Wands [VR]

Wands is a first-person VR multiplayer dueling game from Cortopia Studios, built around the simple fantasy of flinging spells at opponents in real time. You equip a wand, pick a loadout of magical abilities, and then drop into online matches where both you and your opponent are trying to outplay each other through positioning, ability timing, and spell selection. On paper, that loop sounds genuinely satisfying, and in short bursts it occasionally is. The strategic layer here is narrower than the genre label implies. Loadout building before a match is the closest thing to a decision tree you will find. You slot in a handful of spells from the available pool, and then commit to that kit for the duel. There is some real variance in how you can approach a fight: defensive shields versus aggressive burst damage, movement spells versus area denial. If you are the kind of player who likes theorycrafting small, tight ability combinations, you will find a few hours of genuine tinkering available. The problem is that the meta resolves quickly, and the spell roster does not have enough depth to sustain prolonged optimization. For a strategy-minded player like me, the AI situation is worth flagging. There is no meaningful single-player mode with bot opponents to practice against or learn through. The entire game leans on its online population, which is where things get uncomfortable given that Mixed reviews at 54% positive from a small review pool suggest the game has struggled to hold a healthy player base. Matchmaking with a thin community is a real friction point in a game that lives or dies by live opponents showing up. If you hit a session where no one is online, there is very little else to do. The VR implementation is functional. Tracking works, the physicality of pointing your wand to direct spells adds some genuinely fun immersion, and the visual style is stylized enough to look reasonable even by current standards. The tutorial is brief and gets you into a real match fast, which I will actually credit as a reasonable choice for a simple game with a short learning curve. You do not need a long onboarding ramp because the mechanical ceiling is not that high. That is both a selling point and a ceiling. If you are a VR owner who has a friend who also owns a VR headset and you want something casual and easy to jump into for a few duels, Wands has a specific narrow window where it works. As a long-term strategy or competitive game, it does not have the roster depth, ranked infrastructure, or active population to sustain that. Released in 2017, it is showing its age in several dimensions, and the community numbers have not recovered to a point where I would confidently recommend buying in for the multiplayer alone. Diego, Scout Team