Wizards of Lezama

Strategy games have the ability to keep players busy for many hours on end, thanks to the fact that they encourage replayability and provide them with many possible tactics. Hence, there’s nothing better than mastering all the secrets of your favorite faction and using it to crush your enemies, even if this usually takes hours of practice and a lot of effort on your behalf.

Wizards of Lezama is not your typical strategy game, even if it might look somewhat similar to Heroes of Might and Magic or Disciples. However, it’s actually very much like chess and nothing like the aforementioned games, which is a pretty interesting approach, in theory. Unfortunately, the mechanics are pretty horrible at the moment, especially since there’s no way to learn who does what and how everything works.

In essence, you start with a number of pieces that can be arranged however you desire in order to encourage a more offensive or a more defensive style. The units are always the same, on the other hand, and there’s almost no information on the units and their types. Granted, the only differences are in how they move around the board and how they are ranked, but even that information is pretty difficult to unravel.

The units move like in chess, in the sense that you can only move one per turn. Some of them have different movement patterns, such as zig-zag, or in a straight line as long as the way forward is clear. In order to capture an enemy unit you have to move on top of it, although it also depends on the rank of the two pieces to determine the winner. Unfortunately, the enemy units always win, and they are all of the same type, which is seriously infuriating.

Thus, there are so few reasons to recommend Wizards of Lezama at the moment, because nothing works as it should and nothing is explained. You are thrown directly into a match against a perfect AI, with no clue on how the gameplay mechanics work. There is a written tutorial in the game, but it’s practically useless and it tells you what you can figure out by simply clicking around for thirty seconds.

When it’s all said and done, Wizards of Lezama is not really a pleasure to play at the moment, so you’d better wait for it to be improved in the future. There’s certainly potential, but releasing the game so early in the development phase might turn away some players permanently.