Wizordum ended not in triumph but in defeat. Near the end of the game, the save was corrupted. What to do? Start again, and this time turn up the difficulty, playing not as a mace-wielding Cleric but as a wand-waving Sorceress. Playing back through the early stages, we confirm all anyone needs to know: this is a particularly fresh Doomer Shooter.

So what, says you. A Doomer Shooter is good? So what. Doom (1993) is still the best-designed FPS ever made. So they made a good game based on the best designed game ever? Likely story.

It happens all the time. The market is flooded with Doomer Shooters. Most of them are good cause Doom is good, Doom is highly adaptable, and Doom is evergreen. Wizordum leans into the blueprint of Hexen (1994) — one of the initial variants of Doom that favored Magic Fucking Spells over Big Fucking Guns —which somewhat differentiates the game from a pack of shooters that all look and feel exactly the same.

For developer Emberheart Games, Wizordum is a labor of love. Much like Doom, development has been modular, as it released in Early Access with the first episode of levels and has since been enhanced by an even better set of new levels, and even features a very accessible custom level editor for the community to create their own content.

The land of Terrabruma has been taken over by Chaos and it’s up to your Battlemage to locate and eradicate that Chaos from all manner of diverse biomes. Sense of place is Wizordum’s best feature, as the levels are designed to accentuate their setting first and foremost, which is great, cause many of them are very long and exploration-driven, so the bespoke world building being the core design principle is ultimately the beating heart of the game.

The settings are also diverse. The Battlemage runs through a gamut of labyrinthine levels from fantastical jungles, haunted graveyards, burning towns, icy snowcapped mountains, to a series of warships floating downriver.

In each level you’re doing a few things: battling monsters with magic, sourcing keys and solving puzzles to open up areas to progress, and exploring the nooks and crannies of the levels for useful spells, items, money, and of course, plentiful hidden passageways.

The design can be obtuse. Even in some of the more massive levels, the puzzles may require specific and small solutions, like finding this one switch to activate an opening, in a sprawling map. Some of them will take over an hour to traverse and fully explore while others are quick shots from beginning to end.

The combat patterns are not exceptional but do lean into the arsenal of fantasy weapons. Enemies range from various goblins and spiders to creepy mushroom men who can pull you in close and explode upon their death. The problem of the design is that when in-close, enemy attack patterns are not well-determined. They quickly swipe at you, rather than having spaced out and readable attack behaviors. Meanwhile, at range, it’s hard to shoot at creatures properly as they’ll stay mobile and sneak in and out of the low-poly level geometry until you gain a clear line of sight.

The weapons provided are satisfying and each one can be upgraded with money found around the levels for alternate fire modes. You’ve got your two class-based starting weapons: a mace for close combat and a wand for ranged combat. Then, the weapons gained while playing get more inventive. There’s an ice staff, which freezes enemies and with its upgrade, the character waves their hand and shatters their bodies with a snap. There’s a handy little gun with strong firepower. Gauntlets that shoot fireballs and zaps of electricity. While the combat encounters are rarely more interesting than kiting an enemy while peppering them with magic, the weapons themselves and the additional spells you’ll pick up are satisfying in theory.

Wizordum returns us to the initial wave of Doom iterations in style. Like Raven Software’s Hexen, the new game finds that there’s still some magic left in this old and often used formula, and proves yet again that Doomer Shooters are enduring for a reason: they are intrinsically satisfying to play and are so highly adaptable to expansion. As a pack of levels, Wizordum is deeply uneven and succeeds at exploration where it suffers at contextual engagement. Still, exploring this world is a delight, and one of the better recent efforts at the crowded genre.

7/10

Reviewed on Steam Deck