Make your dreams of wielding magic, come to life in VR.
Become a wizard in one of the biggest virtual reality (VR) sandboxes.
Waltz of the Wizard has been enjoyed by the VR community since 2019. Developed by Aldin Dynamics, the game offers up the chance to live out your fantasies of being a magic user, including making potions, casting spells, and a slew of other things.
With the game now being on multiple platforms, Quest, PCVR, PlayStation VR2 (PSVR2), and even Apple phones, there’s numerous reasons that keep drawing players back into this world.
“The story behind that perhaps has a lot to do with our attention to detail and focus on creating a high-quality product that’s constantly cultivated. If we sum it up, we’ve kept updating the game constantly over the years, expanding both the range of features and deepening the world. Additions like voice interaction and greater capabilities in Skully have driven a tremendous interest in the game especially,” said Hrafn Thorisson, CEO of Aldin Dynamics.
While the game has seen an abundance of major overhauls and updates – including offering things like hand tracking, voice commands, and more – one of the biggest updates yet is bringing a new way to interact with everyone’s favourite talking skull – Skully.
Released Oct. 27, the update Skully’s Fantastic Fails, offers players a chance to spend more time with Skully and take him with you as you wander around. He’s not only boasting more words, but there’s also new things to do and even a redesigned menu.
“We thought it was an opportunity to show that Skully has interests beyond just sitting on a table and helping people create potions and meanwhile expand on the world by letting him venture outside the tower. There’s also some tie-ins with future updates, so people will keep seeing us expand on some of the things introduced in this update,” said Thorisson.
So, with that out of the way, let’s talk about the game itself.
Graphically, no matter what headset you’re playing on, this game is very well done. Aldin has made a beautiful world that works with every other technical element to keep you drawn in. Playing the base game on PSVR2 or the Quest version with the Skully’s Fantastic Fails update, there is a slight noticeable difference between the two – obviously the PSVR2 can achieve better graphics performance – but the different doesn’t detract from the game.
Whether you’re playing around in the tower and cooking up a fireball or exploring one of the many places you can go, the detailed work is obviously one of the reasons that the userbase is well over 1-million players.
Now let’s talk mechanics.
For the most immersive experience, the game is definitely best played with hand tracking. You won’t get the smooth locomotion options that you would with the controllers, but the ability to use your hands for everything else in the game makes it better.
Couple this with the voice commands – yes, your microphone can allow you to create, manipulate, and destroy – and you’ll get why the game’s engaging. Use phrases like ‘give me’ ‘create’ followed by what you want and see it come to life. This is especially cool in mixed reality mode (MR) – yes the game has that too – and bring the magic into your space. Play around with spells just as you would in VR, alternatively you can give specific commands in a certain way: ‘when I,’ ‘perform an action,’ ‘do this’ the more creative the more interesting your game gets.
If you do end up using controllers, things work about the way you’d expect; grab with the grip buttons, use items such as the crossbow with the triggers.
In terms of everything offered, Aldin has done a tremendous job of quality assurance on every update, ensuring that the game performs exactly the way in which it’s intended. Hand tracking works very well, though you may want to learn how some of the gestures work so there’s no confusion. As well, voice commands are extremely accurate, never once was there an issue recognizing what was said; if you’ve ever seen a TV show make a joke where a phones built in assistant calls the wrong person, there’s certainly no issues like that here.
There was also never a glitch, or framerate drop, no game breaking bugs were experienced.
As Aldin gets set for what’s next with Waltz, and yes there is more coming in the future, Thorisson notes the importance of being able to interact in game the way you would in real life.
“We’ve been working a long time on forging a new generation of games, where interaction is focused more around what interacting in reality is like — where characters have thousands of reactions and the world is heavily interactive. That’s something we expect to continue building on and taking even further than we have so far. We think the future of reality-focused experiences like that is very bright, and the success of Waltz of the Wizard going viral has proven that in our minds.”
Overall, Waltz of the Wizard is a great game in the VR space for those who just want something fun. Unlike some of the more mainstream games which fit very neatly into a specific subgenre, Waltz is able to transcend those barriers; making it something that anyone can enjoy.
With so much packed into this experience, and every possibility that the game will continue to expand to new platforms, the magic will only continue to spread.
