Wizard of Legend 2 Review — Shadow Money Wizard Gang (We Love Casting Spells)

Wizard of Legend 2 is a roguelike beat-em-up and the sequel to a game that may have invented the genre—or at least played a major role in shaping it.

One of the biggest changes from the original is the sequel’s addition of online multiplayer, allowing up to four players at a time to complete the deadly trials to become a wizard of legend. While multiplayer is a significant part of the experience, I didn’t have the chance to try it myself; I prefer solo gaming, and the opportunity to play online with fellow reviewers never arose.

I mention this because many of the game’s negative reviews, which were all written as part of Wizard of Legend 2‘s early access run, cite network connectivity issues as their primary complaint. While I assume improvements were made by the full launch (the version I reviewed), I can’t confirm whether those problems persist. Unfortunately, if you’re looking for insight into the multiplayer experience, I can’t help.

What I can tell you is that Wizard of Legend 2 is a fairly solid roguelike in every other way.

Your main progression comes from arcana, abilities slotted into four separate categories, each with its own function, which you discover during or between runs. Your build depends on which arcana you pick and how you mix them. If you want to take a fire-focused build, for example, slot a fire arcana in all four spaces and take a relic that improves fire damage, or mix it up with a balanced build that takes advantage of the unique properties of all of the elements. That said, these unique properties, I couldn’t say for certain because I could not find a glossary or explanation of many of the base elements during my playtime.

Fun though some combos may be, I found a lot of what the game had to offer in the form of arcana to be kind of underwhelming or boring. The game takes a very martial-arts approach to magic, which is cool, but it kind of sucked a lot of the oomph out of many of the basic abilities for me. The arcana you find during runs, on the other hand, can be a lot stronger but still suffer from this feeling of only every one in six abilities actually looking cool and feeling effective.

Mechanically speaking, Wizard of Legend 2 is more similar to Hades than any other roguelike out there. Similar gameplay mechanics, such as wall-smashing, armored enemies, and a heavy emphasis on bullet-hell elements and dashing, make Wizard of Legend 2 feel strikingly familiar to the Hades style, which is comforting since Hades was my introduction to the genre. It does, however, feel far more punishing than Hades, with boss attacks much less telegraphed and a very finicky fall system that sees the many gaps and pitfalls across the game’s open-world maps being deadly traps—ones that make combat especially trickier if you don’t focus on dodging the many displacement abilities enemies have.

It may actually be that Hades was inspired by the original Wizard of Legend and not vice versa. As I didn’t play the first game, a simple Steam store search shows that Wizard of Legend was released in 2018, two years before the full release of Hades, though the game also entered Early Access in 2018.

What may, in fact, be inspired by Hades, however, is Wizard of Legend 2‘s art direction, which is far different than the original game’s. Wizard of Legend 2 trades in the original’s pixel art style for a 3D-cartoonish look with gorgeous character portraits to create a look very similar to Hades. This is, of course, not meant as a critique but rather to point out that fans of one game’s style may also find themselves a fan of this one.

What was probably the hardest part of Wizard of Legend 2 for me to enjoy was the game’s steep learning curve. The game sends you across multiple open-world areas in which you will be frequently jumped with combat encounters that can feel a bit overtuned (at least for this garbage gamer) with hard-to-dodge missiles and an emphasis on knockback attacks—all while you’re given a series of tools with no explanation, possibly expected to learn completely by doing. When you do manage to get to the bosses, the severity of the combat is amped up to 11 with much more bullet-hell antics and health bars that can feel daunting to whittle down.

I suppose, in my experience, that Wizard of Legend 2 feels like a game that should be played in multiplayer, or at least that’s how the game’s learning curve struck me. Perhaps it is just an issue of “getting good,” but if I am correct, then it can be somewhat hostile against players who simply want to play the game by themselves or who don’t have friends to play with and aren’t interested in playing online.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Wizard of Legend 2. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Wizard of Legend 2 is available on Steam, Humble Games, PlayStation, and Xbox.