Wizard101 is a MMO for children that can be great fun for adults and even pvp lovers who like a little strategy.
When you create your character, the game goes through questions along the lines of "what is your favorite season?" and "do you like to adventure alone or with friends?" in order to determine which school of magic (there are 7) you are most likely to enjoy. You can skip these questions and just chose if you so wish.
Once you've chosen your school of magic, which is basically your class, you are set off into the world with a few spells from said school to save wizard city. This game borrows heavily from Harry Potter in terms of setting and theme. You play as a child prodigy summoned from a world that doesn't even believe in magic who is foretold to be the only one who can save the spiral.
At its base the game revolves around combat that is more akin to magical duels in 'Magic the Gathering' than it is anything you've experienced in other MMOs. When battle is joined, a magical dueling circle is formed on the ground and the two sides rush to stand in a spot on their side of the circle. The circles have enough spots to allow fights to be up to 4 on 4. The fight is then divided into rounds where both sides choose their actions for the round simultaneously and then the actions are carried out during an action phase. Spells are cast from cards drawn from your deck that you equip and then design before setting out to fight. At first these decks are very small with very few options, but as the game progresses bigger decks are found or purchased allowing more cards in the deck, more copies of each card in the deck and and larger sidebars. Different decks allow for different variations of primary school/secondary school cards, but they almost always allow for far more primary school copies than secondary school. Needless to say, by level 10-15ish you can already have a lot of options behind your deck design allowing for lots of customization to how your approach battles.
At first, the game feels very shallow and it is easy to get turned off by this apparent lack of depth. By the time you leave the first world though, the game quickly becomes addictive. Building your deck requires forethought into what kinds of creatures you will be fighting and your particular style of play and is also dictated by the fact that the different schools of magic start playing very differently from each other. For example, fire and storm tend to be all offense with little defense while schools like death and ice take a more "high survivability, low damage" approach. Even these methods can be different, however. For example, ice survives through solid defensive spells, the highest hp in the game, and getting lots of resistances on ice only gear while death survives by healing themselves as they do damage with creatures such as vampires and ghouls. All of these schools can also be varied up by using training points to learn secondary (or even tertiary) schools. So your life mage is unlikely to be like the other guy's life mage.
Group combat is also done in a new fashion. Rather than traveling around as groups (which you can do with the next update), you can just jump into any fight that is already going on. So as you are running down the street, if you see someone dueling a few creatures you need for a quest, you can jump right in and help him out. However, for each additional person that jumps into a fight another monster jumps in as well. This can lead to a few frustrating moments where someone jumps into your fight, but doesn't pull their weight and it feels like you just had to kill additional monsters on your own.
PvP is a solid way to take a break from running missions and is available at any level. It is done in a arena setting where you sign up for a match and the game searches for someone around your level and skill. This leads to some frustrations when there aren't many people searching as you can end up in a hopeless battle against someone much higher level than you are. That being said, when you do find yourself in a relatively fair match the pvp really shines. The battles can be over in a minute or so or last up to 45 minutes. These battle are extremely intense as you and your opponent constantly throw up defenses and set up for large attacks, trying to be the first to sneak a good hit past your opponents defenses. There is a great amount of tactics and strategic timing involved in these pvp fights and the arena duels are easily the best part of the game. The developer is working on a more robust pvp system in the near future where you can win badges (basically titles) and better pvp gear than is currently available as you climb the ladder.
The game cuts down on travel times and makes it easy to meet up with friends through convenient teleportation functions. In any world you can simply click a button in the lower right to teleport back to the commons of that world (town basically), and you can set a mark anywhere you like with a click of a button and a small expenditure of mana. Once this mark is down, you can port to that mark at any point with yet another simple click. Also, you can teleport to anyone on your friend's list at any time. This makes it easy to move around and even easier to meet up with friends for a tough quest or dungeon.
Health is regained by either healing in battle, picking up red wisps that float abundantely in any combat area, or drinking one of many potions you get while leveling up. Mana is regained in much the same way, but the later worlds no longer have blue wisps floating around forcing you to rely on larger mana pools, your potions, or frequent trips back to town.
In an odd design decision, to refill your mana and your potions you have to play mini games that range from concentration to clones of "Dig Dug" or "Joust". At first, this can be annoying, but as you level up and start getting a larger mana pool and more potions you'll find yourself rarely having to play these mini games; which is a good thing as I found them more of an annoying necessity than fun. Due to abundant red wisps, downtime between fights is almost non-existant as you will usually reach full health just running to the next quest or fight.
The sound and music in the game is solid, but a bit on the bland side. The voice acting however is superb with only a few hiccups of monotone or bad line delivery. This is an impressive feat regarding just how much voice acting you will hear throughout the course of the game. Every plot development and quest you pick up will be delivered in (almost always) believable dialogue. As you move through the different worlds the accents change, keeping the voice acting from becoming too boring.
From a technical aspect, the graphics are nothing special. From an artistic aspect the graphics do a fine job of creating a world children can get lost in. The monster models change drastically from world to world ensuring you never get too bored seeing the same monster skin all game. The models usually have a good bit of character in them as well, and some are pretty funny. The first time you see a leprachaun sliding down his rainbow, mumbling his mumbo jumbo before throwing coins at you or a ninja pig hurling himself through the air, you can't help but chuckle. The animation is also very good and some of the spells are actually quite cool to behold.
As far as value goes, the game is a great bargain. It has a free trial that lasts a long as you want, but limits where you can go that will keep you busy until about level 10. After that, you'll run out of things to do and have to pony up in one way or another. The game offers two options: paying a monthly subscription or buying crowns. Crowns are an in game currency you purchase with real money that can be used to buy new areas to adventure in or to purchase in game items. This option seems like a good option only for the extremely casual though. The subscription opens up the entire game for the low price of $9.99 a month with no retail purchase fee. This is a great bargain since for 10 bucks you can easily get a month of entertainment out of this title. The game also offers a family plan where the subscription is lowered to $6.99 a month if two or more people sign up under the same card for those of you that have children or room mates.
Wizard101 is an mmo that focused on doing only a few things, but doing them very well rather than trying to do too much. In this day of modern MMOs promising the world, but failing to deliver, it is nice to see someone keeping it simple and fun. All in all, this is a game that is easily recommended to those with children as well as adults who are looking for a different type of mmo.