Stick Adventures: Wizard Madness: Chapter 1 Reviews

I enjoyed the game and although it does not take that long to complete it is certainly very fun to play and worth the money. It is a significant improvement from the beta as the shop has more items and it is definately more challenging which I enjoyed. If you are into these types of games or just want to try something new you might as well just buy it as the game is so cheap you really cant go wrong. I would definately recommend this game!

Stick Adventures: Wizard Madness: Chapter 1 is yet another of literally hundreds of lazy amateur 2D retro top-down shooter/brawlers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. I'm being far too kind to this to call it a shooter... it's more dumbed down than that. You can't move, you just click things to kill them as they approach, like some kind of childrens toy app. You do get some "spells" that allow you to "shoot", however. Waves of garbage pixel enemies come at you, and you'll be quickly rooting for them to win so the game can be over and you can rip your hard drive out and burn it to make sure the game is completely gone. It's that bad. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The visuals in this game are a complete joke, it's seriously just a bunch of MS-Paint sprites/images that look like they were lazily scrawled out over the space of a couple of hours. Like, with the mouse, it doesn't look like they even used a Wacom tablet or anything. It's so bad even pixel "art" would look better than this. Pure MSPaint. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The implementation here is of such poor quality, the developer couldn't work out how to make the game display in fullscreen, it only runs in a window. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs. A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Renegade Games has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Stick Adventures: Wizard Madness: Chapter 1 is overpriced at $3 USD, it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. This game features a small number of suspicious, likely fake positive reviews. The reviews all appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and all have very similar wording and writing style. Immediately after this huge peak of reviews, reviews (and player counts) for the game dropped incredibly sharply. This is highly unusual given the very low quality of the game and poor player counts. The "Positive" review score on this game should be taken with a large grain of salt. This might have been done to deceive/mislead gamers into paying for a bad product. The "Positive" review score on this game should be taken with a large grain of salt.

This is a cute, little clicker game that I quite enjoyed playing. Below are my main thoughts on the game. PROS (Strongest To Weakest): Story - While the story is basic, I could tell that a lot of effort was put into it. Levels - Each level design is unique and true to its nature. Enemies - The game contains a pretty wide range of enemies. I noticed a few enemy types to be similar, but this didn't bother me. Bosses - A nice touch to the game. Item Shop - Has items to aid you in the game. Pretty balanced system. Although I didn't really need the items. Structure - A little sloppy, but really impressive, considering this is the developers first game. Item Lottery - I believe this system needs to be more randomized as, throughout the entire game, I got the same reward. CONS (Strongest To Weakest): Length - The game took about 45 minutes to complete. Take this into consideration before buying. (Still Worth Money) Annoyances - I thought the breaks at the endgame cutscenes were a bit to long. Glitches - The only glitch I was able to find, is that when you defeat a boss, enemies continue spawning after the games says "Level Complete" I personally recommend that you purchase the game, but wether or not you want to spend $3 is up to you. I hope the above information helps in this decision. Thanks for reading! NOTE FOR DEVELOPER: Great game! I hope you continue this series in the future! If you do, I hope you take the points I made in my review into consideration.

I love it. I didn't know anything about this game until I heard the creator talk about it in an old video online. My hand started to hurt after the fourth level from all the crazy clicking haha. My favourite part of this game is the intense voice of the narrator you hear between each level. I am so happy this game is still available to buy and play.