Every so often, I play a game that’s just awful, only to check its user reviews on Steam and realize that it’s managed a 9/10 for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent. Novelty seems to play a role—since reviews are a binary “thumbs up or down” affair, playing slightly different than other games in the same genre is often enough to amass some early positive reviews, at which point other reviewers start erring on the side of caution and following suit. That’s doubly effective if said game is backed by a publisher capable of whoring it out, which is Humble Bundle in this case. Wizard of Legend isn’t a 9/10 game. Its visual style is uninspired, its gameplay is awful, and its idiotic puns are like a cheese grater on my sanity.

Wizard of Legend is actually really simple: there look to be 6 stages (each with a clumsy boss fight at the end), 3 boss stages which are significantly more involved fights, and maybe a final boss that I don’t know about. Stages are procedurally generated based on the next boss you’ll face, but that just means that there aren’t many tilesets to differentiate runs.

Wizard of Legend‘s randomization is also prone to creating dead ends that exist solely to waste your time. Finding your way through these randomly generated areas is about as rewarding as tracing your finger through a maze on a Denny’s menu. Hellmut uses a very similar two-stages-and-then-a-boss structure, but its dead ends have chests with money and weapons, and other games are similarly designed to ensure that their dead ends have some value. Not Wizard of Legend.

Equippable spell effects are the “big innovation” here. Basically, you earn money from failed runs and then use it to purchase new spells that can be used as your default attack, special attack, extra special attack, and dash. This would be great if every spell was equally viable, but some are far too unpredictable to use and don’t do enough damage to make up for that, so certain setups can get you significantly farther than others. It doesn’t help that the game’s perspective is all off, making it difficult to tell where you’re standing in relation to pits and other enemies. Your dash move doesn’t have invincibility frames, either, and rooms are usually small and covered in pits. Enemies can also stun-lock you. And since Wizard of Legend isn’t awful enough already, its combat is mandatory; every time enemies show up, the door closes behind you and you’re forced to defeat everything. It’s a gigantic waste of time.

I could get past a lot of these problems if the story wasn’t so overwhelmingly irritating. Every time someone speaks, it’s to unload a ton of stupid puns at you. There are no stakes, nor is there a goal for the main character to drive toward. You’re just finishing this gauntlet of stages because your character was invited to take part in a tournament. Wizard of Legend is a hollowed-out shell compared to other games in the genre.

Wizard of Legend sucks: Game Pass, part 7 first appeared on Killa Penguin