Wizard's Crown
Description official descriptions
Wizard's Crown is a fantasy role-playing game in which the player creates a party of up to eight adventurers and takes them on a quest to retrieve a magical crown from a wizard named Tarmon, who sealed himself and the crown in his laboratory five hundred years ago.
The game features tactical battles, during which the player navigates the party members in turns over the battlefield. Different weapons demonstrate unique characteristics; for example, spears can attack two squares away, flails ignore the enemy's shields, and axes have a chance of breaking them completely. Shields are used to defend against frontal attacks and those coming from whatever side the shield is equipped on. The player can opt to skip these details and have the battle proceed automatically.
Experience gained by characters is spent on skills, attributes and life points. Unlike in most comparable games, classes and their unique abilities are not assigned to the characters, but must instead be "bought" by using intelligence points. The classes are Thief, Ranger, Fighter, Priest and Sorcerer; any of those can be combined with another one for a single character.
Weapons can be imbued with various enhancements. Magical weapons inflict elemental damage (called "injuries" in the game); "Plus" weapons cause extra bleeding, which may affect the character's health, making him faint; "Life Blast" weapons can kill a character in such a way that he cannot be resurrected afterwards.
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Credits (Commodore 64 version)
16 People
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Reviews
Critics
Average score: 76% (based on 3 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.3 out of 5 (based on 25 ratings with 2 reviews)
Not an overly in-depth storyline, but gameplay is fun.
The Good
The tactical combat adds a lot of enjoyment to the game. I also like the way you can improve magical items and weapons -- very nice, and gives you something to work towards.
The Bad
Would have been nice to have a bigger world. I'm not really sure why, but SSI chose to keep you in the small map. The text, "The wizard's spell prevents you from going any further in this direction" gets old and is rather unimaginative.
The Bottom Line
If you like RPGs, you'll probably like this game. If you're new to RPGs, look elsewhere first.
DOS · by Mirrorshades2k (274) · 2000
The Good
The best aspect of Wizard's Crown was its incredible attention to detail in character development and combat. Wizards and priests did not have a huge selection of spells, but the spells they did have were a lot of fun to use and always had a strategic impact on the battle beyond just doing damage to enemies. Weapons were varied in their abilities and strengths: swords would do lots of damage in some situations but almost no damage to certain types of armor or creatures. The wide variety of combat tactics in the game really made you think about how you would approach a battle.
One of the best features of the game which unfortunately has not been implemented in more recent RPG's was the option to turn on "Quick Combat" which saved tons of time when you were fighting easy opponents and made the combat a lot less repetitive.
Finally, character development was a dream. You built your party completely from scratch with a point-based system. As long as you had a high enough intelligence, you could choose as many character classes as you wanted with the price that your overall skill and attribute advancement for that character would be slower compared to a more specialized character.
The Bad
The plot was fairly standard: find the evil wizard and retrieve what he stole. The graphics were not that great either.
The Bottom Line
Wizard's Crown was an innovative game because of its incredible attention to detail in character development and its combat system. The plot was simplistic: kill the evil wizard and recover the crown, but the fun gameplay and character development made up for it.
DOS · by Droog (460) · 2000
Trivia
This game is quite flexible in terms of character creation, particularly in the area of character classes. In essence, you can multi-class your characters as much as you'd like (keeping in mind that this will cause slower development). It would be possible for you to design a character as a Warrior-Priest-Ranger-Wizard-Thief... if you had the patience for it!
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Yakumo.
Windows added by Plok. Apple II added by Dietmar Uschkoreit. Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit added by Kabushi. Atari ST added by Belboz.
Additional contributors: Mirrorshades2k, jean-louis.
Game added March 9, 2000. Last modified August 2, 2024.