Spellcaster University

I love the idea of this game. It has an enjoyable feel. However, the mechanics are not intuitive at all. The UI and the tooltips ought to give obvious indications as to what effect your decisions have on your game. I honestly feel like when I'm playing I'm just picking random choices and there's no sense of what effect my choices have on the outcome of the game. I don't feel like I'm in control of what happens at all, no do I have any sense of how well I'm doing or how I could improve how I play.

What this game IS NOT: a base building colony management simulation of a magic school. Yes, I know, that's what it says the game is but if you're buying it for that you're going to be massively disappointed like all the other reviewers. What this game IS: One of the more unique roguelike deck building games out there. If you're itching for a new roguelike deckbuilder this one has some neat mechanics. You draw some basic cards to start each school, and then you get so many points to draw from the standard deck. Each time you draw from a deck, you get to choose from 3 cards that are in the theme of the deck (one for general stuff that costs money and one for each school of magic). These cards serve as your school Houses, Students, Rooms, and items available in the game. You use these cards to hit combos for different bonuses. For instance: You get a quest to graduate 3 Stargate Engineers. This requires training in Portal Magic from the school of Arcane and Runcecrafting from the school of Alchemy. I use a school House card to create a house and am provided with the option to apply the traits beautiful (limiting insanity from the portal room) and worker (increases learning level) to any students in the house, and I limit what they can learn to alchemy and arcane magic and name the house "Engineers" with little brown robes. I am lucky enough to draw an Inter dimensional Portal from the arcane deck, so I place it and add the common room card on top of it and set that room to be the common room for my Engineers. Next I get enough points from the alchemy deck from some little map quest. When I draw the Rune Scriptorium from the alchemy deck, I made a point to keep space next to my portal room and I place it there, and right nearby I make sure to add a refractory for eating and a dorm room. Now when I look at my school, almost all my little brown robed engineers should mostly stick to this area of the school with most of their needs met without having to travel too far. I then draw a portal window from the arcane deck, which allows any active students in that room to learn portal magic, so I place that in my rune Scriptorium to double down on any students who learn one learn both so when they graduate they can be chosen as Stargate Engineers. As students graduate, they apply bonuses or immediate benefits based on what they're trained in. There's also little auto battler dungeons occasionally, and then you get to see the training and items in action. They are shockingly fun when you get a good little party going and you can bring back lots of loot. Like any game of this nature, you roll with the draw of the deck. So you can see why people who went in wanting to design a magic school were sorely disappointed. It's just not that game. It's about points and combos and "deck" management. And someone please fix how they labeled this game so the right crowd gets to it. I hate seeing a game get pounded in the ratings not because it's not fun, but because the advertising is bringing in the whiskey crowd when all they serve here is fruity cocktails.

It's a magic management sim where you're basically the headmaster, except you can't actually tell anyone what to do, which is probably more realistic than we'd like to admit. You just build rooms, hire teachers who may or may not be competent, and hope the little bastards learn something before the whole school explodes. Which it will. Every time. That's not a spoiler, that's the game. Look, if you're the sort of person who enjoys planning seven steps ahead and optimizing spreadsheets for fun, you'll absolutely love this. The art's adorable - proper charming stuff - and there's genuine complexity hiding under all that cuteness. It's got replayability coming out its ears because your students graduate, carry forward bonuses, and basically haunt your future schools like magic-wielding ghosts of Christmas Past. The rotating map system is brilliant: your school gets destroyed, you start again, but you're not starting from scratch. Past students leave legacies, curses, blessings -it's like if Majesty and a management sim had a baby, and that baby was really into self-destruction and phoenixes. The humor's spot-on too. Light when it needs to be, dark when it doesn't, and there are these messengers you just have to see for yourself. Plus the faction system, the worldbuilding, the variety -it made me think, "Christ, you could build a whole genre out of this." Indirect management through environmental manipulation? That's not just clever, that's interesting. Here's the thing though: it doesn't really matter what strategy you use. You can play it safe, you can go mental, and the outcome's roughly the same. Which makes it repetitive. And tedious. And when a game becomes tedious, that's when you start noticing all the other problems. The UI is a mess. Cards get stuck, the screen zooms in for absolutely no reason, you misclick because everything's moving about like it's had six espressos. You can't even demolish a room if you put it in the wrong place -one misclick and you're stuck with a toilet where your library should be. Good luck explaining that to the accreditation board. There's one save slot. One. So it's Iron Man mode whether you like it or not, which is fine if you're into that masochistic sort of thing, but don't expect to experiment without consequences. Oh, and bugs. Bugs that lock the game completely. Bugs that just annoy you. The kind of bugs that make you wonder if anyone actually tested this before shoving it out of Early Access. It's fun. It really is. But it's also unpolished, occasionally infuriating, and definitely not for everyone. If you like sims and you're willing to overlook the jank, you'll have a good time. Not everyone's cup of tea, but if it is your thing, you'll drink the whole pot despite the leaves at the bottom.

The game offers you no chance to correct a mistake, once you place a room there is no way to remove it or move it. This will not only bug people with ocd but will also prevent you from designing any kind of building you might like, or a building where you can actually keep track of what you have. The devs claim this is a design choice. This is an obvious lie to mask an unfinished product as no sane man would design something so horrid by choice. The game has a single save file during the campaign. You cannot load a game to correct a past mistake and if you make one mistake later in the campaign you have to restart it whole. Cannot recommend this, feels incomplete and just creates a lot of frustration..

开场的男旁白、前任是男校长、很典男翻译，几乎没有的新手指引，还只能看一次，让我在短短十三分钟就决定退款

[h1] 开局为什么要给一个骷髅特意画上胡子？人都死了还要刻意强调性别是吗？[/h1]

I like the idea of this game but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. The largest problems with it are the lack of multiple saves, bad pathfinding, and inability to delete or move rooms. If not for the pathfinding and room issues, multiple saves wouldn't be needed. But as things stand, if you accidentally drop a room in the wrong spot, your entire campaign may be ruined. Most egregious of all is the pathfinding. On my third map of the current campaign (lake), I happily built a tall tower of important rooms on the small island only to find out after a while that nobody can get in or out of the rooms in that stack because of pathfinding stupidity - they keep walking into a wall instead of the door next to them. Saving and loading didn't fix this, so my run is pretty much dead now and I have lost all interest in playing further. This is a bug that was first reported 7 years ago and still remains unfixed. Was interested in the upcoming DLC but I've now lost interest in that as well.

Непогано зроблений менеджмент-симулятор університету магії. Є цікаво виконані деталі, але не вистачає глибини та різноманітності щоби з цього вийшла повноцінна "пісочниця", якими є найкращі представники жанру. Добре спрацьовує тільки як кампанія з відносно коротких місій, де університет треба відбудувати з нуля 7 разів з накопиченням певних загальних бонусів. Є певне replay value, з задоволенням пройшов кампанію двічі щоб зібрати всі ачівки. Можна було б і ще пограти, але не бачу більше якоїсь цікавої мети, просто розбудова сама по собі до мети не дотягує, це не Dwarf Fortress і не RimWorld. Мануальні режими є, але вони не такі цікаві. З мінусів ще - час від часу крашиться або сама гра, або вона крашить Стім, після чого той починає безкінечно відкриватися і крашитися повторно доки не закрити гру. 7/10.

I'll be honest with you guys: Spellcaster University is not a good but a fun game. The main problem and the elephant in the room is the fact that the game is not only card based but also relies HEAVY on RNG. Every, really every single aspect of the game is hidden behind a wall of RNG. Be it dungeonsevents, faction events, the cards you get, the students and even the futures your students achieve or the skillset of the teachers. Especially the teachers are a big problem as their pedagogy skill is set once you build their classroom and can only be changed by some items which are - you guess it already - are hidden behind RNG. The handling of the cards is also incredibly clunky. Very often the hoovermovement "blocks" the mouseclock fording you to play veeery slowly. And ever so often pictures or placeable items are not recognised which can only by solved by building some rooms and then try it again. Cards are bought with mana of different magic schools and is always very scarce. As you run against the clock by evil forces marching in it so is possible to have a very important card of inventory or item on your hand but cannot be placed as you have to wait for more mana to draw (and get because of the overwhemling RNG) a room card. So the most annoying problem is that you cannot plan ahead or use any strategy due to RNG. How cool would it be to design my students schedules in order to really priorize for the futures or anything. That said - why is it a fun game and why the thumbs up? Well, once you completely surrendered to the RNG and forfeit the idea of becoming a great planning and wise headmaster the magic of the game suddenly works like a charm. Once you dive in into the pure RNG and absolute chaos you’ll have a blast with that game. The music is okay but the animations are great and beautiful. The ideas of the five schools of magic and the more than 160 achievable futures with small to big boni to your actual game are awesome. I had so much fun trying to find every possible future even though it is a shame that all achieved boni only count for the actual campaign. As someone who also works in the branch of modernizing schools and therefore spend a lot of time witch teachers, parents and sometimes students I absolutely love it that they’re making fun of everyone in the cosmos of a school: The annoying overprotective parents, the glutenfree Eco-teacher, the old-fashioned teacher, the Inquisition, the ever demanding teachers of your school, the Hermine Granger Style of students and so on – I really had fun as the devs had a keen eye for their problems, sorrows and behaviour. And they even gave some of the mentioned some kind of “redemption arc” in the last level. The dungeons are a great addition but a little bit underwhelming as the events are extremely repetitive and also suffering from the huge impact of RNG. But using the different schools of magic and traits of your students to crawl the dungeon is always fun. The race against the time makes every single academy level very exciting and leaves you a little sad once you are forced to leave it behind. So what are my wishes for the game? First and foremost: An option which would let me choose between the impact of RNG. Pure Chaos or more finer nuances – for examples that every draw of card contains a room, an item and maybe a guaranteed drop of new students after x cards. Secondly: An option to start a new campaign with all already achieved benefits from former campaigns. Last wish: A possibility to control the futures a little bit more. It can be tedious to achieve certain futures as it feels frustrating to have 20 possible futures with a chance of 5% each. But overall – I was having a blast playing the game and want to thank the Devs for their great work and awesome game!