If players can get around its bulky tutorial and the heft of crafting, Wizard With a Gun offers a brisk roguelike. Building an arsenal of magic bullets and guns makes dispatching enemies fun but it's even better with a partner.
Wizard With a Gun‘s five-minute gameplay loop is a double-edged sword.
Its quick runtime belies the complex mechanics that are front-loaded in the game’s opening hours. But it often can strip out the necessity for planning and the sensation of dread that comes with the looming threat of the world ending.
As a Gunmancer, players are tasked with finding precious gears to install in the Chronomancer’s Wheel to continue rolling back time in hopes of finding a solution to preventing a kind of “end” as the force of Chaos consumes everything. The action takes place in a realm called The Shatter, which becomes overwhelmed in five minutes, those final seconds ticking down to something terrible. But players have more to be concerned with in the beginning of Wizard With a Gun, namely the bevy of information that must be absorbed for eventual success.
During the game’s numerous tutorials I found myself captivated by what was on hand. A delightfully colored world that leaned more towards the arcane and mystical than Wild West. Bullets were spells, my Gunmancer wore a duster that almost covered its glowing eyes floating against the black void of its head. Despite the dangerous beasts, icy ravines, and haunted swamps, the world felt dusty, like a saloon with a brothel attached was right around the corner.
As inspired as the world is thematically, neither aesthetic ever feels like pandering. The focus certainly is on magic with a Western twang but it never grows overbearing and I was able to become absorbed in the fantasy of it all. The story whimsically grows in depth, taking on a more sinister tone as players begin to uncover the truth about what is going on. Better yet, there’s a magical book acquired almost immediately called the First Edition that can scan objects and enemies to divulge further lore.
Wizard With a Gun presents itself initially as a survival game where players must fight off hordes of Chaos that become increasingly overwhelming. But then players transition into The Tower, a location immune to the effects of collapsing time that acts as a base of operations. Then the crafting comes into play.
Almost every object in the environment from trees to rocks to arcane altars can be shot or punched, eventually breaking them down into materials. These materials can then be used to make crafting stations or research hubs or make bullets for the numerous guns collected during the journey. Within minutes, Wizard With a Gun lets players make a gun that is capable of shooting out crafted items into the world. Soon, a gun is made that allows platforms to be placed in mid-air, allowing players to connect to previously inaccessible parts of the Shatter and the Tower.
Those opening hours of Wizard With a Gun can be a bit tricky for players with a low attention span or those who simply want to dive into the action. Juggling multiple guns, navigating crafting menus, assigning ammo types, and being concerned with time management are introduced at a rapid pace. And I felt like I kind of just had to figure it out with little on-boarding.
This is not to say that I felt overwhelmed or even completely confused by Wizard With a Gun. But that is because I took my time with that introduction, knowing that survival mechanics in a game can be daunting if not properly absorbed. Personally, I think Galvanic Games could have shoved in more exposition and more Chaos-clearning before tossing in the ability to make various crafting tables that can break down materials into other materials and making furniture for the Tower. In the first hour of playing, I was able to completely research the first node of each type of craftable bullet and unlock four or five objects that aided crafting. It seemed fast.
Which leads to the five minute gameplay loop.
First and foremost, it isn’t strictly over and done with in five minutes, rather a baseline. In the Tower, anything a player crafts will stay there indefinitely. Before heading out into the Shatter, it’s advised to max out bullet inventory and make any potions or grab healing items. Once in the Shatter players have the ability to use the crafting gun to build anything they have a recipe and materials for but it will be lost forever when that run is complete.
Once those five minutes start, the goal is to find gear pieces for the Chronomancer’s Wheel. These pieces are held by NPCs, random enemies, and bosses scattered throughout the randomly generated instances of each run in the Shatter. These maps are not overly large and have a handful of important points of interest that can be discovered. Players have the option to scour the map by heading in an aimless direction or having the map revealed through altars that highlight where a gear piece is.
The more gears placed into the Wheel, the more of the Shatter will be revealed. When players kill the major boss of a specific area, a new biome will become unlocked that houses new enemy types and new crafting materials. The loop works much like any other roguelike game as progression is tied to incremental improvement and felling major bosses.
With the five minutes, players have a sense of purpose and an idea in mind of how far they can stretch a run in. As the minutes tick away, Chaos enemies begin to trickle into the Shatter. Killing these Chaos enemies will return a bit of time to the countdown, allowing players just a bit more time to accomplish their goals. And when time runs out it doesn’t mean that the Gunmancer automatically dies. Instead, the Chaos enemies flood into the map, making it extremely difficult to survive, especially as bullet counts dwindle.
So this begins a strange quandary in Wizard With a Gun. With so little time, what is the best way to maximize progression? For me, I spent my first few hours of the game running in and out of the Tower only taking a few minutes out of each run in the Shatter. I was able to build up a stockpile of materials and craft the chests to stuff them all in. I was able to research bullet effects and grow fairly powerful, eclipsing the basic guns after some brute force.
If a player doesn’t find what they are looking for in the first three minutes of a run, what’s the reason to continue when they can try again and get better luck next time?
Roguelike games can be quite punishing, especially if luck is an important factor in progression. The quick gameplay loop in Wizard With a Gun acts as a kind of parachute for players who may want to optimize their experience to a degree. You can cheese the experience and grind towards runs where map altars are close by but that won’t help do more damage to the boss that is eventually reached.
There is incentive to explore the various combinations of bullets and their effects because not only are they mechanically interesting, they can make the game ridiculously entertaining. Wizard With a Gun doesn’t feature fast action, focusing on a smooth pace that allows players time to dodge and line up shots as you would in a twin-stick shooter.
Though I didn’t enjoy navigating the bulky menus of the game when searching for recipes and loading a gun, when I got to the action I was overjoyed. Load up oil and fire bullets and watch the trail the oil bullet left behind get set ablaze. The same logic applies to water and ice bullets. Players can heal a Gunmancer with bullets, charm enemies, poison them, or do additional damage to Chaos enemies.
Players will need to not only research these effects but find increasingly better guns that can hold multiple bullet types. It becomes the real meat of Wizard With a Gun and the continuing reason to chase resources.
Certain combinations of guns and bullets are definitely overpowered but I don’t find anything wrong with that. It feels better to be able to actively craft and fight towards a victory rather than have it determined by luck and the random items the game bestows the player at the time. There’s just enough random nature in Wizard With a Gun to keep it interesting without turning into a slog of failures.
I’m not sure if being able to place furniture and decorations in the Tower is going to extend the life of the game but it is a nice touch for those who desire it. For me, I’d rather have better endgame content that finds fun ways to extend the life of the game when everything has been conquered or unlocked.
Maybe that’s where a friend is best implemented. Players can participate in co-op with Wizard With a Gun to have another Gunmancer along for the ride. An additional player means a bevy of bullets and their combinations can be stacked in the Shatter to completely obliterate the opposition. I can’t really say that co-op feels completely balanced for not only multiple damage sources but two targets for enemies to have to focus on. One player is able to pepper damage while another draws fire, especially from a boss.
Wizard With a Gun is yet another strange roguelike that finds enough ways to separate itself from the pack. A unique aesthetic that leans into survival and crafting may turn away players who want action. But the creative, magical gunfights are a spectacle on their own and even better with co-op. My hope is that over time, Galvanic Games adds to the experience, allowing Gunmancers to go turn back time again and fight back Chaos.
