Spellcaster University

更新：有自由模式的，就是主界面那个快速游戏，可以一直玩下去没有魔王来。 真的不能有自由建造模式吗！不想一到时间前面的全都白建了，能不能让我搞个历史悠久底蕴深厚的魔法学院啊啊啊啊

This used to be a great game. But the UI has only gotten worse. You will not be able to see cards or text within the game. Some screens open so wide, you can't close it. Until they fix this, the game is practically unplayable. And they've been promising to fix it since 2019.

肉鸽+建设题材还没有无尽模式我是给差评的。 我想建一座巨大且伟大的学校而不是短期培训班

I enjoyed this game but I cannot in good faith recommend it. Its bugs are frequent and severe enough to prevent normal play. At its price point, this is honestly egregious. I'm not certain if every bug that exists presently has existed throughout prior updates. I picked this game up again after having first played it in an officially incomplete state many years ago. It's sad to see where this game has ultimately ended up. The most significant bugs I've encountered involve pathfinding issues. Whenever you build your university in such a way that it exists as more than one building, npcs fairly consistently get stuck running in place infinitely while attempting to enter rooms in the second building at ground level. This can occur on the game's earliest stages if your rooms aren't fully joined to the entrance, and retroactively connecting them with new rooms doesn't 'free' the stuck npc. Some users report success with reloading the game to free the npc, but I've had no luck with that. Insult to injury - multiple location stages allow you to build across separated plots which cannot connect, and none of these are the beginning stages. This means you can be partway into a campaign and realise you've bugged potentially multiple teachers for the remainder of the stage. You can stick it out to the end of the stage, losing access to however many classrooms are impacted, or completely restart your entire campaign. It's beyond frustrating to be repeatedly punished for playing the game in an expected way due to its own faults. There are various other bugs I've observed with object placement, where a played card can sometimes get stuck behaving as though it simultaneously has been placed and is still actively being placed (with the particle effects for item dragging still visible). Sometimes the card visually shrinks and can be rescused and returned to the player's hand by clicking on it in a tiny, shrunken zone. Other times it shrinks so small that the only sane way to proceed is to save and exit to the menu before reloading. My favourite bug I encountered was in my first dungeon. A few rounds in before a difficult combat started I opened the in-game help popup to look for explanations on what my item cards did, knowing I'd need them. On exiting help popup the game started behaving as though I had started the combat, but that I simultaneously hadn't yet. With no chance to use my items my students got obliterated, and the game entered a limbo state. Combat hadn't begun yet so the dungeon attempt wasn't done, but my students had just died in combat. I nearly stopped playing the game entirely after that. The game is close to dead on the developers side, with extremely infrequent updates and limited communication. There's been word of an update for some months which may correct some of the above bugs, but there's no way to know if or when that will come. I enjoyed this game and will keep trying to play around these bugs, to push it to its limits at least and enjoy it until I get bored, but that's the masochist in me talking. This is very unfortunate, and not something you should be seeing from a game at this price without active development or proper disclosure.

First I'll address the negative reviews, Yes the game is a bit over-priced for its actual content, 15$ would be much more fitting for the quality. Yes the game is not very forgiving with room placement and the such, but its also a rogue-lite, you aren't suppose to build the perfect school, you are suppose to finish a goal before the school in consumed by the forces of evil and you have to move to the next zone. If this looks like something you'd like to play, but the rogue-lite aspects and limited quality are bothering you, Check out "Mind Over Magic" it is literally the same exact game, but focus on 1 school, more in depth building, and higher general quality. I play the games together, Mind over magic as the serious, big investment one, and Spellcaster University as the "lite" mode when I don't want to invest that much time.

The game starts with the tutorial that is completely useless. It's just a sequence of pop-ups that describe the UI elements. "This button does this, the options are here..." and... that's it. It reminded me of Silicon Valley "your box goes here" data center episode. Nothing is explained about the game and the consequences of your choices. OK, I figured I could learn as I go, how hard could it be? Maybe it's not hard but I can't tell because I just absolutely could not stand the awful UI. It is a card playing game that doesn't involve very complex mechanics, but almost every move seems off. To select a card, you need to click off-center. There is no consistent close button. Sometimes the button is drawn but it does nothing and there is a real Close button elsewhere. Sometimes there is no Close/cancel button at all. Esc key does nothing. How am I supposed to just close the huge dialog screen? There is no handy access to Help to read more about the concepts. It feels like an alpha version and I'm really confused by the positive reviews. I don't understand how anyone could spend more than 15 minutes with this game and not go bonkers dealing with terrible UI. Really wanted to like it, neat idea but awful execution.

I tried the game out for 2 hours and I felt like the gameplay was repetitive. I could not see myself replaying this game over again. Tutorial does not explain any of the features very well. I decided not to keep this game in my library.

I wanted to like this game so much more than I did. The concept is so far up my alley it's practically coming out of my mouth, but the execution just isn't there for me. The wacky antics and creativity the developers put into this title are impressive, but actual depth of gameplay just isn't there for me like I wish it was. It feels just a bit...cheap, to me.