7 years ago
It stays true to its prequels, with the complex character and party building and even surpasses it with its itemization and magic-system.
The tactical, phase-based combat is different, due to the 3D engine, but in a good way.
All in all Sir-Tech managed to "modernize" the game without removing the "Wizardry feel" and dumbing it down. This is no small feat, if we look at all kinds of "sequels" and "spiritual successors" in these days.
The game is challenging. Not as hardcore and obscure as the previous games in the series, but it is still no small task to build a capable party and learn the combat system, and successfully finish the game.
It also requires a moderate amount of grinding and save/reloading, but just enough, not to make the game unpalatable.
The artwork is good, it has nicely drawn portraits and a well-designed UI. I also like the stylish, rather wacky 3D graphics, and it looks remarkably good for a 2001 game, on my Win 7 machine, with forced 16Q antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.
The audio is great: A pleasant soundtrack, lots of decent to good voice-acting, and what's truly unique is the different voice-sets for the PCs, which gives them a lot of character.
I find it hard to find some negatives, but here we go:
The combat is very slow out of the box, so using the Wiz8Fast and Wizardry 8 speed mod is mandatory. Also it is possible for PCs and NPCs to get stuck sometimes, plus a few crashes now and then (I had like 5 of them in 100 hours).
I've played over 300 hours of Wizardry 8, a full playthrough requires around 100 hours. If you manage to get this kind of free-time and are interested in an accessible, tactical dungeon-crawler, I can highly recommend it.
9.5/10