Wizard with a Gun Review – A magical Devolver revolver

Wizard with a Gun is a brand-new indie game with unique mechanics, an original premise, and tons of style. This title is published by Devolver Digital, the company has a track record for publishing indie titles that hit the aforementioned three marks with precision I’ve said above. Games with the Devolver logo are almost guaranteed to be great experiences, and Galvanic Games’ Wizard with a Gun is no exception to this rule.

In Wizard with a Gun, you play as a wizard with a gun—the title really says it all. After customizing a little witch or wizard of your choice, complete with big hats and a western-tailored suit aesthetic, you’re given a firearm and thrown into the end of the world. More specifically, you witness a doomsday event, wherein the primordial force of Chaos consumes everything except for a mystical tower outside of space and time that serves as your refuge from said all-consuming force. Here, the wizards have been using a magical device to continuously turn back time in an endless futile struggle to stop the end of the world.

It’s up to you to make this struggle less futile by collecting all of the gears of this powerful machine and finally fighting back the primordial pink evil once and for all.

You do this with what is perhaps the penultimate type of magic, gunmancy. The reason the words “Wizard” and “Gun” are in the title is because of this. All of your powerful, Chaos-slaying magic is tied to the big iron on your hip.

Spells in Wizard with a Gun are powerful incantations cast onto iron bullets, so you’re literally writing incantations onto the bullets. The way this translates into gameplay is through different types of bullets, which each do different amounts of damage and have their own elemental effects. Some effects are fire, poison, ice, and more obscure ones like charm, order, and healing (ironic that you can heal things by shooting them in this game). Each type of bullet is researched and then improved at various workbenches dedicated to specific schools of magic. The bullets come in increasingly powerful tiers to be crafted with rarer resources you find in the world. Thankfully crafting ammo is very relaxed, with small resource requirements and generously high production quantities.

The gameplay loop in Wizard with a Gun sees you turning back time and leaving the tower to explore the open world map. Your ultimate goal while exploring is to collect all of the gears scattered on the map and to fight the stage’s boss, collecting materials along the way. There is a five-minute timer to the beginning of the apocalypse which is when the world becomes incredibly hostile. You’re not very likely to get all of your objectives done in one go so you’re going to end up losing them. Due to time resetting anytime you die, you’re likely going to be making a lot of back-and-forth trips to the tower.

My multiplayer partner astutely compared this gameplay loop to Don’t Starve Together, where you’re in a rush to collect resources and achieve goals in a hostile environment before it gets infinitely more hostile. The difference is that instead of huddling around a campfire at night, you’re returning to an extra-dimensional tower and resetting the timeline over and over and over again.

While Don’t Starve Together is a good comparison for the game feel, I will say Wizard with a Gun is far less oppressive with its difficulty. While I’ve had my fair share of deaths, completing a reasonable goal before retreating to my tower to craft more supplies always felt doable, even with the world ending around me. The times I died, outside of boss fights, which do up the difficulty a bit, were because I got too greedy or careless. If you do find yourself against an enemy that’s too strong for you, you can always retreat to the tower, upgrade your spells (bullets), and take them on again without too much resource grinding involved.

Something I dislike is that you are always pretty much entering the map from the same portal with the same time limit, but the map grows as you progress through the game. You are constantly given less and less time to complete your goals as the trek to your objectives gets longer. This can be especially annoying if your goal is to fight a boss. You’ll have to traverse the dangerous environment, defeat minibosses outside of their gate, and then enter and fight the boss quickly.

This aspect felt designed only to drain my resources before getting to the boss itself. I had to prepare for the boss and the time it would take to get to the boss.

Traversing the ever-increasing map can be a little tiring without any sprint button or movement mechanics (speed potions not included). It gets worse when you know you’re not going to make it to an objective before things get hairy, or you’re just on a resource-gathering run. The real grindy aspects of the resource gathering come when you need to learn new crafting recipes. Thankfully, as I said before, crafting things once you research them is pretty generous, though I can never get the weeds I need for health potions.

While you can most certainly play this game solo, I would say that Wizard with a Gun is best enjoyed with a friend. Having multiple wizards in the party gives more flexibility to tackle problems and allows for better use of the many gun and bullet types available in the game. The danger of the world certainly becomes much more manageable with a friend by your side, especially when death can be reverted through revives when multiple wizards are in a party.

Overall, it’s just fun to work together. There are just so few games that give you a fun, open-world experience that you can play with friends that emphasize cooperation over competition. If you’re a fan of Don’t Starve Together and need something else to scratch that itch or want a game that incentivizes working with your friends or significant other, Wizard with a Gun is a great choice. Plus, you get to be a Wizard with a gun which should have been enough to sell you on the game from the beginning.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website!