Wizard 101

Kitten was at loose ends on Saturday, so I followed up on a suggestion from Doyce (who shared this review) and set her up on Wizard 101. And, when she seemed to be getting into it, in order to be able to answer her questions, etc., Margie and I both signed on, too, and ran it for most of the day. Purely, ahem, for research.

Wizard 101 is sort of a cross between Harry Potter and one of those endless card game animes on TV. You are a new recruit at the College in Wizard City, which sits on the World Tree. There are several schools based around different elements (Fire, Ice, Storm) and concepts (Myth, Life, etc.); one school, Death, was not too long ago ripped away from the city, and that and other actions provide the underlying story as you take your student through his/her MMO paces.

The game is designed for kids, and the graphics are large and cartoony (though nicely rendered in sort of a WOW fashion), the villains spooky but not scary, the action controlled but exciting. Kitten, at 8, is at the lower bounds of the age range (I think they actually recommend 9); she was having plenty of fun.

The game follows basic MMO conventions — you get contacts who give you missions, some of which get waypoints on the map of the city’s zones. Some missions are of the “run over and talk to Joe-Bob so you lean more about the world,” others are basic combat missions (as dark things are creeping into the fringes of Wizard City). There are both instanced missions and “outdoor” ones.

While the environment is vaguely Potter-like, the conflict system is where the “card game” part comes in. You have a spell deck (yes, literally cards), which you’ve slotted with both powers/spells you’ve learned as you advance, some specials that you get here and there, and wand spells. When you enter combat with a critter (no PvP here, just PvE), you become locked into a magical circle / arena, where, turn-based, you have a short time to select a spell from a randomized set of your cards, and the target to which it should apply. Then, based on an initial randomized initiative, each of the attackers casts their spells, each of which has a very nice animation around it. 

If it’s an outdoor mission (dealing with skeletal pirates wandering the streets of Unicorn Way, for example), people can join into a battle (which may, in turn, draw more opponents). That gives you a wider array of activities you can do, focusing damage on one opponent, buffing yourself and others, etc. There’s no mechanism I found to do an instanced mission as a team, though there are hints it’s possible.

Spells are driven by Mana (energy) and Power Points (which slowly build up during the battle). Thus your options in any given round are limited by the randomized cards, your remaining Mana pool, and the Power Points you’ve built up. That means setting up your deck important so that you’ll get a good random spread, including both cheap powers you can cast to begin with and high-level (and more expensive in Power Points) spells to seriously slam the bad guy.

When you get defeated in a combat, you’re transported back to the center of the City. (You can flee a combat before that happens, but that carries its own costs.) Healing and Mana recovery are relatively painless. HP in non-hazard zones will slowly come back (good time to run a non-combat mission). There are a series of arcade games at the fair that you can play to get mana points back (and gold), and flitting about Wizard City are little wisps of energy that will recover HP and Mana. You can also get potion bottles that will recover your HP and Mana in a single (not-in-battle) quaff.

The gold, in turn, goes to buying pieces equipment that provides you with various buffs (offensive and defensive) as well as everything from more capable decks to changing your color scheme.

As you go up in levels, you’ll get missions that open up more of the City to you. There are also missions to other realms — but they are only available to folks who are paid subscribers, vs. the free game. Margie, after several hours of playing, indicated she was beginning to bump up against some of the limits of the free game.

Also as you go up in level, you get trained in spells in your primary School for free, and gain training points that can be used to cross-train in other Schools. The spells tend to be more powerful — but also require more Power Points. That makes your deck more delicate to balance.

The biggest problem I have is the social aspect of the game. There’s an elaborate and difficult to manage canned set of emotes and messages you can send. As an adult, you can also free-type (AI-regulated) text. It all made it difficult to interact with anyone else, and honestly there was not a compelling reason to do so to the point I was at.

Another frustration (as an adult) is the lack of control configuration. The X-Y axis on the mouse (looking down and up) is reversed from what I have it on every single other game I play, which makes things frustrating. As does other keys I was used to using for function X doing function Y.

Overall, and despite all that. it was a pretty fun time. It’s not a trivial challenge — I ran a character up to Lvl 6 over the course of the afternoon, but discovered some serious design flaws in how I set up my character that I’d probably start over with. There’s enough cute eye candy to keep kids enchanted, some decent combat play to keep things interesting. And there appears to be an overarching story that creates a useful narrative to follow. The NPCs are fun, visually and personality-wise, and the overall world is quite engaging. Katherine seemed to be enjoying herself. I give it a thumbs up.