Rift Wizard 3

One reviewer says "only 20 percent of players have beaten the game." I went and checked, because that's the kind of claim worth verifying rather than repeating.

The real figure is 24.5% — that's the share of players who have earned WIN_ONE, the achievement for winning a single run. It is also the most-earned achievement in the game. Of the 104 achievements Rift Wizard 3 has, the median sits at 1.4%, and 97 of them are under 5%.

That's the review in one statistic. This is a game where three quarters of the people who bought it have never won.

What it is

A traditional turn-based roguelike: twenty floors, one screen each, an immortal amnesiac wizard, and a nemesis somewhere at the end. What makes it unusual is the shop. Rather than doling out spells as random drops, Rift Wizard puts the entire spellbook in front of you from the first floor — over 500 spells and artifacts — and lets you buy anything you can afford.

That inverts the usual roguelike tension. You're not hoping for a build; you're choosing one, and then finding out over twenty floors whether it was a good idea. The positive reviews are full of people describing the moment it clicks: "you'll learn to speak the game's language," writes one at 185 hours.

The playtimes are the strongest evidence. Positive reviewers have a median of 46.5 hours and a maximum of 385, six weeks after launch. Recent reviewers median 43.9. Nobody is dabbling here.

Reading every negative review

The game has 212 English reviews and nineteen of them are negative. I read all nineteen — total coverage, which is rare enough to be worth stating, and it means I can characterise the criticism without any sampling.

It splits cleanly in two.

The veterans' argument, which dominates. The top negative, at 131 votes from a self-described longtime player of Rift Wizard 1 and 2, says outright: "if you've never played rift wizard at all before, i'd recommend it even less — just go buy 2 instead." Another: "I'm going to say stick with RW2. 3 is reliant upon equipment spam and thus isn't quite as 'wizardry' as it should be." A third: "Loved Rift Wizard 2 but Rift Wizard 3 feels too different from it."

The substance is a specific design change: skills and equipment have been merged into a crafting system where you fuse components found on the level, and consumables — potions, the Aether Dagger, the Stopwatch — are gone. Maps are smaller. For some long-time players that removed the improvisation they valued.

Notably, the most honest framing of this comes from a positive review, 63.8 hours in: "I don't think liking RW2 means you'll like RW3, they feel like two completely different idea's for what Rift Wizard is." That's the sentence a prospective buyer needs.

The clarity problem, which everyone shares. This one is not a matter of taste. "Information overload has always been difficult to deal with in this series," writes one critic. "Each level remains a giant arithmetical nightmare. I have no idea how someone is supposed to conceptualize what happens on a given turn," writes another. Even a broadly positive reviewer: "The biggest weakness of this game is clarity. Right now it's very unclear how different items work together." That's why the interface score here is a 5.

And there's a real design tension in the difficulty — a 16-hour player asks "can we get some player agency on like the first 3 stages??? 99% of my runs end in the first 3 stages if I try to theory craft at all." When a build-focused game kills you before the build exists, the build focus is undercut.

Where it's going

Early Access, and being worked on: an EA patch on 30 June, then a public beta branch opened on 6 July with three rounds of beta patch notes through 29 July. Running a public beta branch six weeks in is a good sign for a game whose main problem is balance and legibility.

The verdict

Rift Wizard 3 earns an 8. As a tactical puzzle it's excellent — open-spellbook design is genuinely novel, the depth is real rather than decorative, and the people it suits are putting hundreds of hours in within weeks of launch. If you liked Caves of Qud or want something far crunchier than Slay the Spire, start here.

It isn't higher because the interface doesn't carry the complexity the design demands, because the difficulty frequently ends runs before the interesting decisions begin, and because it is still in Early Access with balance visibly under construction.

The series question I'd answer plainly: this is a redesign, not an upgrade. If Rift Wizard 2 is a game you love, treat 3 as a different proposition and try the demo first. If you've never played one, ignore the veterans' argument entirely — it isn't about you, and the game underneath is very good.