Set over five worlds, Wizard Apprentice is an attractively presented, but fundamentally simple, puzzle game. You take control of a little wizard who you must guide around the screen collecting all the collectables, which vary from flowers to mushrooms. On some levels you also get a second character, a delightfully animated little blob-like creature.

A great deal of care has been taken over the animation - the items you must collect jiggle around funnily whilst awaiting collection, and when you climb ladders your feet are perfectly aligned with the rungs. If your browser supports animated GIFs then you can see the dancing flowers and mushrooms at the top of this review. Also, the game runs in a 256 colour 640x512 resolution mode so the graphics are highly detailed, although you do require a Risc PC to play this game. A lower resolution version for older computers is intended to be released at a later date.

This is not a fast action game. Moving is rather pedestrian in order to allow for the detailed animation, but this is quite pleasant in a game of this nature, although it can become tedious to continually execute the same moves repeatedly when attempting different solutions to a level. Due to the limited size of each level this never becomes too much of a problem, however. The screen does scroll on some levels, however, although never by very much.

^{Screenshot shown 2/3 of actual size}

Many puzzle games tend to have levels which are either easy or hard, with little in-between. However, due to their carefully moderated size the levels in Wizard Apprentice do not suffer from this problem. Apart from some easier introductory levels I found that the levels were nicely tuned - they reach the point where you have to think about each level for a bit, but you never feel completely overwhelmed or 100% stuck. And even if you do become absolutely stuck you are not forced to complete a level to progress onto the next one, although the program does keep a record of which levels you have finished, and gives you your percentage completion of the entire game.

The whole game is rather sedate, but this is probably how puzzle games should be - time limits tend to make games extremely tedious, and luckily Wizard Apprentice has no such annoyances. You are sent back to the main menu when you complete a level which initially seems silly, but once you get past the first few levels it becomes more sensible because you will have spent considerably longer actually playing the level and you will want to save your position.

Overall, therefore, the animation is excellent, but it does seem very odd that when you are not moving your character stays absolutely still, especially given the dancing objects. The graphics are crisp and well-drawn, although the breakable rocks are rather poor, consisting of a few pulsating 'cracks' added on to the existing block graphic. The game consists of 100 levels, which is probably just about the right number - too many more and you'd never finish it, but too many less and you might finish it too soon.

The review copy was a pre-release version and so did not include the promised 'large introduction', and some finishing touches were missing, so some of the comments above may be fixed before the final release. It's also not possible to give it a final overall mark because its price has not yet been decided.

But should you buy it? Well, if you like puzzle games then I'd recommend Wizard Apprentice without hesitation - it's definitely much better than any free (public domain) efforts I've seen, both in design and presentation. And what if you don't? Well, it really is just a pure puzzle game, so you'd have to judge it on its merits, but the fact that you can pick it up and play it for as long or as short a time as you like is rather appealing.

Review by Gareth Moore, © 1997

'Value' mark will depend on final release price, which may affect the 'Overall' mark

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