Tap Wizard 2 Review

When you start Tap Wizard 2, you are shown an image indicating that to move the cursor you will use the left thumbstick and to move your wizard, use the right thumbstick. That is it for instructions on the controls. With that over, you begin the game in limbo. Here you will select the character you will play as, the wizard you choose will determine which spells will be available to use: Emberfreeze Prophet, Electroville Maestro, Chillbloom Warlock, and Firelight Maven, then it asks if you want to remember the past or if is it the future. That seemed a little weird to me, so I was curious to see what that meant.

Tap Wizard 2 is an interesting mix of genres, it feels like an RPG mixed with a bullet-hell type game, reminding me of Vampire Survivors where your main character fires their weapon at the enemy automatically. The one weird difference is that your wizard will walk around on their own, you can use the right thumbstick to influence where they go, but if you aren’t moving it, they will continue to fight and wander around the stage. The game even continues to play itself when you are offline. As soon as you start again, you see your stats and the rewards you accumulated while gone in the Vase of Accumulation. In the beginning, you will earn one Random Rune for each hour away. As you progress, this will increase.

I thought that since I was checking out this game on the Xbox Series S it would work well with the controller, however, it definitely was not the way I expected. The left thumbstick is like a big cursor and the right stick moves the wizard around, it's quite cumbersome to use. Using a controller isn’t the easiest, moving that cursor around feels slow and sluggish. The game does not wait for you to make selections, there is no pause and the game continues whether you are ready or not. When you die, time rewinds and back to the beginning you go, but with the upgrades and items you collected.

When you start, there is no magic equipped so you need to do that first by clicking on the spell book and selecting a spell that you want to use from your spell bag, dragging it into the spell slot. Once placed, your wizard can start using magic against the enemy. For now, there is only one unlocked but you can get up to four spaces for spells. Your wizard will auto-fire at the enemy located closest to you. It’s tricky to control where they are shooting, you can try to move them around using the right thumbstick to get closer to what you want to target. This also allows you to fire at the treasure chests placed around the stage, or at the giants carrying items that they drop once defeated. There are a variety of items that can be inside the chest like gold, XP, crystals, or health.

When I started, I found the enemies you fight to be incredibly fast compared to my wizard, it was hard to even get up to wave five without being defeated. As you play more, and try over and over again, you can upgrade your attacks to make them stronger, unlock more health, and increase your wizard’s speed. Once you start powering up, you will start making progress getting further and unlocking more upgrades for your character.

There are so many things to complete and collect to empower your wizard, such as: the Staff of Knowledge that gives you special perks like Slayer, Elemental Overlord, or Elemental Empowerment; a Rune Bag that holds runes that you collect like haste which increases your speed, or two types of repulsion rune, that are activated when you take melee damage pushing the enemy away; a Totem Pouch which holds spirits that you find on the battlefield; and a Research Manual, with which you can spend points to work on making attacks stronger, increase your max amount of health, or strengthen a spell. Tap Wizard 2 has so much going on it ends up feeling overwhelming and convoluted.

My time with Tap Wizard 2 was interesting, frustrating, and confusing. It was neat to have the game continue battling when you were away from the console. But, trying to figure out all these different items and power-ups and how to use them effectively to improve your character was hard. I think this title would benefit from not having so many things going on at once or doing a better job at explaining it, I felt like most of the time I was just guessing and hoping that it would work. This made the game feel more like a chore to play than a super fun experience.