It's a wipe! is a really bad game based on a cool concept - being a guild leader and running 'raids' against huge enemies with a bunch of people at your disposal. The interface is clunky and broken in spots, the battles take forever even if nothing is happening, you have close to no control over your characters and it's quite difficult to plan strategies properly so the end result is a depressing little RPG.
You start by creating your character - which is almost useless because you have a massive pool to recruit from and all classes are well represented - and you pick up a guild name. You then go and recruit party members - mages, wizards, rogues, druids, clerics, paladins and bards - and start raiding. After battles, you get items that you have to distribute to your party while trying to balance happiness between your guild members. The whole mechanic of the guild members being rogue AIs annoys me a bit and I wish there was a way to play without it. Guild members are supposed to have personalities and things they like/dislike that you have to manage but the interface is so clunky you'll avoid using it as much as possible. There's even a button in the lower-left corner of the screen that pops a huge box that covers a third of it, and you have to navigate to some other menu to remove it.
Fights are long and boring. Your characters deal very little damage and enemies have massive amounts of health. There is a battle speed selector, but even the fastest speed is still so slow. There should be a speed that runs the battles instantaneously. The game feels like once you've seen a turn of the battle, you've probably seen them all. Enemies seem at least a bit varied with a few tricks up their sleeves and your party members all do different things. I wish there was a way to set "gambits" like in Final Fantasy 11. You could see what your party members do in certain situations and configure that. It's not silly to think that a guild leader could say to a healer "use X spell if health is below Y%, otherwise do Z", but as it is, they do pretty much what they think is correct based on the role you assign them.
Speaking of actions, your guild members emulate stupidity. They might "alt+tab to browse the internet" during fights, doing nothing for a turn, they also might change row or change their role, for no reason. I suppose this reflects the realistic nature of human players, but there's a reason I tried this game instead of trying to run my own MMO guild: It's because I don't want to deal with human players like that. There is also a massive list of commands you can issue to your guild, but they sound like they have much overlap and most of them are things that automatically should be done by the different classes. What's the point of saying 'OMG HEAL!' instead of "Choose default actions"? Your healers are going to heal anyways.
All and all, I would've stuck with IAW a bit longer if the interface had been better and more detailed but at its core it's a bad experience I don't recommend to anyone.
