Wizard: The Villian’s Burger it is a short adventure. With only four levels and a bossfight, it gives us a taste of what the full game will be like in the future.
Wizard: The Villain’s Burger is available on PC.
Pepe the magician is a youtuber that makes the most diverse content. Always with a video game theme and a special focus on retro games. Within his videos there is no lack of variety between tops, gameplay and even some of terror. He is also the director of the title we are talking about in this note, a demo of a game simply called “Wizard” (release date still to be confirmed), where the famous youtuber makes a self-insert with his avatar as the protagonist.
This game a platformer retro with graphics in the best 16-bit style, in which we take the role of a nice magician, who leaves his house hungry for hamburgers, from what little we can see in the cut scene initial. We have a overworld to go through to move between the different zones and levels. The first thing you notice is that our character moves very slowly, we can hold a button to run, but it’s the first time I see this functionality in a overworld, and it’s a bit awkward. From the overworld we can, in addition to the levels, go to a kind of city called musicalia, where there are countless NPCs. Unfortunately, only one is interactable, precisely the seller. It offers us in exchange for orbs that we collect in the levels, some improvements and alternative costumes. The rest seem to be characters that will have interaction in the full game, and some seem to be based on others. youtubersinternet personalities, and even characters from other games (there’s Rumi from Tunchefor example).
The graphics and design of the artwork they are really very cute. The work they did on the pixel art within the game is of very good quality. It is noteworthy that they knew how to animate the protagonist, who has a beard, in pixels without making him look weird or confusing his expressions. What is a bit weak is the design of the enemies, I don’t think there is much coherence between them, each one could be from a different game. I understand that these first levels of the demo are part of the same “world” and are all quite similar, but it would have been better to see a little more variety in the environments.
The levels are simple and very retro, we move to the right and dodge enemies and wells, which is healthy. With the attack button we launch a short projectile that stuns the enemies, but to defeat them we must jump on them. This same magical projectile also serves to activate temporary vines, which serve as platforms and to climb. If we keep the attack button running, something that we will need to have active all the time. Not only to finish the levels quickly, but because our movement speed is very, very low. We also have a double jump, a very satisfying classic for this type of game, but we can only activate it after jumping on top of an enemy, which makes it an interesting mechanic. Throughout the levels we can collect the aforementioned orbs, and some special coins for each level. There are special levels in which at the beginning we transform into a bird, and they are a kind of autoscroll in which we only have to jump when appropriate to avoid obstacles. Well in the retro game style, except for the small tutorial when we start a game, we don’t have any kind of explanation, or dialogue, or anything that tells us what to do or what is happening. This is strange, but luckily almost everything is intuitive enough that no on-the-fly tutorials are needed either. If it doesn’t feel like a narrative thread, in case the game is trying to tell a story.
The only one bossfight that we have, although it is entertaining, I feel that it is not the best example that they could offer us in this demo. The problem is that, like other things within the title, everything feels very slow. Our opponent cycles between various attacks and phases, only one of which leaves him vulnerable. Meanwhile we have to wait and dodge, sometimes for almost a whole minute.
Once we pass the game, we return to the overworld and we can repeat levels to finish buying the improvements and costumes if we like. There is a tower that works as a challenge mode, in which we play short sections of levels with some random aspects and a time limit. It’s a little extra that doesn’t add up to much but an interesting concept, if they decide to expand on it later. As in this demo you cannot save the game to close and continue another day, there is not much incentive to complete it or replay levels.
The game has other problems at the design level, in addition to that feeling of slow movement and its lack of acceleration. In each level there are secrets, which are usually discovered by shooting our magic against a wall to break it. But they are not marked and there are no clues, so we will be shooting at the walls for sport. Our character has a very slow start, even if we start running it takes a moment before we reach a comfortable speed. Therefore, to move we are going to be holding the run button almost 99% of the game time, even in the air. This doesn’t help with the default setting for gamepad play, where running and jumping are at opposite ends for the thumb, and not in a position where we can without moving our thumb to the side jump directly (almost all jumps are going to want to do them without releasing the run button, in addition). Fortunately, this is easily configurable to our liking, but I would have expected that the default at this time had already been thought of before. In the levels there are some things that could be optimized, like the vertical vines, which seem to have a hit box too small or a timing too precise to climb them. These lianas also last too little, most of the time we barely get to the other end of where we need to go before they disappear, as the timing is very tight, even if we hurry. This feels unintuitive and leads to more than once falling into the void. There are also pundits that blend a little with the background and are not understood as such. The strong point of this title is undoubtedly the musical part, it sounds like a soundtrack of the best of Snes. There is no theme that is not good or does not go well with the game.
Despite all the weak points in this demo, the game is free to try, and fun despite its short length. All the design problems that it has do not make it impossible to enjoy, but they do remind us of old games where many aspects were not well polished. It shows that he has a heart, and you feel in the gameplay a tribute to what games were like in another era.
System Requirements
MINIMUM: OS: Windows 7 – Processor: 3.2 ghz dual core – Memory: 1 GB RAM – Graphics: 1 GB – DirectX: Version 9.0 – Storage: 500 MB available space