Arcane Assembly

Great game, love the possibility of creating my own spells! Only one weak point, I think the story is a bit poor

It's a good start, but it desperately needs more actual effects to use. For all the unlimited customization potential, there are only 3 damage types, 1 status effect, (just an underwhelming, non-stackable dot) and a shield effect. No matter how good you are at programming your spells to self-replicate, move, etc, there's ultimately only so much to do with them. You cant even control the damage amount on any given orb. As great as the underlying system is, success just boils down to "make more orbs" which is a shame because there's so much potential to do really creative and interesting things with the programming system.

Really cool idea, but severely lacking in content and polish. It has all the workings of a fully functional game, but it does not go even a single step beyond that. The level design is especially bland. The difficulty comes almost entirely from blind jumps requiring quick reactions to figure out where you are trying to go before falling in lava/spikes/traps, and bosses that spam attacks to the point of it becoming a bullet hell. Also, if you don't already have some programming experience, you might struggle in coding any decent spells too, as the tutorial is very bare bones as well. Once you get enough code blocks and come up with a powerful spell, however, bosses become a breeze as you spam attacks right back at them. The art is decent, music is pretty good, I just wish they would have taken a good bit more time to really flesh out and polish these ideas before deciding it was ready for public release.

This feels like a game jam concept. I got it on sale, and that's what I would pay for a game with this little content. It takes inspiration from Hollow Knight, but it's levels and enemies don't feel unique or fleshed out. One enemy in the last zone is just two bush sprites on top of each other. As for wand building and spell building, well you don't have that many options honestly. You only are ever given one real spell to control which is the orb. You can change all these parameters for the orb like it's speed, or having orbs spawning orbs or having them orbit another orb. But all these things cost more Mana, and are usually harder to use than just spamming attacks with no delay. I beat the game super fast even on the expert difficulty which is just a damage modifier, and it feels like there should be more spells or more things I can do. This game has a novel idea in creating spells yourself, but the system needs balancing to make different spells worthwhile. Overall it just didn't bring as much replay value as a game like Noita does

This is just horrible. "game" is a very lose term here. Uninstalled within an hour.

If you lose to a boss you just encountered, it takes your coins until you can retrieve them and defeat the boss. So, you can't spend the coin to buy upgrades to help defeat said boss.

I don't regret buying this game, but I can only recommend it to people who, like me, are solely interested in the spell crafting. The game is short, the platforming is uninspired and completely disconnected from the spell system, and the story is nonexistent. If you're not already comfortable with scratch style programming, this game won't help you learn. This game is much better as a game-design inspiration and source of mental exercise for spellcrafting obsessed people than it is as an actual game. Mana cost being calculated upfront somewhat restricts branching conditional spells, but if you're clever you can work around it. By making sure no mana costing tasks are inside your condition checking 1000x repeat loops, and some careful delegating of spell components with variables and lists, you can be a lot more flexible than some reviewers realize. With all that said, I would have still given this game a positive review, if it weren't for the fact that the spell programming has numerous bugs and the game has been abandoned by the developer. To name a couple, a physics bug causes orbiting orbs to rapidly spiral outwards, making the orbit function almost useless except for making an orb that follows you around by setting it to orbit and then changing the speed to 0. Also, any constant that contains a negative number registers as 0, though you can bypass this by using the subtract function. These annoyances really add up and they will never be fixed.

Great concept, underwhelming execution.