Adv: Alchemist Wizard [by Dekovir]

Alchemist Wizard by Dekovir Entertainment is a plat former set in a fantasy world. You control a wizard-alchemist as you explore 4 incredibly large worlds, collecting runes and ingredients on your way. Your only defenses are your spells, so those ingredients become very important since they are the only things that let you increase your spell power.

Each of the four worlds looks amazingly detailed, with diverse textures ranging from spooky graveyards to ancient Egyptian pyramids. The animation looks fluid, and the special effects add a nice touch. The level layout has you jumping to different platforms, avoiding enemies and their attacks, and collecting runes. Runes double also as health, and the levels are designed fairly well. You can almost always find plenty of runes near a collection of tough enemies. The enemies vary in strength and speed, from slow moving skeletons to quick moving ravens that fly through walls. Some enemies take only one hit, while others require multiple shots to be defeated.

Luckily, there are different spells available to make your job easier. Picking up ingredients like frogs and snakes, you can mix them in one of the many cauldrons littered throughout a world. Each cauldron has a different set of spells that you can create, and each of these spells has its own uses. You can freeze your enemies before taking them out with a fireball. You can cause a rain of fire to descend from the skies in the immediate vicinity (careful to avoid the rain yourself!). One of my favorite spells was the Bomb. You basically throw a bomb, and once it hits your enemies, or when the timer runs out, the bomb explodes, causing a flashy particle storm that can bring down multiple enemies! If you find yourself fighting a particularly tricky boss, you can always setup a teleport spell to move to safety immediately after moving in for an attack.

While the game features a few standard options options, such as volume control, I personally loved the ability to redefine the controls, which many "professional indie" games miss. With the incredibly large worlds, being able to save your progress at any point helped, especially since at any point you might find yourself out of magic and poisoned, with seconds left to live. It took me one play session to realize that saving is very important, since I had just reached the boss and died, resulting in me starting over from the beginning! Save, for your own sake!


While I found the worlds to be incredibly long, the variety of enemies, spells, and level layouts made for an interesting game.  The game itself is your standard plat former, but it has enough of its own twists to make the game refreshing to play.  It honestly took me a bit to get into, but this is the kind of game that I could see playing for some time. People shouldn't pass this over, since it's a great game.

Added: February 18th 2004
Reviewer: Gianfranco Berardi
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