Welcome Time Wasters!
These last couple of weeks I’ve been perusing the web for browser games. I really enjoy these types of games and they’re what the Time Waster was originally founded on. However, over time, this piece has turned into a place to talk about indie games that aren’t in the browser format.
Some readers have also likely noticed that I’ve started doing Let’s Plays for Time Wasters. I really like the idea behind it because I’m a huge fan of Let’s Plays and other YouTube game content. Unfortunately, most browser games aren’t long enough to make a good Let’s Play of. This has been the case these last couple of weeks.
I know that all was a bit long winded, but I wanted to explain why there haven’t been as many Let’s Plays while still assuring readers that browser games won’t be getting the boot. So without further ado, here is this week’s Time Waster!
This week I played Remove the Dragon, Wizard! It’s a small browser game that puts players in the control of a local kingdom’s wizard. The king has tasked this wizard with killing a dragon that is plaguing the kingdom.
Remove the Dragon, Wizard! is a top-down adventure game that has a similar feel to a Zelda game. Players have to adventure through the forest to get their magic wand before they can take on the dragon. Why did the wizard leave his wand in the forest? I have no idea, but that’s what you have to do.
Getting to the magic wand is when Remove the Dragon, Wizard! gets interesting. When the wand is reached, players are transported to a new area where they have to move through the user interface of Stencyl, a type of game creation software. This fourth-wall breaking is really neat and how the wizard solves the dragon problem in the end is also clever.
When it comes to graphics, Remove the Dragon, Wizard! is lacking. The actual forest and characters in the game looks like it was made in paint and everything else is just screenshots of a Stencyl work space. There are also no animations in the game. The wizard is content to just glide across the ground rather than move his feet.
Remove the Dragon, Wizard! does have some solid music. It’s action packed and full of energy. One small part that I appreciated was the music becoming quieter as the player moved away from the game and into the Stencyl section of the game.
Overall, Remove the Dragon, Wizard! has some clever ideas behind it, but there was obviously a lack of effort put into these ideas. This could’ve been a much more impressive game that went further with its comedy and fourth-wall breaks, but it isn’t.
Remove the Dragon, Wizard! gets 1.5 GiN Gems out of 5!