard with a Gun hit the nail on being a true sandbox experience. It took a few of the things it focuses on–world building and crafting–and tied it into other fun gameplay mechanics, allowing you to shape your own fun and adventures. The game gives you the essential tools and leaves the creativity entirely up to you. Mix up your bullets and try to shoot at (literally) everything on the map–trees, those poor goats, Rider enemies–and you’ll discover some interesting things in the game.
Figuring out how to get specific items can be a bit tricky, as the game doesn't explicitly explain how you collect them. It will take tons of experimenting on your part to get those items and discover rarer ones. For example, if you lack access to a Furnace, you can obtain more Charged Iron bars by zapping metal objects in the map until they break; To get toxic ice, you need to inflict poison on the enemy then kill them off using Ice bullets. The possibilities are endless! It might take some trial and error, but it adds to the game's challenge and makes it more engaging.
Cons of Wizard With A Gun
| Things That Wizard With A Gun Can Improve |
|---|
|
Underwhelming Survival Aspect Lack of Challenging Bosses |
Underwhelming Survival Aspect
The game falls flat on the Survival aspect. The only real threat when you’re in the Shatter is running out of ammo and health items. And while it makes a point of being able to craft the reloading bench and other crafting structures in the Shatter, it’s kind of pointless when you can just return to the tower where you’ve placed most of the valuable things as the objectives have instructed you so.
Enemies don’t seem to use any strategy at all, and it only becomes a challenge when Chaos ensues and endless enemies start to spawn. But enemies have only a few ways to attack, and use predictable attack patterns. Some enemies can throw or shoot projectiles that move slowly from point to point; others have a forward lunge that has a long wind up animation; and others have AOE attacks which you can just easily dodge.
Even then, it’s easy to set enemies ablaze or finish them off in other creative ways once you’ve upgraded to more powerful ammunition.
Lack of Challenging Bosses
Bosses also have attack patterns you can crack with ease, or specific weaknesses you can exploit. Disappointingly, just like with other regular enemies, they don't employ much strategy at all. You can rain down any combination of bullets and kill them off easily that way. They aren’t all that difficult, and really aren’t that satisfying to beat.
Is Wizard With A Gun Worth It?
It's a good Sandbox, but wait for updates!
Wizard with a Gun might not be worth getting in the state it’s in right now. Even the online co-op seems dead. Galvanic Games has already revealed a roadmap of updates and new content they’re adding in the game. Hopefully, the devs turn this game into, at least, online 4 player so players can get the most out of the multiplayer sandbox experience. We think you’re better off waiting for improvements if you’re keen on trying this game.
Wizard With A Gun Overview & Premise
Ancient Eldritch forces have triumphed and laid the world in ruins. Amidst the chaos and desolation, you, the last remaining wizard must save the world. Armed with arcane knowledge and powerful enchanted firearms, you will embark on a quest to reverse the cataclysmic events, kill the eldritch abominations roaming the wastelands, and restore normalcy to the world.
Wizard With A Gun FAQ
Is Wizard with a Gun Multiplayer?
Yes, it features an online cooperative mode where you can buddy up with one other gunslinging wizard. You can either host or join games, but it often takes a long while to find other lobbies.
How to Get Chaos Eyes in Wizard with a Gun
You can get Chaos Eye by killing an Eye of Chaos, a floating orb located near Chaos portals. It appears as a large pink circle with tiny bubble formations in the center. Enter the circle and defeat the orb to get Chaos Eye.
Game8 Reviews
Wizard with a Gun Product Information
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| Title | WIZARD WITH A GUN |
|---|---|
| Release Date | October 16, 2023 (PC), October 17, 2023 (PS5, Xbox Series X/S) |
| Developer | Galvanic Games |
| Publisher | Devolver Digital |
| Supported Platforms | PS5, Xbox Series, PC, Nintendo Switch |
| Genre | Indie, Roguelite, Crafting, Survival, Action, Adventure |
| Number of Players | 1-2 Players |
| ESRB Rating | E 10+ |
| Official Website | Wizard with a Gun Website |
