Posted on: July 9, 2016

Ramevox
Verified ownerGames: 650 Reviews: 68
The nice and the ugly
While I think Wizardry 7 is gold and aged really well, Wizardry 6 is just an overkill. On paper, it's heaven, and it really is. But it aged terribly. I will take first Ultima games over this. While I started playing it with high hopes, and indeed had fun creating my team and cracking up the Castle area, soon enough (~30 hours in) I noticed I'm pushing myself to play this, constantly thinking about importing my team to Wiz7/8 and how much fun I will have in Wiz7. Yeah, how much fun I WILL have. Because Wiz6, although having good rules and character development, falls short. Playing it through your dosbox is a real pain in the ass, interface is just awful to navigate with your mouse and don't let me start on save management. It might have been comfortable enough using your floppy disks (hard to get lost with them), but emulating that via dosbox lead me to constant frustration with save corruption and loosing progress on my teams. Fights can take even longer than those God damned ant hordes in Wizardry 8, and oh boy we all remember them. And that were just the mines in this game, the second area. Random encounters often forced me to reload (resting ambush by a horde of aoe enemies). And you can't just go back to the main menu during the fight. You have to click it through (with awfully long waiting times between actions even if you fasten up the text notifications) or shut down the game and restart it. The graphics are fine, but the UI is just way too tedious to use. It's like trying to drive casually with rusted and unkept car saying to yourself it's all right. WIzardry 6 needs some serious refreshing update, because there is a ton of good content and wonderful gameplay to experience, but its interface is just putting me off. It's not the age itself, since I loved first Ultima games, which are way older than this.
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