I had a great time with Void Wizard, which is a voxel-based roguelike first-person shooter with fantasy themes.Fantasy has a long and storied history in the FPS genre, going all the way back to games like Catacomb and Heretic. Void Wizard sits directly in that lineage, but merges it with a roguelike structure. What I found refreshing is that, unlike a lot of roguelikes, it does not feel like a game of chance. The overall dungeon layout is procedurally assembled, but the rooms themselves are hand-designed. You never know which room you are going to get or how it is placed, but once you walk in, you can read it. You can tell how it is going to play out.That matters, because a lot of criticism of roguelikes is that they feel luck-driven instead of skill-driven. Void Wizard feels skill-driven. The runs are short, fast, and closer to an arcade FPS with looping difficulty than a long-form progression game. You clear two main levels, fight a boss, and then the game loops back to the start with higher enemy density. At that point it becomes more about execution and score chasing than builds.The combat is excellent. There is a strong emphasis on movement. You are dodging projectiles, jumping constantly, and using momentum. The enemies are good. The weapons are good. I especially like that mana is your ammo. You are always hunting for manavials to refill it, and different wands consume different amounts of mana. Sometimes you have a weapon that can wipe a room quickly, but it drains mana so fast that you have to stop and ask yourself whether it is worth it.There is a simple upgrade system tied to shops. You collect money and buy upgrades that increase health, mana, or stats like firing rate. It is not deep, but it works. I do wish there were more gear options and more varied power-ups. Shields or armor power-ups would have added more variety. The developer has even admitted that the limited pool of rooms and upgrades leads to noticeable repetition over time.The setting works. The voxel aesthetic has a Minecraft-like quality, although this is not Minecraft at all despite the resemblance. The game runs at an extremely low internal resolution, which gives it a crisp, readable look and makes it run on very low-end hardware. You could run this on a potato. The style choice was also practical. The developer used voxel tools instead of Blender, which made asset creation faster.Another interesting detail is that this was made almost entirely solo, and built in Godot, an open-source game engine. I am genuinely impressed by what was accomplished with it. Everything feels smooth. Controls feel excellent.I played the game on PC with keyboard and mouse, and also on a Steam Deck. I do not think the developer tested it on Steam Deck, but it works extremely well using WASD with mouse emulation. The trackpad aiming feels surprisingly good.There is also a weird, slightly meta narrative twist. The game insists you must defeat the āvoid wizard,ā but when you reach the end, it turns out that the void wizard does not really exist. Instead, you can loop back, fight harder versions of the game, or even fight yourself. It undercuts the premise in a tongue-in-cheek way, and it fits the arcade feel.I recommend this game. It is tremendous value. It is cheap, often discounted to under a couple of dollars, and it does not demand much mental overhead. You can pick it up and play immediately. For the price, I do not think you can find a better option if you like fantasy FPS games with wizards. After all, this is Void Wizard.
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