Archmage Rises

Start game, make a character with lengthy customization. Once in game I enter town and game crashes. Ok, so character is now gone so do a quick character. I do not enter town and wander around. There's nothing, just tiles and towns. No enemies and no dungeons. Go to town and take a quest. Sure I can get your 4 honey, where do I get them? Oh, in the forest 8 miles from here. Go 8 tiles over and nothing. No prompts, no gather options. Go to town and get a different quest. I need to go to this town. Go to that town, they say I need to go to another town to find a witch. Go to that town. They know where the witch is but I need to repair someone's house? Says I need stone. I make sure I have a hammer and pick axe and go 12 miles west and there's no prompt no options. I don't know what I'm doing wrong here. This is boring.

Great game. Positive: -Lots to do with many quests, conversations, building, dungeons, world map exploration, etc. -Hard to stop playing....one more dungeon. -Good music and fun graphics -All of the game mechanics are tight, easy to pick up and work well together. -Even when the combat seems a for sure thing you stay on edge as it's permadeath! Negative: (it's a WIP) -Combat is samey. Once you know the order of attacks to do all combinations of goblins, wolves, spiders, and crocs down down easy. Also more enemy variety is needed. -Quests are bit mundane and there are too many boring steps before going out to look for them. You have to get quest, then ask them about that item, then ask them where it is, the stumble around in that area until you find the marker. -Music can get under your skin as it repeats none stop (village!). -All the dungeons looks the same. One tileset so far. Needs WAY more variety. Why would wolves be in a castle/keep - though it is described as a cave on world map. Overall a lot of fun and great for the price. Look forward to more content/variety!

Until things change I cannot recommend anyone to buy the game. With the old map generation things were different, you would be able to search each tile if it had something there (Either for tracks or resources) and if you passed the skill check you were able to either follow the tracks or collect the resource. Now instead you must find enemies through the new event system which is ok, collecting resources on the other hand is borderline impossible. There is no way to figure out if a tile has a resource on it, and asking npc's isn't much of a help either because when you get the place they said to go to nothing happens. And lets say hypothetically you reload a game to a previous state before you found a resource, now it is gone, like it never existed, even if you walk all over the tile. This either needs to change or we need a tutorial that explains how this new system works because I am banging my head against a wall.

The game was pretty fun long ago, but at some point, they changed the map's amazing, free form interactivity to a heavily restrictive, event based system which makes the world feel lifeless and even nonsensical at times (imagine not finding any wood when you're surrounded by woodland tiles). Being able to enter and explore every tile, and enter any cave/dungeon you found at any time, without needing to constantly ask NPCs for directions, was fun. If they ever change the current event system back to an improved version of what they had before, I'll change this review into a positive one.

The idea is something that we want, play the adventurer mage arise to power in freshly generated world, either rise to power or die trying, BUT the implementation is meh... in 1st hour of game the combat factually consists of deciding which magic school you want to level up and spamming that schools basic mana bolt at everything, there is little enemy variety, the only strategic decision is which to take out first & once in 10 turns using interrupt on multi-turn attack against you, not because that really changes much, but just cause you spent so much time to unlock it. Combat (and magic that is core of it) needs hell of a lot of more depth, it gets boring extra fast. UI needs a lot of work, UX is ♥♥♥♥, clicking on miniature icons. The overall game... there quickly comes realization that there isn't really anything to look forward towards, stronger type of mana-bolt unlocks (larger numbers to defeat monsters with larger numbers)... no. Potentially doubling down on the open/generated world idea could work, but there needs to be interesting content on the horizon to get new player hooked.

I love the potential for this game, and I'm also a sucker for aggressively open world settings. At the time of writing, there are definitely issues. The thumbs up is for what I hope this will be in the coming years.

This game has a ton of potential, but is pretty much abandonware at this point. I login from time to time to see what changed and frankly I have no clue what are they doing. I could probably vibe code more over a weekend than they did last year and I would still have less bugs.

This game needs a LOT of more work before I could consider recommending it but I may revisit it after it has received more updates.