Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

It brought me back to my apple II days. It's like playing basketball with your great grandpa.. he's not going to dunk on you, he's not going to move very fast, and he may forget your name... but you're going to have fun for a few hours and if you're lucky he'll give you one of those hard caramel candies before he falls asleep...

for such a simple game it has some really bad bugs. No xp rewards occasionally, combat flow gets stuck on characters occasionally and doesn't move, requiring a restart. for this type of game the encounter rate kind of sucks. especially when half the enemies will just run away if you even slightly overpower them and they don't ever seem to fail at this (however just you try running away...) Given the layout this leaves you stomping around a 1980s era dungeon wishing for more to do besides make it through the next empty tile... and a strafe key.... why didnt they put a strafe key? rotating then having to move forward, turn and see the wall in the next tile is just an egregious disregard for your time... and just one of many reasons why games got better since then really. nostalgic? maybe. fun? meh for a bit. then you run into a game breaking bug and then you realize while rebooting that there are thousands of games with way more complexity that do not have stupid bugs like these an...

Hangs too much, play dos or apple version

While I appreciate what they tried to do here, further research into the original game should have been done. The levels at which spells are gained are off from the original version which makes the "elite" characters less playable. In the original, Samurai/Lord/Bishop classes had access to all spells by level 16 (usually got all spells by level 17). I think they took a later Nintendo port for the spell leveling. This makes the Elite class characters less playable as they will not keep up with the Basic characters as effectively.

The gaming system is not good for a modern gamer.

30 mins into playing all of my characters including backups have been completely wiped and I now must abandon this save file and start over. I can confirm that this is indeed the old school wizardry experience.

I played this when it first came out. Enjoyed it then, and enjoy this version as well.

its pretty horrible. i don't know how a party of 4 can get killed by level 1 undead kobolds, but go on with that crap design.

Vintage Role Playing at its finest. The game that started it all.

Thumbs up, yes, but 3/5. The game is undoubtedly the classic original Wizardry that is as hardcore as dungeon crawlers get. The updated graphics are great (not enough character portraits tho, and no customization options there) and the pace is sped up. It's a far more engaging visual treat. Inspecting monsters is a neat new mechanic. The major downside -- for all the updated info and tips about the game, other info is strangely absent. What does the strength or intellect stat do, specifically? What does 25% resolve mean? I can learn about monster resistances, but they are symbols with no specific description. I feel like this updated game could have been WAY better. It's better...but not better enough to be worth anywhere in the neighbourhood of $50. I bought it for $25 and after playing it a few hours, that feels like a stretch. Worth it if you really like dungeon crawlers and are a fan of the Wizardry series.