The magical world of Wagadu awaits. First, you must make it through the land of dream. Twin Drums Afro-Fantasy game The Wagadu Chronicles is an experience like no other. In the early game, I’m still undecided on whether that’s a good or bad thing.
The Wagadue Chronicles crept into early access on December 4th last year. Surrounded by a land of calming browns and yellowed greens, the world of Wagadu for the early game stages has certainly captured the essence of what one would imagine the African planes are like. Small encampments are strewn few and far between, with resources scattered throughout the wild land. The aesthetics feel authentic, and there's some interesting lore built throughout the world that feels very unique. The game starts in the Dream Realm, which is essentially a tutorial area. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. My first impression actually began at character creation.
Wagadu starts you off with the ability to create one character. Just one – per Steam account. At first, I wasn’t entirely bothered by this, as I have strong feelings towards character progression, and I don’t feel like every game needs alts to keep players entertained. However, Wagadu also has 7 lineages, which some may consider “races” with plenty of additional lineage choices once a base lineage is selected. The lineage choices ranged from cat-like character models with the Lionblood lineage, to the Octopus-like Ikaki lineage.
Each lineage had their own specialties, like the Ironmasters were proficient in smithing, the Asiman were masters of elemental command and so on. Ultimately the limitation of having only one character ended up being more of a nuisance when I found myself torn between several different lineages. While I can’t truly say for certain, even after a few hours of play time whether lineage plays a large part in the overarching story, it certainly stuck in my craw that I wouldn’t get to try different options if I desired later on.
It's Lineage, But Not THAT Lineage
After obtaining a lineage, the remainder of the character creator was fairly lackluster. Your appearance can only range in two sizes and shapes, and the option to have breasts or not. The hair and facial styles felt like a simple choice between a few masculine and feminine options, but in my opinion, they didn’t vary quite enough at this stage of development. You could also choose a wide variety of color options for your character. I happily chose a blue skin tone to match my Water Elemental Asiman. Finally, when selecting a name, you’re tasked with choosing both your first and last name from a list of words with their own cultural meaning. There were so many to choose from, and the list didn’t make it very easy to sift through them all. I ended up with Yero Yin Yero which means “One who chose their Element Quickly”, but truthfully I just like the alliteration and the way it sounded.
Moments later I was off to Dream Land, where I was met with my first set of challenges. Wagadu doesn’t do particularly well at quest navigation, or path navigation, or general navigation. The pathing is marked by a lighter brown that differentiates itself from the surrounding sand. Navigating through the tutorial was about as grating as the sand I walked on, with quests feeling a little obtuse as you spoke with your Assistant Ancestor. Questing was somewhat difficult to track, even when you’re following along in the quest menu. Apart from the quests you’ll pick up around the world from quest givers, I also picked up quests through my Ancestor, and sometimes, those quests wouldn’t be able to be completed until you’ve leveled up some, which was very confusing.
Once you’ve got the handle on picking up quests the game quickly turns to a more survival-style collecting simulator. I ran around and picked up numerous items to fulfill the requirements of the quest, bypassing warthogs and colorful moth-bat creatures. Harvesting was a slow task, taking about 13 seconds per action, and the number of items I eventually had to procure became quite taxing. Once done, you can head to a crafting station to start refining your items. I was able to refine enough and get to an adequate ability level so that I could craft a bow instead of using the training swords. With how resource taxing the game has been I thought that the bow would require that I constantly craft arrows, but I was happy to see this wasn’t the case.
Combat is a turn-based system that gives each character two separate phases. The first phase is a movement phase, the second is the action phase. Movement and actions are certainly important for strategy, most especially with the Bow because if you’re not within range or the game believes your sight is blocked, you can’t hit the enemy, and worse still, you want to make sure you’re far enough way so that you’re not getting smacked by your animal nemeses.
Beware the Animals
The combat animations still feel quite placeholder, with my sword strikes not depicting my sword in hand, and the bow activating some arrows, but not really showing they’re equipped. If the combat was faster, meaning if each phase didn’t take several seconds to transition to the next phase, even after you’ve made your choice, I would actually like it quite a lot. The skills are built in a way that you can select as many actions as you have resources for, so that means I can strategize whether I want to aim my bow first, or fire several small attacks against different enemies. The speed of combat is so slow that I have enough time for a micro-nap in between actions, and say what you will about enjoying slow-paced games (which I tend to do) but I don’t want to spend several minutes in combat against trash mobs for some low-tier rewards.
I also haven't felt any danger really, in the sense that I can just walk around any enemies that are near me if I don't want to fight. During a battle if I feel like I'm losing, I can just flee, which I sometimes did just because I didn't want to bother fighting at all due to the time it takes away from the other quests I was trying to complete.
There’s still plenty of places left to visit in The Wagadu Chronicles early access. There’s some unique settings, characters, and gameplay here at this early stage. The game screams early access though, and I’m excited to see my way to the more difficult islands to see how the world progresses.
