Building Up A Wizard Academy | Wizdom Academy Review

Get ready to build, staff, and run your own magical academy! Wizdom Academy is where you build up your own school from the literal ground up. Starting from the mana tree in the middle of the land, decide where each classroom goes and remember to put in some dorms for sleeping. Every single aspect of the school is up to you.

Mind the Budget

Schools are not cheap to run, and since you have been given the task of making a profitable wizard college, you must mind the budget. You can build the school on your own, but you cannot run all the classrooms on your own. You can hire professors to focus on teaching. Tip: try to negotiate a lower pay because money can be hard to come by. To get some money flowing, you’ll need students. Enroll students and they will start going to classes. You can keep track of money flow in the upper left corner to see if you are making money or losing money.

Mana

Being a wizard school, you rely heavily on mana. That magical tree in the middle of the school supplies all of the mana for all classrooms. There will be times when mana droughts happen, and you will need to shut down rooms in order not to run out of mana. Each room takes a certain amount of mana over a certain amount of time. This will be a balancing game of what can be left open (I suggest keeping the dorms open). There will be options to upgrade mana storage and this will allow you to keep more rooms operational.

Upgrades

With each class successfully taught, you will gain materials for upgrades. From graphite to books to physical power, all classrooms yield different results.

Graphite is needed for building new rooms. The only ways to get it are by teaching or taking down old structures, but that way costs money… so I suggest teaching.

Books are important because they allow you to progress in the Learning Tree. This is where you unlock stuff like storage, classrooms, and other necessities for the school. This one is directly linked to your overall progress in the game, so make sure to be collecting books when you can.

Over time, (just like mana droughts), there will be goblin attacks. To avoid goblins destroying buildings and stealing materials, send out a team to intersect the horde. Since you need enough power to take out a horde of goblins, you will either be sending out multiple teams or training up people to only need one team. This is where the physical power from teaching comes in. Build up power and ensure that you don’t have to waste too many people on fighting enemies.

The Council

The council are the ones overlooking the wizard schools. They decide if you are doing your job as headmaster well or not. They will be critiquing you until the end, no matter what you are doing, by pointing out things that you need to improve on. They will be giving out missions that you can do to gain stuff like increased working speed. You can check at any point to see what you need to do to finish the missions. There will also be reminders for things like professors not being assigned to a classroom, or losing money by having too many professors and not enough students.

The Battles of Balance

Finding a good balance of trying to complete missions and build up the school, and dealing with constant mana droughts and goblin attacks is tiring. These things seem to hit endlessly to the point I was constantly having to shut off classrooms because of droughts, and it felt like when that wasn’t happening, goblins were destroying my school. This made it more annoying than anything else.

Even though some aspects of the game have plenty of tutorial and explanation, some feel like you are thrown in blind.

Things like actually fighting the goblins have zero tutorials. Setting up the room to create teams is all you get. Putting teams together and seeing them on the map under the goblins makes it seem like they are defending the school, but alas, each time, it would end in destruction. You actually need to click on the goblins and select which team(s) you want to send to intercept the horde.

Building up the school is a main thing. Early on in the mission, it tells you to start on the second floor. But this is incredibly frustrating! The building in this game is not always user-friendly. I could not build a second level, and this was probably the most infuriating part. I spent so much time trying to set up the stairs and put in a new classroom, but I never was able to get it to work. The classroom was never accessible, and no matter if I put hallways to connect the stairs and the classroom, there was no way for my workers to reach it.

Having a school full of young students means that man-made chaos is inevitable. Students will pull pranks and sometimes even break rooms. This means that you need to send someone to fix the room, and it will not be usable until then. This can add up and be a timely investment if a lot of the children are misbehaving and making dorms or classroom a mess. This seemed to add up quickly, and there was no taught way to make this happen less or prevent any of the destruction.

Final Thoughts

This game is in early access. There is a timeline on Steam that shows the future improvements and what to expect later on. At the moment, it feels like there are bugs or simply overlooked things that make the game (in its current state) nearly unplayable. I tried the game from a fresh start, and I still cannot recommend it in the current state. Things as simple as a mission to survive a second-level mana drought were impossible because there was no indication on how to activate a second-level drought. The constant interference made the management part of the game get shoved to the back burner. I wanted to focus on the school, but I also had to constantly search for cheaper teachers and fire the more expensive ones (which made the school look worse because each time you remove a staff member, a student, or a student withdraws, you lose points). Students leaving meant that I constantly needed more students to enroll. This was not fun. It was stressful because it was just a waiting game.

Wrapping everything up, I can’t recommend this game right now. I hope that once it is fully released, it will be a fun management game that has you building up a great school for wizards. In its current state, Wizdom Academy earns a 1/5 stars from me.