Wizdom Academy Preview
Making a wizard school sounds like an excellent time. Wizdom Academy hopes to fill that very specific niche. After playing the early access build, I’d say they’re mostly succeeding so far. There’s a fair bit of content that’s missing at present, so any kind of definitive judgment is pretty much impossible. If nothing else, you can make a lovely-looking academy. But is that enough?
You can zoom right in to any given section of the school and watch your students do their thing. The classrooms are detailed, the characters look great, and the whole school feels lively. You can also get things moving fairly quickly, which I appreciate. Although the high-speed mode is almost too zippy for my tastes. The menus are clean, clear, and easy enough to navigate. On the other hand, the pop-up warnings aren’t always especially clear. It took me a little while to work out what every angry red sign was referring to.
In particular, I found certain construction restrictions quite frustrating. You can lay down a set of blueprints easy enough, but then it stays an angry red until your engineer(s) can get there. And the problem wasn’t always obvious. I could surround a given space with hallways and stairs, but it would still sit there unbuilt for eternity. I had to delete and re-apply the blueprint in question multiple times before it stuck. And sometimes the creation of a given room was very ummm, time sensitive.
Lay Down Some Hallowed Halls
Balancing resources is a real dizzying dance most of the time. It’s pretty normal to be hovering above bankruptcy, and that’s fine. I did find gold acquisition to be especially frustrating, maybe more so than was really warranted. Student fees are your only real income source, but it also costs gold to move them up a grade. And if you don’t do that, they just leave without a diploma. So you’re very frequently broke.
There’s a combat element planned, but it hasn’t been completed at this time. So you can still send out teachers to meet advancing enemies, but the combat itself doesn’t exist yet. Hopefully that comes with an update or patch soon. Until then, you’re just sending out squads to meet and immediately delete a steady stream of enemy icons. There’s also a regular stream of mana droughts.
Always More Students To Enroll
This is just a period of forced inactivity you have to juggle every once in a while. It’s a minor inconvenience, unless you’ve got enemies approaching at the same time. Otherwise, the game is politely asking you to stop running the school for a short time. It’s less of a challenge and more of an interruption. Although presumably the mana droughts get much more intense as the game progresses further.
You’ve got a lot to do in Wizdom Academy. You’re hiring teachers, recruiting students, building classrooms, repelling invaders, and harvesting resources. And yet, I found this wide range of challenges fell into routine pretty quickly. At least in the preview build, all of these tasks funnelled into a breezy series of menu prompts in no time at all. I went from struggling through a new set of quests to balancing a set of menus almost immediately. You need a little more time to languish and live in this world before it ramps up into a magical rat race.
This is a fascinating premise. Building your own wizard school is a great idea. The characters have potential, the setting is enchanting, and the customization possibilities are numerous. But I found, at least so far, that gameplay quickly focused on high-speed menu management. A world this whimsical and weird needs a little more time to mess around in it. I wanna take it easy and watch these people ruin their lives, you know? If you’re curious, Wizdom Academy is out now in Steam Early Access.
Thank you for keeping it locked on COGconnected.
James Paley
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