Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements

+ The backgrounds are nice, classic handpainted style with a variety of settings + The music is good + There is a selection of interfaces including the classic Sierra. - The roleplaying is extremely shallow (you get a choice of element which doesn't really change much at all, no real classes, and only 4 stats which can only be improved as you earn classic-styled points) - The puzzles are almost all simplistic, I haven't really gotten stuck once and I am over 75% through the game, and I am not particularly good at the puzzles in these games. - There is no day/night system, way to rest, extensive NPC's that you can't talk to and serve no purpose - Extensive backtracking - The voice acting is (expectedly) immersion breakingly bad, but can be turned off - The sprites/cutscenes/backgrounds are a weird clashing mishmash of styles - The combat is terrible, even worse than QFG - The areas to explore (like the forest) feel like one-off largely empty areas and you repeatedly walk through the same few hub screens over and over again. Hero-U is better if you want a QFG fix, it has more of a new style mixed with the old style which I wasn't entirely fond of, but on the whole it is a better game.

Yeah it's got issues. My kind of issues! If you're playing this for combat, you missed your calling in the FPS or isometric top-down/3D POV RPG genres! This game is a work of art! The voice acting is indie+ quality, which grooves fine with my expectation and desired output from this studio, of which I full-disclosure indie-backed back in the Kickstarter beginning! Granted, it could use some voice-acting upgrades in any sequel, but I find the work pretty worthwhile as I am not looking for a "Hollywood" release. I have voice-training and could criticize too; it's not the point with this title for me. Lots of sterile RPG releases with polished vocal tracks available on other distro platforms if you want that! I believe the studio has done well on their first retro-style for-profit release and has great room to grow, I see the lack of certain easier-to-implement features (sleep/diurnal cycling, point allocation) as probably more to do with engine limitations being it is based on a popular open-source project to recreate a rogue-like (room-based) RPG galaxy of games. In any case I have had fun playing it so far, find the writing acceptable (but could use more depth overall,) and have been stumped at least twice by retrospectively-obvious puzzle solutions (but they always are!) I've only finished the first quest but have spent hours playing it and am not disappointed (I talk to everyone, try all items everywhere when in doubt, and some Easter Eggs are only found by doing so, and this game seems to respect that tradition, although others have noted a lack of Puns present pared playing peer products!) Four stars with one left for improvement in polish and writing in future releases; major mechanics are all within-spec and expectations for this release.

One part Quest for Glory, one part Legend of Kyrandia. Nice art and plot. Combat could've been better, and magic could've been more useful, but still decent.

The best part of the game is the graphics. It has some nice backgrounds and animations. Now for the complaints lol :D The game's kinda alright, like Quest for Glory, but it feels like it's only trying to copy that game in a weird way. I don't know how different the puzzles are if you play a different mage (you select your element at the start of the game) but it seemed like there's only one solution to every puzzle and the element only matters for your combat spells. And the combat was weird. An odd real time clicker with pause when you select spells. There's an option to turn the combat off except for bossfights though, so I didn't have to bother with it and you don't have to either if you don't want to :D. If you really want to though, the game has 2 large maps with nothing but combat in them. Kinda like in Quest for Glory games but there are no other kinds of encounters in those maps, it's only combat maps where they send you to find a thing for the main quest, which wasn't very interesting for me, but with the combat off you can just rush through them (they're kind of a maze though) You also level up and add points to your stats, but those stats only matter for combat. There's nothing like stat related solutions to puzzles or actions you can do in this game like it was in Quest for Glory. So what you're left with in the end, if you turn the combat off, is a point and click adventure with fairly obvious puzzles and a story that's a bit silly tbh, but I guess as a whole it works if you want a fantasy fairytale adventure game. There are better choices for that though, because this game always feels like it's only halfway there in every aspect, from story to combat to puzzles. Aside from the graphics, it's full way there because the graphics are nice :D

Combat is terrible and has almost none of the elements that would class this game as a RPG. However the art, style, music, sound, narrative and voiced dialogue are what save this game from being all round terrible, with a few caveats. 1) A little of moon logic required to progress with the game 2) Character defaults to walk speed, no option to have perma run 3) Sharp eyes required unless you really love waving the cursor around spasmodically to see what items can be retreived 4) Be prepared to talk the same in-game character a lot. 5) Lots of other UI niggles and absence of quick-key options that really slow things down. 6) Not much magic going on outside of combat which is a shame.