Wizard Blocks

[SDHawk]

Wizard blocks is a puzzle game. The main gimmick is that you control a character within the puzzle, similar to games like Wario's Woods, Troddlers, or Mr. Driller. The movement is quite strict with the only vertical maneuver being the ability to raise yourself up by placing a block beneath you. Otherwise it's a pretty straight forward color matching game with the only gimmick tiles being chests that reveal a normal block after being near a clear chain.

It contains two modes: puzzle and dig. Puzzle is exactly what you expect it to be with static level layouts where you have to figure out how to remove all the blocks to advance to the next level. Dig is closer to a traditional puzzle game with the screen constantly scrolling downwards, requiring you to clear enough space to survive. Puzzle ends up being a good way to pick up techniques, but dig is where the most entertainment comes from.

The core game of Wizard Blocks is perfectly serviceable. But it never goes past that. It has a few pieces of public domain music, but they're not especially exciting nor do they sync to the game situation. The most exciting the presentation gets is with a voice saying something when you hit chains of certain sizes.

This half-heartedness seeps into the game itself as well. In dig mode the speed stays the same throughout, so it lacks the increasing intensity you might expect from a puzzle game. In fact, it actually has an end to the level that you can reach which turns the game more into a score attack rather than a struggle for survival. The heavy amount of randomness (combined with the finite level) prevents the game from actually being that interesting as a serious score attack, though, so it pretty much ends up with an identity crisis.

As far as OHR games go this is probably one of the better puzzle games out there, but in the context of puzzle games as a whole it doesn't have much of an identity. If you prefer slower paced stuff that favors score chains or static puzzles over survival, you can probably get something out of this. If you're more into survival, then maybe pass this one over unless you're dying for a puzzle game.