Wizard Swipe is an iOS game where you have to 'swipe' the screen to throw spells at waves of advancing enemies to protect your castle, using more powerful spells on cooldowns and upgrades to survive better. It started pretty okay, but the difficulty curve quickly ramped up to a point where I would have needed to grind too much in order to get further. It's too bad, since the game has a nice blend of challenges and upgrades so I wish I could've stomached to play some more.
The basic action you do in WS is swipe from the bottom of the screen up to throw weak fireballs. You can also hold your finger to charge a stronger blast of fire and after a while you unlock spells that freeze, knockback and otherwise damage your foes, which are on cooldowns. While you're doing that, enemies stream from the top of the screen and if they get to your castle, they damage it. Even with upgraded health - and a pitiful shield that stacks on top of it - my castle was almost always destroyed as soon as things got wrong and I started to let enemies come too close. Since the speed you're casting is limited by the speed you're swiping, longer levels can get tough, because swiping that fast can get a bit tiring.
For completing levels and challenges, you get gold that is used to upgrade your spells and your castle. Most upgrades are a bit on the boring side since they more or less all do the same thing, reduce cooldowns of your spells, increase their effects, add more charges. The castle has a shield upgrade that adds a non-regenerating barrier on top of your possibly-regenerating health, which is just weird, and really small damage reduction bonuses. You only start with the freeze spell easily accessible, but the game tries to sell you a spellbook for 3 bucks that unlocks them all and makes your damage go up by 50%. I kinda wish that the game was 3 bucks more and you had all that stuff starting it.
Levels have a specific list of monster features, but sometimes I can't decipher them, so they're pretty useless, adding a little encyclopedia of what these icons mean would've helped. There is okay enemy variety and the bosses are pretty hectic, although they're all pretty much moving targets that also spawn more targets that you need to shoot down. At the very least, when you lose, you keep your gold, but the upgrades often require multiple runs to be bought.
Wizard Swipe was fine, but I didn't play it past the skull boss, since I couldn't defeat it. That's pretty much all I could get out of WS. It's a neat idea and some of its mechanics are fine, but I feel like the balance was kept away behind in app purchases, which soured the whole thing for me.
