Wandness: WandCraft Survivor

This game is trying to scratch the same itch as Magicraft, but it falls short. Movement is sluggish and you have to choose between picking up coins and hunting down chests before the level ends. Worse, almost everything intended to make a spell better comes at the cost of increasing the cooldown. +1 damage is not worth +1 second of cooldown. I wanted to love this game, but I was done after I beat it once.

Wandness: WandCraft Survivor is an addictive game. I kept coming back to it for one more run, and another, and another. I'm unsure how long it takes till completion, but it has some grindy achievements. [b]Approximate time to 100%:[/b] Unsure, I would guess over 30 hours, maybe even 40 hours because of the achievement for 100k gold. [b]Estimated achievement difficulty:[/b] 3/10 [b]Minimum number of playthroughs needed:[/b] 1 [b]Is there a good guide available:[/b] You don't need a guide [b]Multiplayer achievements:[/b] No [b]Missable achievements:[/b] No [b]Grinding Achievements:[/b] Yes, unlocking everything as well as earning 50k and 100k are very grindy [b]DLC-Only achievements:[/b] No [b]Speedrun achievements:[/b] No [b]Time-gated achievements:[/b] No [b]RNG-achievements:[/b] Getting the full synergy is a bit random, but visiting shops and choosing your character carefully decreases those odds a lot. This is also a roguelite where you'll play many runs, so I would say that it isn't really RNG achievements as long as you're on the lookout for the ones you still need. [b]Does difficulty affect achievements:[/b] No [b]Unobtainable/glitched achievements:[/b] At this moment, the a…

[b]WandMESS: WandCraft Survivor[/b] is a mixed bag, and unfortunately the bag has a hole in it. Bullet-hell roguelikes usually aim to make you feel like an unstoppable menace. [b]Wandness[/b] does the opposite. The more components you add to your wand, the slower it becomes, often to the point where a single cast takes multiple seconds. Instead of cooking up wild spell combos, you end up sprinting in circles, waiting for your wand to remember it has a job. On paper this feels like [i]“balance.”[/i] In practice, it discourages experimentation in a genre that lives and dies by broken builds. The presentation doesn’t help. The art direction feels unfocused, like assets from several different games stitched together without a clear visual identity. Movement is sluggish, combat lacks impact, and nothing really feels responsive. Hits don’t land with weight, enemies don’t react meaningfully, and the whole thing feels oddly floaty. The [i]“randomly generated”[/i] maps barely qualify as maps. Routes don’t feel distinct, choices don’t feel meaningful, and nothing changes depending on where you go, except how much damage you take and how long you’re forced to survive while running away. En…

Wandness is a roguelite action game developed by Knight Owl Games in collaboration with Binary Lunar and published by Knight Owl Games. The game blends the increasingly popular “survivors-style” horde combat formula with a deep system of magical customization built around crafting powerful wands. Rather than relying solely on predetermined character abilities or simple upgrade trees, the game focuses on letting players construct their own magical weapons using a variety of components and modifiers. This approach transforms the experience from a straightforward survival game into something closer to a magical sandbox where experimentation and synergy play a central role in determining how each run unfolds. The premise places players in a series of dangerous dungeons filled with hostile creatures that continuously attack in waves. Each run begins with a relatively simple setup and gradually evolves as the player gathers new equipment and magical components. The goal is to survive increasingly intense battles while advancing deeper into the dungeon environment. Enemies appear from all directions, creating constant pressure and forcing players to move strategically across the battlefi…

frame drops make the game just feel unfun. Will wildly fluctuate between 20 and 120 fps

Not recommended. Main issues: 1) Like many poor survivor-like games, the legibility can get really poor. Health regen is pretty much mandatory. Sometimes you can die because the level ended and a reward choice popped up. 2) Speaking of levels - the whole tree-like round selection is completely pointless and adds nothing to the game, just bloating and interrupting the gameplay. 3) Speaking of bloat, there isn't enough focus in terms of mechanics - the set bonuses, the modifiers that apply to adjacent weapons most notably don't add fun complexity, just hassle. 4) Ultimately, the wand building mechanics simply aren't engaging - in big part because a lot of the options are behind unlocks so from the start of the game you can basically just... increase crit change for weapons. Like cmon, the wand building is the main selling point you are going for, why not make sure it's interesting from the start? But not like much changes as you unlock - I did not get all the unlocks but skimming them there just isn't much interesting and there are similar games that do it better.