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BEST SINGLE-PLAYER ROLE-PLAYING GAME
 
 
Wizardry 8

 
 Publisher: Sirtech Canada
Developer: Sirtech Canada
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Sirtech's Wizardry series is one of the oldest computer role-playing game series around; the very first game was released nearly 20 years ago, and even then, it enthralled players with its first-person dungeon crawls and enjoyable hack-and-slash gameplay. Considering all the problems that the developer had bringing Wizardry 8 to market, it's presumably the last game in the series...but you don't need to have followed the game's troubled development or the series' history to enjoy Wizardry 8, because it's an excellent single-player RPG in its own right.

Though the game picks up where the previous game in the series left off, it's not the least bit inaccessible for new players. In fact, Wizardry 8 not only lets Wizardry veterans import old characters from previous games, but it also presents more choices than ever for creating a new party of characters, including all of the series' powerful prestige classes, such as bishops, lords, and samurai. Once you've created a party you like--and you might take a while to decide, since Wizardry 8 offers so many different ways to build an interesting party of characters--you'll journey into the game's vast, fully 3D world. Despite the fact that Wizardry 8 has been so long in the making, the game looks and sounds surprisingly good, especially since it features the same sort of distinctive and often extremely funny voice acting that was featured in Sirtech's excellent Jagged Alliance strategy games. It's easily the overall best single-player RPG this year.



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