THIS WAS THE ONE REASON I GOT RAIDBORN. And you know what? After the developer was discussing how he wanted "to do necromancy right" in a discussion on Steam, I looked forward to this.
BUT THERE IS NO SUMMONING.
I am one of those kinds of people where I always played through every game as a summoner-based mixed class, and I had high hopes that Raidborn would be like an Elder Scrolls Skyrim mixed with procedural generation. The fighting is there, melee, all of that, even being a stealth archer, but summoning IS THE ONE THING I WANT IN THIS GAME AND IT DOES NOT HAVE IT.
Now, what DOES it have?
Okay, well, first you go to the mage school, and immediately you join and... must clean the dorm. Which requires resources, but not too difficult.
In the Wizard (magic) skill tree, you unlock stuff by (and in some cases progression IS BLOCKED UNTIL) you go through a stupidly long amount of fetch quests. 32 to get to Adept rank, each mission takes at least 10 minutes, do the math - not an issue if you have gathered and expanded a lot already AND KEPT your resources, but otherwise... yeah.
The spells themselves fire glowing unguided orbs, or later you can make them homing but they have a bad habit of missing targets that are not REALLY close to the retical and far enough away. So homing is appreciated, but almost useless, yet still required for the following unlocks (thankfully there is no level or skill point limit in the game).
By far the nicest addition is that you get Mage Robes, and the ranking seems to only require the first level in Armor usage (Apprentice).
Now here is a cool thing - they almost break the game by making your "special energy bars" recharge with time, instead of exclusively through dealing damage and defeating enemies.
Now you can spam Power Shot and the other non-magic-based skills in the game, of which there are only like 3 or 4, but whatever.
The spells themselves are projectile, as mentioned, player-centered Area of Effect (AoE), and some utility (lockpicking, single-target-at-a-time Soul Siphoning which is stupidly annoying and better you just buy the 10+ target passive siphoning tools, some potion effects like increased defense, and healing). There are a few debuffs as well, such as Curse (increase damage taken) and a slowing effect from Frost.
The annoying thing is that Damage over Time (DoT) effects are useless and will barely take 1/8th of an enemies healthbar when you first get the spells AND upgrade them.
Further upgrading is locked at the Apprentice level, and unfortunately NEARLY ALL SPELLS ARE DAMAGE OVER TIME.
You have freeze, shock (stamina damage), fire (armor damage), venom (health damage), and leech (DoT, transfers health drained from enemy to you, can also drain both stamina and health) damage spells.
But again, NONE of this matters until you become a Master-level mage, and at that point you will be around Level 30 with all of the dungeons you have beaten. So if you can't one-shot most normal enemies by that point with a bludgeon or pointy object, you are playing on higher difficulty which is almost required, otherwise the game becomes boring.
Many nice ideas, and fast-recharging your ability-use points is really nice, but overall I feel extremely disappointed. Raidborn does many things well, and I love the streamlined inventory, but SINCE THIS IS MY ONLY REASON TO BUY THE GAME... it is a huge disappointment.
Magic does add a level of complexity that Raidborn is sorely lacking, however, so at least the developer was on the right track, otherwise the game reduces to simply one-shotting enemies by swinging the identically-functioning items of your "choice".
Sad implementation, and the DLC is mostly for the robes and more quest types to extend the gameplay a bit further. So better than if it didn't exist.
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