Rift Wizard 3 Reviews

I'm going to say stick with RW2. 3 is reliant upon equipment spam and thus isn't quite as "wizardry" as it should be. I would've refunded, but played too long. Disappointment for fans of the series, notwithstanding the toxic positivity brigade. I'll play till I win a few games and then likely never touch it again.

Every iteration of this game brings us closer to the Rift Wizard Platonic ideal. I've only played a few short runs so far, but I can already feel that the new systems strike a really nice balance between randomness and control over your build. Every rift is a unique tactical situation that rewards deep game knowledge if you have it, but still allows for analysis and narrowing down options if you're a new player.

My favorite of the series. Like the previous, it's all about finding the most powerful and flexible combination of spells and items to survive a series of brutal one-screen battles. The third game brings the most polish, with great visuals and music, but also makes adds some twists to the gameplay, removing potions, skills, and treasure chests. Instead, your spells reset each screen, and you craft gear from components you find. I personally prefer this system. Do be aware this game is brutal and there is no easy mode.

This is my first Rift Wizard and it is excellent so far. The UI is so clean The graphics are lovely The decision making is intense The amount of spells is insane I am also finding that pull to play another run is very strong. I think the fact that the spell book is basically open to you from the start is really unique. Mix that with the crafting system and the sheer speed of the game and it is a highly addictive experience. Very early into it but deserves a thumbs up

Great game just like all the other rift wizards :) I think i am first review shout out my Best Friend AJ

Biased because I like RW1 and especially RW2 a lot, but after 30h playtime in the pre-release demo, I think this iteration is a fresh and interesting entry in the series. Apart from the obvious change in artstyle and new music, the mapsize has been reduced, and map generation changed. Skills have been removed (and most of them moved into items), spell can be upgraded twice instead of once (with shrines and item allowing for even more sometimes), and you now gather components to craft items. All of this leads to a vastly different experience to the previous titles. The game asks flexibility more than ever, while also being much harder, not only because the safety net of consumables have been removed. Runs that do make it late often feel much stronger imo, delivering even harder on the power fantasy aspect. A good looking, harder new entry to Rift Wizard with new enemies and design space for creativity. Instant recommendation.

I really don't like the direction here. I've always been a bit iffy on the series, playing long enough to get a couple of wins and then moving on, but this incarnation doubles down hard on the issues of its predecessors. Information overload has always been difficult to deal with in this series. Understanding spells that work well together takes hours of reading here just like the earlier games. With the new crafting mechanic, you also need to learn the equipment up front, since everything is (potentially) available, rather than being able to make choices on the fly. Given that there are hundreds of spells and equipment, you'll be spending a very long time reading before and between doing anything. Rift Wizard 2 did have skills to learn, but the new system bundles those with the previously findable items, making it far more burdensome. There has also always been an issue of viability in this series – the 200 spells and 300 items aren’t created anywhere near equal. In past installments the difficulty ramped up more slowly, and I could usually find manageable floors early on even if I'd have to settle for worse rewards. So, even if a combo wasn’t good enough to win, I could still have fun trying to get it as deep as possible and make it 8-15 floors with a suboptimal build. In Rift Wizard 3, I start struggling in the first 3-5 floors when I go outside of the most powerful builds. Floor 5 in particular feels like you only have the challenge options from previous games, which are going to result in a quick death if you haven’t managed to get some synergies online. This issue is amplified by two other changes – smaller levels and no consumables. The levels are FAR smaller than the previous installment, and force you into conflict with the enemies quicker. This makes slow strategies and high range strategies substantially weaker, further reducing the pool of viable builds. The removal of consumables eliminates your main option to recover when things don’t go quite as planned, which is a bit frustrating. It also means that builds that are slowly to come online don't have something to help them get through a floor or two until things click, again reducing the pool of viable builds. All that said, the builds that pop off, seem to pop off even harder here than previous games. You generally have a bit more control over how you advance your character, given that you can now upgrade spells twice and choose which items to craft. This means, if you can get past the early game, you can more reliably cash in on the multiplicative scaling some of the combos promise. Unfortunately, I think this comes at the cost of the feeling of discovery and having to adapt to what's available that I enjoy in roguelikes. I should mention that I do appreciate the new art and music direction. While I tactically dislike the smaller levels, the readability has definitely been improved. Further, some crafting components have effects on pickup that are similar to old consumables. You can't stock pile these and they require you to be in a specific position on the map to get, but they do add some strategy to spawning into a new floor that I enjoyed. All in all, I simply didn’t enjoy my time with Rift Wizard 3 at all. I gave it 10 hours to grow on me, and it didn’t. I'm sure others will enjoy the increased demands of the early game and more reliable ability to achieve the biggest combos, but the exploration of new builds is really the only thing that drew me to the series, and that's just not as fun as it was in previous iterations. It’s early access, so I do feel a bit bad about leaving a negative review, but I think the steps away from the design I enjoyed previously were very intentional, so this likely won't grow into a game that better fits my tastes.

I can absolutely recommend this [i]if[/i] [b]you're alright with a giant shift in this series' design ethos, but it isn't for me.[/b] I leave a positive recommendation because beyond my personal gripes with the game, I still respect the vision and It could even be your favorite entry in the series, if you enjoy this new shift in power. The removal of skills and consumables in favor of component crafting isn't something I personally enjoy over 2. I do enjoy the smaller arenas in theory, but I really just don't enjoy the busywork of component hunting, and looking through each rift more thoroughly than you previously had to due to resource constraints. The consistency of your buffers to get out of tight situations (mana potions, teleporter, chaos bell, etc) are now dependent on a rift's components in tandem with the enemies you're fighting. That's perfectly fine on paper, but It's overall a shift in rift preview vigilance I don't necessarily enjoy at the moment. You were always encouraged to read into everything a rift has to offer, but It feels way more punishing/chess-puzzle-esq to me now. I can't extensively comment on this without overreaching, but it seemed like the bell curve of difficulty is very much favored towards hyper-optimal play in the early game. Resources are quite limited, and it demands utmost flexibility in a way that doesn't click with me, despite spells now having two upgrades again, and equipment potentially being more controllable. My issue is not when your build is online, absolutely not. Two upgrades per spell and more controlled result on your equipment over time, will naturally be fun to play with. I just don't like the patchwork you have to do to get there compared to 2.

You may be wondering , "how much better can a third version of an obscure franchise be ?" Let me tell you , Rift Wizard 3 may well be the pinnacle of true roguelike gameplay in our current era. Now , don't let the few hours at review time fool you , I've played its demo for 180 hours , on top of the already massive Rift Wizard 2 play time. It is everything we've hoped for , and more. It's significantly harder than previous iterations , keeping the player alert at all times , lest they unceremoniously lose their run. Devs have been keen to iterate on the difficulty curve and added some devious monsters to the mid game and later levels , to keep up the challenge even against the most broken looking interactions that may feed your power trip. Where the Mordred fight was anticlimatic in Rift Wizard 2 , it is now an absolute thrill and will very effectively test your skills. I had to give my all just to win one normal run. While a peculiar change , the new graphics help with clarity , while the shrunken arena keeps things more engaging and edgy. The new music is much better this time around , with custom tracks for both level 20 and 21 bosses , and also secret vaults. Finishing the Archmage Trials is going to be a delightful struggle. Then there's the mods that are bound to show up if I do succeed at that. If you like gratuitous complexity , emergent interactions and spicy challenge , you're going to love Rift Wizard 3.

i am a longtime player of rift wizard 1 and 2, and played a good amount of 3's demo before buying as well. as an avid enjoyer of those games, i will spend some of this review comparing them, which may require some familiarity. but if you've never played rift wizard at all before, i'd recommend it even less - just go buy 2 instead. i cannot wrap my head around the mindset of a lot of this game's players, and seemingly also its development team, which seems to be: "Just read and internalize every single mechanical description of every single spell, upgrade, and equipment before you begin to play, so you know which ones are good and which ones aren't worth taking". in earlier entries, you can learn by doing. in all likelihood you will fail at this at first, but those failures are likely to impart experience and knowledge onto you. but there's simply so much information in this game to absorb, and such a higher demand than before for your build to collectively function at all, that failures here feel more frustating than ever. i think the reworking of consumables was a complete fumble. in 1 and especially 2, stockpiling consumables gives you wiggle room. you have room to be stingy with consumables on easy rifts, so you can afford to burn more than one at a time when the game throws more demanding rifts at you later. this affordance is completely tossed aside in 3. instead of consumables that you choose when to use, they are replaced by on-pickup effects of the game's consumable crafting materials. many of these effects are useless where they appear (like affecting only demon enemies in a level with no demons), and since the effect happens on pickup it's not like you can just take it and use it when it WOULD be useful. but because it's tied to crafting material, you often have to choose between items useful effects or items that help you craft the equipment you're trying to craft. since they're also placed randomly throughout the level, it's easy for them to be in spots that leave you more vulnerable or be placed prohibitively far from each other, even if you do invest in translocation. there is something there - having to make that decision at all is compelling! i think that replacing consumables in this way could have been an interesting idea, in theory, but it doesn't feel like the game is balanced around it at all. speaking of balance, the difficulty ramping from 2 to 3 is even more aggressive than the shift from 1 to 2. why do ice maws exist? why do ice bombers spawn at level 2? why do fiends spawn so damn early now?? levels being smaller means that you'll have more enemies targeting you at once on average, but of course now you don't have ANY health or mana potions to help you get through those tougher moments. that lack of wiggle room drastically exacerbates the gap between "build that works" and "build that doesn't" in a game series that already demands a lot of game knowledge. scraping by for a while and losing later just doesn't happen as much. there's not room to learn things like "ok, this spell hasn't really been pulling its weight in this build", because deaths come so quickly. there are definitely points to praise about this game. i'm a big fan of the new art style (especially some of the large monster sprites like flesh colossus) and soundtrack. i like the equipment crafting system overall. i enjoy many of the new spells, all the new content has interesting depth to it. recruiting allies at taverns was a fun surprise during the demo, and some of my best runs heavily utilized them. i'm glad spells can have more than one upgrade again - some spell upgrades i wished i could take alongside each other in rift wizard 2 have come to fruition here! ultimately, while i do like parts of this game and its new content, i don't feel like i should have to understand SO much information all at once in order to even get out of the earlygame consistently. i really just wish there were more room for sub-optimal builds to get by.