Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant Reviews

Best classic dungeon crawler.

I remember this game from when I was a kid and I never finished. I finally did finish the other day, thanks to DOSbox save scumming and walkthroughs, and I cannot recommend playing it without heavy modding that hopefully is available for anyone willing to fix some of the issues. Even though it is an old game, the issues often feel like oversights or a lack of play testing on very basic functions. From resting, to buying from vendors, the game feels like an absolute slog. The character creation is very random and annoying, forcing you to keep re rolling over and over again until you get some decent starting stats or preferred classes. This leads to a lot of save state spamming to quicken the re roll process. This is exacerbated later on in level ups where everything is random, including stat boosts (needed to change classes) and HP as well as academia points that you use to increase levels in your spells. If you get very unlucky, you end up with some real stinker characters very quickly. This wouldn't be such a problem if the game difficulty made sense, but it is very unpredictable and random as well, often leading to quick deaths by enemies casting instant death spells on the entire party. The enemy encounters are wildly difficult to predict and often your party is going to meet their doom by one unlucky enemy roll. One fight with a boss may have the boss and one group of adds, but if you die and try again, you may be met with multiple groups of very difficult adds with the boss, or double bosses on the harder difficulty. Then, when you cast a powerful spell like Nuclear Blast to clear the groups, you can get a fizzle or backfire even with 100 skill level in oratory and the school of magic. A backfire on nuclear blast or asphyxiation is basically a death sentence. Sometimes one fizzle will allow many enemies to cast multiple rounds of high powered instant death spells to kill your party. SO again, save state scamming comes into necessity here unless you want to terminate game and reload again and again on long battles with difficult enemies. The tobaggan encounter is notorious for causing heartache and long cry sessions back in the day. Resting restores magic VERY VERY slowly and the mana recovery items in the game are rare, so get ready to sit for lengthy periods of time hoping that the mana bar will tick up one notch before a new monster party raids you while you sleep. Again, save scamming through save states becomes a necessity here. This is also incredibly annoying before or after a difficult boss where no restore fountains are available to prep you or restore your party, not even at the end of the game before the final boss! The vendor situation is very annoying in that you have to read the same text and answer the same questions over and over again, with rare exceptions, and this issue is exacerbated by the fact that vendors will only sell a set number of items in one visit, meaning if you need 200 arrows and the vendor only sells 20, you have to leave the conversation, leave the room, come back in, talk to them again, and buy another set of 20, then do that several more times. Its very annoying... Some physical skills are hard to predict their necessity and how they work. Swimming is an absolute necessity and your party members with less than 10 swim score will die immediately when they step one toe in a water tile, but only 1 character needs climbing skill that is high in order to avoid the whole party having a long stumble to their deaths. Oratory is way more important than it should be, as a low score will make your spells often backfire on you, but even a 100 doesn't guarantee good results 100 percent of the time. Heal spells are nice in the beginning, but are almost useless near the end of the game as the one useful heal wounds spell (not the party heal spell that is even more useless), even at its highest cast cost, is just as likely to heal a tiny amount as a moderate amount, and no possible way can you use a single heal spell to fully restore a decent but wounded fighter's HP in one round. It will only really heal a tiny fraction, which spells doom for some front line fighters later in the game during a difficult fight (Hall of Gorrors, I am looking at you). The most difficult part of the game is navigation. You need a map that you can only find by getting lucky and finding a chest, or by finding a character that is hidden in a mid game area and buying one for quite the sum of gold. And even with this map, it is nearly impossible to find your way to locations you have been to unless your mapmaking skill is decent (at least 10). Even with the map and decent skill level in mapmaking, the graphics make it very hard to know where you have been and to navigate mazes since everything looks the same. It is especially difficult to see landmarks, or interactables as many of these are invisible until you step directly on the tile that has these. It becomes an even bigger problem when mazes are no longer on one floor, but require teleporting up and down multiple floors, including some areas that are completely black and have holes to fall down or teleporters that make you start all over again. This is even worse near the end of the game where you must navigate multiple times through the final dungeon without really any perceivable short cuts that can get you back to where you were to progress further. You really need to have a pen and paper and write everything down.. or just use a walk through which is what I suggest. Lastly, the most annoying thing is that the whole game is built around finding maps. These are located in chests and are attainable after a long quest. However, quite often (if you are not using a walk through and take a long time to find them), you will open a map chest that is in fact empty. You receive no exp or gold or the map and now must locate whoever (NPC) got it before you to progress the game or get hints as to what to do or how to solve a puzzle. Without a walk through or the maps, the game is impossible to complete, so often in my youth I would get to a point where I could not progress because I would hit a wall and had no idea how to move the game ahead. That's it. It was a long road to finally finish the game but to avoid further heart ache by other gamers, I suggest trying one of the later Wiz games and avoiding this one.

After spending over an hour building my characters and ready to play the game, I was surprised to see that a code word was necessary in order to play! I was ordered to look up page 25, 4th paragraph, 3rd line, 5th word on the manual (?). When I purchased the game I was not informed I would need a manual. And as you all well know, if you don't get your game played within a VERY short period of time and if it doesn't work, you've lost your money! I looked up the "manual" on Steam, tried everything (pages not numbered), thought I had the word, but NO! So, if you're considering risking your money on this game, you'd better be sure you've got the right code name or your game will only last for as long as you design your unplayable characters.

For a game as old as it is, it has many features todays #1 games have. BG3 like adventuring party(6max) and turn based combat. Set up attacks and magic and let it rip or R.I.P your party. DND like world and monsters with enough variety to have combat be exciting and anxiety inducing. Exploration that is more meaningful and has fewer instances of pointless searching, cuz at least you'll get some xp! Character creation and development that could be said what inspired Bethesda to allow Dovakhin/Dragonborn to be jack of all trades or master of few/1. Also showed my nephew the game and he replied "Looks pretty good." for its age.

This game kicked my ass even harder than Wizardry 6, but that's okay. I expect to be treated like Mr. Sir-Tech's punching bag. That being said, while it feels a bit tougher than its predecessor, I find the game itself to be a bit better, overall. Yes, these games are hard, but that's part of the fun if you're a serious masochist. However, if you are the type of weenie that thinks Dark Souls needs an easy mode, this game will break you harder than you've ever been broken before. In the end, you just have to dig really deep and then ask yourself, "Am I even a man?" The answer lies in how you handle this game.

After many years, I finally came back to this game and defeated Beast of 1000 Eyes. While it definitely didn't age well and needs a guide to make any sense of, it is still a great game.

This game is about as old as Egyptian pyramids are, and requires a lot to make the process engaging (playable after downloading a couple of patches and making sure you have a guide in front of you as well as location map displayed on a second screen). Ultra grindy and often frustratingly cruel, it's pretty much not worth it as many other more up-to-date Wizardry clones exist that are actually way better. Why one should even play it? I can only answer this question based on my personal experience. Essentially, to me, it's like a mythical virtual trip along the maze of some ancient pharoah's crypt: you're unable to comprehend anything without a guide, get lost easily, the screen resolution is absolute ass, and you bite the dust both literally and figuratively oh so many times. Yet it's also weirdly fascinating... For the record, I've actually never visited or even seen Egyptian pyramids with my own eyes, so they're about as simultaneously existing and mystical to me as this game is.