When I saw the trailer for Wander I was immediately drawn into its lush world. The atmoshpere and various biomes looked thick and gorgeous and I couldn’t wait to explore every inch of the it as different creatures. Specifically the Griffin.
Wander is described a MMO without consequences. There is no HUD to take you out of the world, no enemies, no way to cause harm to yourself or to others. There are no RPG elements, no soundtrack, and no text or voice chat. It’s just you, the open world, and other players. You would think then that Wander would be a game full of relaxation similar to flower but you’d be wrong. Instead it’s a game full of bugs, glitches, clunky controls, and ends up being an excruciating boring mess. I had enough of getting stuck in the geometry of the world, hard game crashes, massive texture pop-ins, along with other bugs. Mainly I had enough of being so damn bored.
You start out as a giant walking tree and have to explore the forest until you find your first transformation stone. Playing as the tree is irritating because of how ungodly slow it moves. I found the out the hard way when I hit a dead end while on a path in the woods. Within about ten minutes of playing I was already punished for doing the one fucking thing you can do in this game—explore! But I pressed on and eventually found the transformation stone and took more of a human form as a character named Hira. Once I did find the griffin the flight controls were a mess (a running theme if you haven’t noticed) and that’s when I called it quits.
You should not buy this game. If you like exploring there are numerous other titles to, well, explore but this should not be one of them.
