Mini Review: Wizard with a Gun (PS5) - This Co-Op Survival Adventure Is Worth a Shot

Wizard with a Gun is a one-or-two-player, twin-stick shooter, survival game from Galvanic Games and Devolver Digital. You play as a time-travelling wizard who's been tasked with preventing the Collapse, a cataclysmic event that split the world into pieces scattered throughout time. By exploring various procedurally generated worlds and collecting gears to fix your time machine, you'll be able to return further and further back in the past to events before the catastrophe.

Each time you set out from your base between realms in search of another gear, you'll enter a newly generated world through a portal. With only five minutes on the timer, you must explore the biomes quickly, locating the gear before the collapse. Once your time limit is up, enemies start spawning in large waves, forcing you to fight or flee the world before it becomes overwhelming. Offing enemies can extend your exploration duration and makes time management even more important as you juggle resource collecting, gear searching, and enemy slaying. It's a unique idea that makes for some enjoyably frantic moments.

Similar in style, both visually and mechanically, to Don't Starve, Wizard with a Gun has a heavy focus on its survival aspects. You'll be gathering a wide range of resources, crafting all manner of guns, bullets, and potions to increase your survivability. Using your arcane tome, you scan creatures and objects within the environment to unlock and learn more details and recipes for crafting.

Wizard with a Gun isn't without its issues, however. The beginning of the game is overly slow, taking several hours to really get going. Combat, although fun, can often feel frustrating due to the unoptimised controls and occasional frame rate drops. The button mapping also feels weirdly off, taking a long time to get used to since they're far from standard formats other titles use.

Wizard with a Gun is an enjoyably frantic twin-stick survival shooter. Although its iffy controls and occasional frame rate drops dampen the experience, its extensive crafting, upgrades, and base building systems overshadow the issues. If you're a Don't Starve fanatic or just after an enjoyable co-op title, we'd recommend giving Wizard with a Gun a shot.