Wizard 101 Review

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WIZARD 101 Publisher: Kingisle Entertainment Free to Play Published by KingIsle Entertainment, Wizard 101 is a wizard school adventure with collectible card magic, wizard duels and far off worlds. The game is based on creating your own student Wizard and guiding him through different world and adventures. The game is Free to Play.

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If you like Harry Potter or magical worlds, this game is for you. Wizard 101 published by Kingisle Entertainment is a fantasy role playing game in which you create your own wizard and walk into this magical world of adventures.

You are lucky though, as you are gudided by Headmaster Ambrose who walk you through the tutorial section of the game, teaching you basic controls as well as simple magics. 

The user interface is very basic and each element on the screen is added during the tutorial with detailed instructions on how to use them. You even challenge other novice magicians like yourself and make a great impression in the eyes of Headmaster Ambrose.

Ambrose who guides you through the detailed tutorial section of the game, praises you as the tutorial is complete and tells that you have the potential of becoming a headmaster yourself one day.

With this motivation you jump into this MMO and start interacting with other players. Be careful before challenging anyone! Before you even learn a few basic spells, it all gets out of control in Ravenwood and all student wizards including you are called upon to investigate the bizarre events going on around them.  

The graphics are lovely, the color palette they used is very vivid and makes the game more fun to play. The animations and the voice commentaries are nice. The spell animations are fantastic. You will be amazed by the creativity of the spell animations. Each of them are unique and it keeps you entertained throughout every battle.

You can start exploring the missions available to you. 1st mission is to go to the Unicorn Way and help Ambrose with a small problem. Once you accept this mission, you are handed a letter to deliver it to  Private Stillson at the gateway.

When you accept a Quest, you see an arrow directing you through your path. It's not complicated to finish the first few Quests before taking more challenging ones.

I like the short loading times between the scenes. This game never makes you wait in loading screens. Even after the tutorial, you can see some tips on your screen once they are available. 

The name tags on characters are a little bit larger than I would prefer them to be. The blue font is somewhat annoying but you get used to it. I have not experienced any latencies while playing the game for a few hours. It's usually very smooth and you won't have any problems in battles as it's turned based anyway. 

On the upper left of your screen, you should notice the `UPGRADE NOW` button. The game offers a membership that gives you access to premium areas and some premium features like the Gifting capability, larger friends list and larger backpack. 

The PvP side of the game is actually limited to members only. This is a big negative in terms of competitive gameplay. You can still join practice matches but you miss out on the most entertaining and most competitive player versus player matches. The f2p option still offers Dueling against monsters. 

Considering the PvP and the extra housing features and some of the in-game mini-games, the membership benefits are worth the price. Especially the Access to Ranked matches are appealing if  you plan to become a competitive Wizard. 

You can still go on and play as a free 2 play account and enjoy this game for months. There are many places to explore and the Quests are fun to complete. The new updates made the game much more enjoyable as well!

Wizard 101 is an innovative MMORPG. Created back in 2008, it has a very big userbase and the developer Kingisle Entertainment has done an amazing job, keeping the game fresh with regular updates every year. With the latest updates late in 2012, the game has loads to offer. The Avalon update back in May 2012 has added so many areas to the game, you would never get bored of playing Wizard 101. Pet system, housing system, pet quests, advanced spells, new spels, new cards, there is so much to see and to do in Wizard 101. This is truly a masterpiece and highly recommended to an MMO enthusiast. 

• Graphics: 8/10
• Sound: 9/10
• Gameplay: 8/10
• Entertainment: 9/10