When a hardcore fan of CRPG's thinks of the most popular and longest running series of games in the business, only a handful of names come to mind. Ultima, Might and Magic, and of course, Wizardry. When Wizardry was first released in 1981, it brought with it countless hours (for that time) of gameplay, that had people of all ages hooked to their monitors, going through dungeons, searching for treasure, and vanquishing evil. Now after more than 20 years, the last game in the series has been released, putting an end to the Dark Savant saga.

Introduction
Wizardry 8 is a high fantasy game at heart, with swords and sorcery at the core, but technology still manages to get in, in some subtle and not so subtle ways. You start off on an alien planet, due to a crash landing of the space-craft you were on. With no way off, you are forced to trek out with your party, and within less than a few minutes, you are thrown into your first fight. After a few hours in the game, you realize that there are other inter-galactic factions on the same planet, all warring over the artifacts that you are searching for yourself.

Let's have a party
Character creation in Wizardry 8 couldn't have been made better. You can choose from over 11 races and 15 classes, with countless combinations, and even though some classes and races are better suited for each other, its much more fun to play Wizardry with characters you want to play as, not as the best made characters.
Levelling up leads to one of the best parts of Wizardry 8. I had a lot of fun raising my characters stats, and changing their class, just to see what else they could do. By changing classes, you get the best of both worlds, and you can get several skills which you wouldn't even have access to.
Skills in Wizardry can be raised up by either using the skill continuously, or allocating points to it (to a certain amount) when you gain a level. Abilities can only be raised when you level though, and with a limiting amount to spend on them, it can take a long time to max out even one.

Combat
Battling enemies ist both very sophisticated and frustrating at the same time. The latter, because the amout of fighting is very frequent. No matter where you are in the game, whether at the beginning area or at a more advanced area, the monsters will always be near your level and outnumber you two to one most of the time. And with more spawning continuously, you can get bogged down and even pushed back to where you started off to where you needed to go just to heal yourself. Even if you turn up the combat speed, the monsters will "think" before attacking you (even if it is their only option), they'll run away faster than you can catch up to them, and even hide behind obstacles so its harder to find them; and on the other hand it is impossible for your party to flee (at least without a notable amount of damage).
On the other hand, combat very finetunable and adjustable, making it very enjoyable, especially once your party has risen above a certain level, where they inflict enough damage and their armour class is high enough!

Arcanae
There are enough spells in Wizardry 8 to rival a D&D game, which are split into four main groups, and many more sub-groups. Whether you choose from magic, psionic, priest or alchemical spells, you get into more detail with Ice, Fire, Divine, and other spell groups. By increasing these skills, each spell you have increases in strength and duration, so by the end of the game you'll have an incredible magical force at your disposal.

How does it play?
The main quest itself is quite large, and will take you to many different environments. The game boasts over 60 hours of play, and it couldn't be more true. You can even choose to join one of two factions half-way through the game and only help one of them to achieve your goals.
Side quests are far and few between, and usually pretty uninteresting. In most RPG's I finish as many quests as I can find, but with the huge battles in between area's, I found it took much too long, and just wanted to finish off the main story. Going from area to area in the earlier parts of the game can take hours depending on how lucky (or unlucky) you are, so I tended to accept quests but only finish them if I'm in the area.
Controls are very good and sophisticated and it becomes clear, that Sir Tech has spent a lot of time finetuning it. Be it the inventory or the pop-ups, combat or dialogues, everything is intuitive, fast and easy to handle.
In your travels, you will be taken to monasteries, a tree city, a technologically advanced fort and underground cave, a whole underwater section (filled with the largest boss in the game), and even graveyards. While not the best game graphically, a lot of areas are really well done, especially the water effects. What's great about the environments is that each area, no matter if they are both underground caves, or cities, will always look completely different, with different textures and everything. The NPC's are a different matter though, they all seem quite blocky and way too dark, but considering the number of them in each area, it does keep down the frame rate. The portraits for each character are exquisite, a lot of work was put into them and it shows.

Sound & Vision
While the game engine is not state-of-the-art, it is very well good enough for a great RPG experience. The only thing really strange is the very limited line-of-sight, which is also not adjustable. But in closed rooms, like dungeons, that game looks very well.
As for the acoustic side, Sir Tech did a great job: The voices of your own characters can be customized to have different accents and attitudes. You can have everything from angry French characters to uptight fairies, and you won't even get tired of them, since they have so much (and regularly funny) things to say. And the music by Kevin Manthei is very moody, but sometimes the tracks are too short, which makes them to be played to often and thus sound repetitive.

Tech Stuff
Even on an above average computer, there seemed to be surprising amounts of loading time, mostly while trying to bring up the area map. I waited ten minutes for the auto-map to load, but at least until you leave the area, the map would load up instantaneously. Once in a level though, there won't be any more loading, lagging or anything bothersome at all, which is surprising since there can be a lot on the screen at once.

Conclusion
Sir Tech has succesfully ported the old Wizardry feeling to modern PC's in First Person 3D. Anyone who enjoys a good RPG has to give it a chance and one can only hope, that Wizardry 8 sells enough copies for another company to buy the rights, the manpower and know-how from Sir Tech to conclude the series!

The Verdict Graphics (30%) 6.0 Sound (20%) 9.5 Control (25%) 10.0 Fun (25%) 9.5 Overall 8.7

Reviewer's System Version Wizardry 8 (Wiz8Patch2001_12_23) CPU Intel Pentium 4 1.8 GHz RAM 512 MB RAMBUS Graphics ELSA Gladiac 920 GeForce 3 Sound Creative Sound Blaster Live Platinum OS Windows 98 SE, DX 8.1