Review: Wizardry Labyrinth of Lost Souls

Posted by Brad T on August 10th, 2011 | 0 Comments | Tags: Wizardry Labyrinth of Lost Souls

Get in your TARDIS, we’re going back in time. Wizardry faithfully recreates previous incarnations of itself in all 1980s Apple IIe splendor. It’s up to you to decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Booting up, Wizardry: LoLS offers the player a grand introduction to try and set the tone for the game’s story. After the intro, the player chooses their main character for the game. The option is given to be a male or female choosing between 5 different races: Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Human, or Porklu (The hell is a Porklu?). Once chosen, the main character can be assigned an alignment and numerous skill points to specialize in what type of job they want to undertake (I made my human an evil thief).

After the creation process, the game begins in beautiful static backdropped Aitox City. There are numerous places to visit, including an inn, item shop, guild, palace, and temple. Visit the guild and recruit a team (or build your own characters for a real personalized experience). Then get a quest from the Guild HQ. After that it’s time to set off to your first dungeon.

Look at the first screenshot I provided in this review. This is the kind of visuals you’ll encounter for the rest of the game; dull first person 3D corridors, and lots of them. You can move one step at a time, and are frequently interrupted by random encounters with 2D creatures. Battles boil down to telling your front 3 party members to attack, and the rear 3 to buff/heal/attack with magic. This can all be accomplished by holding X, making the battles spectacularly dull. I tried making my first dungeon run blind, using graph paper to make my own map. I can see where some people would love this, but this isn’t my type of game. After dying 20 minutes into the dungeon crawl, I was transported to the temple. There my main character could revive the rest of the party for a nominal fee. After that I made sure to pick up a map from the item shop so it could automatically map where I was going.

While there are relatively few missions in the main game, with side missions and trophies, this game will take you over 200 Hours to complete (A ton of content for a 15 dollar price tag). Just remember that its 200 hours of dull drab visuals and archaic battles when you’re writing up your pro/con list. Wizardry: LoLS is a history lesson in RPG/Adventure games. It’ll knock you down and won’t apologize. Personally I’d rather be rolling D20s than this, but I leave this one up to you if this title is something you might be interested in.

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation 3 version of the game.