When D.W. Bradley, the architect behind Wizardry V-VII, left Sir-Tech and formed his own company, Heuristic Park, the first thing he released was Wizards & Warriors, his preemptive response to the upcoming Wizardry 8.

Both games are very similar in many ways strong, traditional class-based character building, an open world full of dungeons to explore, quests to perform, characters to interact with and phase-based combat. The differences are in the details, but those details are what make these games.

The game's dungeons are excellent, some of the best ever designed and certainly far better than any in Wizardry 8. There are so many memorable and cleverly designed areas, some favourites being the Serpent Temple, Shurugeon Castle and the Boogre Lair (which features a thrilling prison breakout).

The combat, a mix of turn-based and real-time, is a fantastic answer to Wizardry 8's unbearably cumbersome, fully turn-based phase system. You can freely act or walk around and enemies' turns will happen concurrently. For everyone who's ever gotten frustrated with Wizardry's painfully slow battles, Wizards & Warriors will be a revelation.

The most frustrating quality of the game is its world structure. The game presents large, non-linear areas that the player is free to explore as they want until you end up where the game doesn't want you yet. Wizards & Warriors gates off huge areas until you've progressed far enough in the story to enter them, similar to how the Grand Theft Auto games play, a big step back from Wizardry VII's fully open world.

The other major issue lies not in the game itself, but in the difficulty in getting it to run on modern computers – several steps are necessary, including re-encoding its video files. It begs for a re-release.