You can’t speed up your descent so you’re forced to rely on some strong gravity to pull you down as you will often overshoot your targets since the jetpack is too touchy for precise flight, but even as you begin to acclimate to the fact you’ll surge upward and plummet downward, your attempts to accommodate it will be foiled by your opposition. What I still hesitate to call the wizard has rather rigid flight controls, the jetpack propelling you upwards depending on how much gas you give it. The gameplay involving this supposed magician is about zipping around the air and firing repeatedly like in Jetpac as well, but it has a far worse game feel and sense of control unfortunately. It definitely doesn’t help that the brief plot synopsis that appears before you play mentions the game taking place on Planet Zyfus, the player needing to rescue the citizens from volcanic explosions, some “lizards” that are really just dragons, and eventually even spiders that go unmentioned in the story blurb. In fact, this poor excuse for a Lizard Wizard is better off compared to someone like the space-faring astronaut from the ZX Spectrum game Jetpac rather than a magic user. Lacking a robe as well, this game’s hero might be meant to be extending a wand which he fires his projectiles from, but it too looks more like something ripped from science fiction, the weapon a long yellow line extending from his shoulder and firing more like a gun than a magic rod. Sure, the character you play as has a blue hat that could pass for your stereotypical cone-shaped wizard cap, but he looks more like some space explorer pulled from sci-fi due to the presence of a jetpack that he uses to get around. Perhaps the first disappointment in Lizard Wizard is the utter lack of something that qualifies as a proper wizard.
Even if you temper your expectations appropriately for a game released in 1985 though, it quickly becomes clear this doesn’t hold a candle graphically or conceptually to contemporaries like Paperboy or Gauntlet, and with Super Mario Bros.’s explosive release on the NES around the same time, Lizard Wizard stood little chance to make a splash… and that’s before we even look at the issues it has. With a name as snappy as Lizard Wizard and an arcade marquee that delightfully indulges in fantasy tropes, I’m a little surprised I had never heard of this arcade title before I went looking for some lesser known arcade games to play.
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