[h1]A game that promises incredible spell combinations and almost delivers.[/h1]
I don't think that this game is bad by any means, obviously, since I'm recommending it. This one has a lot of deal breakers which makes me feel like Spellmasons hasn't quite captured the magic inherent to its promise.
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[h2]Rogueliking It vs. Rogueloving It[/h2]
As someone with thousands of hours across multiple roguelikes, from Binding of Isaac to Slay the Spire 1/2 to Risk of Rain 2, or notably Noita, I know first-hand that a good roguelike takes hundreds of hours to properly comprehend it. It's why I'm hesitant to write a review so early, so take this review with a grain of salt. A game like this is better reviewed by someone with triple-digit playtime at least. And normally I would do that, but I don't think I'm going to hit that point.
Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed my good six or seven hours of playtime since I bought it, that's worth ten bucks with the DLC on sale. Which, on the subject, I'm reviewing this game plus it's DLC as a single product because given my experience, I can't imagine the game having nearly as much replay value without it. Frankly I'm shocked it's DLC in the first place. If I purchased this game at its full retail price, however, I'd be pretty disappointed.
[h2]Magicka or Noita This Is Not[/h2]
If you've played either of those games, you'll get the promise of Spellmasons right away: combo spell pieces to make wacky shenanigans. You can do this either on purpose or by messing around, both are valid. What sucks is that Spellmasons doesn't really seem interested in helping you get there. Magicka lets you cast the best spells over and over again if you can mash the buttons in the correct order. Noita also hates you, but it also throws you a bone every once in a while with the randomized wands you can find. Spellmasons is... very slow in comparison.
You do accumulate a lot of spell components, but they rarely interact in cool ways. There are the targeting components which are easily the most fun to mess around with, but all the other components (unless you have the DLC) are typically only interested in doing their damage to one target or an AOE effect, not really comboing with each other. I also found that the default casting range was stupidly small with enemies having far, far larger ranges and movement than you do for basically an entire run. In other spellcasting games, you're typically given far longer ranges unless the payoff is much greater.
Here, there's barely ever a reason to cast a spell close up if you can help it, you're only going to get yourself killed and end your run. This made every fight feel like I wasn't an epic wizard flexing on some monsters, I was a scared, threatened novice running around hoping not to die. At least in Noita that sensation feels justified, and you feel amazing when you overcome it and craft amazing wands that break the game. When I "broke" the game in Spellmasons, it felt much more like a fluke than any skill on my part.
[h2]This game REALLY wants you to play it multiplayer[/h2]
There are so many spellcasting options that rely on allies, and summons in the game are few and far between. One of the characters even required a heavy balance adjustment to make them even functional in single-player. I haven't played it multiplayer, which I won't lie is likely a large part of where development went to, which has left the single player side feeling rather unbalanced.
It only gets worse when you're slogging through options, only to be given spells that as far as I can tell can only become useful if you build into them, but getting to that point requires you to already have their constituent parts. I found no success building my characters for anything other than DPS and survival directly, because any time I tried to build around the game's systems, I was given no support for those builds. I think that's where multiplayer is supposed to come in, to smooth out those power spikes that players have, letting one player spec into a support role, one player be the direct DPS, one being the status guy, etc. In singleplayer, however, you just kind of have to do everything yourself, and the game has too many systems in place to make that interesting. In a game like Risk of Rain 2, which is effortless to play multiplayer or singleplayer, here it feels like I'm being punished for trying to do it on my own.
[h2]Are the well designed characters in the room with us now?[/h2]
The selection of characters is fairly diverse! I was actually kind of excited to try the different ones, and I've given three of the four main ones a fair shake. Of the three, the "card based" character was my favorite, but ultimately all of them have their fair share of issues which I don't have the character-limit to go into here. There's a lot of fiddling to be had with all of them, and the process of leveling up and managing your spells should be heavily streamlined, in my opinion.
[h2]Presentation that got the job done, I guess.[/h2]
None of these guys have much character in terms of design or visuals, in my opinion. Not even the enemies feel notably inspired, with basic zombie/tribal archer/slimes all showing up. The spell effects are also pretty lackluster, with some excessive screenshake (which you can tone down), meh sound effects, and very minimal animations to couple along with them. Little things, like explosions not leaving any particles or discoloration on the environment is also disappointing. Sadly I think a lot of effort was put into the blood and gore of the game, which I disabled because it honestly just looked gross to me, and felt kind of juvenile in its implementation. It double sucks that unique death animations are made for every enemy, but status like "bloat" just have affected units scale 1.5x horizontally, which looked terrible every time. At least the soundtrack is decent.
The presentation of the game as a whole, especially in it's UI feels very ameture. It's not dysfunctional, but it's not putting the "fun" in that word. Even after half a dozen hours, I was still struggling to organize spells, tab through the menus, accidentally locking and unlocking things in the menu, and seeing random visual glitches or selections not quite behaving the way I expected them to. A very commonly used key in this keyboard/mouse game being bound to backspace by default tells you all you need to know about how much the user experience was considered. I rebound it to Q, which immediately was a thousand times better.
It was to the point where went to check to see if this game was early access because of the presentation, and it's a full release, apparently. It does seem to still be getting worked on, but if you're listing it as a finished game then I'm going to judge it as one. If this were a flash game, I'd say it was incredible, but this is a twenty [i](TWENTY!?)[/i] dollar game on steam, not including the DLC cost that looks like a polished up student project.
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[h2]So... why exactly are you recommending this game then? Sounds pretty negative to me.[/h2]
I got it on sale. That's literally it. There's just barely enough here to kill a Saturday with, and when it's heavily discounted, about ten bucks feels about right. The promise of polish coming down the road with the devs seeming to be actively improving it is a good sign that it could someday live up to its core ideas. When this game is working like it feels like it's supposed to, it's decently fun. But there's too much going against it for it to be considered a successful product at its undiscounted price point.
