With all the fan gushing in these reviews, I thought I'd ( try to ) save my own and give a more thorough gameplay review for the potential buyer's consideration. Magic carpet is a series of open, 3D levels in which the player flies around ( on a magic carpet, no less ) with the goal of bringing the level - aka that "world" - to equilibrium. Doing this requires mana, a magic energy represented mostly by gold spheres. To claim the mana, you must cast a spell on it to mark it as yours, create your castle using a separate spell, and allow your air balloon to pick up the mana and return it to your castle. The more mana you have in your castle, the more spells you can use and the more you can use them before you have to wait and recuperate. Once you reach that level's goal, you win the stage. Most mana isn't just lying around, though. Sometimes it appears when you fly though specific areas, like stone-circles or deep valleys. You can gain some by casting your mana-claiming spell, Possession, on village houses. But mostly you have to gain it from destroying some of the games diverse enemies. Giant worms, Krakens, Genies and Trolls, just to name a few, will roam the stages in droves, each giving up a specific amount of the precious substance when you destroy them. Each have very unique behavior: Krakens will lock you in place and try to bring you down with lightning bolts, and Skeleton Archers will march through villages, shooting citizens and turning them into yet more Skeleton Archers; Griffons will fly around peacefully in herds until you attack them, after which their reflection of fire spells and their powerful lightning attacks will make you regret it. Eventually, you'll begin to encounter enemy wizards as well. They're gathering mana just like you, and as the only wizard among them trying to restore balance, you'll find yourself fighting them often, destroying their castles piece by piece to obtain all the mana their own air balloons have collected. To permanently destroy a wizard, you need to kill them when they have no castle. Whittling them down to that point takes a lot of skill and persistence, but there's nothing more rewarding than the little message saying that they've been removed from the stage. As you progress through the game, you gain additional spells, but you can't always use the most powerful ones right when the stage begins. Most spells require a certain amount of mana in your castle; you'll have to build yourself up to that point, killing weak enemies, claiming their mana, and protecting it to make sure a rival wizard doesn't claim it for themselves. Through each stage you'll move from fireball to lightning bolt to meteor, battling against other wizards doing the same. Since there's no real dialogue or narrative to Magic Carpet, it might seem like there's not much other than raw gameplay. This might be true if the atmosphere wasn't thick enough to cut with a knife. Beautiful, haunting music and sound effects perfectly substitute the environments; and even though the game shows its age pretty hard, the terrain does still manage to impress from time to time. Each stage is also riddled with hidden mana, enemy spawn points, and teleporters, giving each stage its own unique depth. Some have their own themes as well; particularly memorable is the stage where you begin in a teleporter-filled maze, requiring you to find your way out before you can build your castle... and go back in to get the mana you need. Another favorite of mine is the world that's almost entirely made up of a city. God help whoever shoots a villager there, as the entire level's archers will turn on you in an instant. The most notable sour point for this game is probably its challenge. Magic Carpet is very, very hard. Sometimes unfairly so. Those first few minutes of struggling, where you can't shoot more than five fireballs without taking a second to recover, can be hell if the game decides to through you into something challenging right off the bat. In later levels, this happens frequently. Getting attacked by a swarm of hornets with nothing to fight them off is almost certain death, and often it can take a frustratingly long time to get to the point where you can survive, dying and respawning at your castle upwards of 10 times before either getting your foothold or losing the stage entirely. Glitches can grind your game to a screeching halt as well. I should note that I encountered these on the playstation version of the game, so I can't say whether or not they're in the PC version yet. But few things are more frustrating than realizing your rival wizard's castle has somehow become part of the terrain and can never be destroyed or upgraded, leaving him to harass you for the rest of the level. Worse is when this happens to -your- castle, meaning you can't finish the stage at all and have to restart. Still, these are mercifully rare and... like I said, may not even be in the PC version at all. (I'll be buying it once I finish this review, and I'm sure I'll find out.) Magic Carpet is one of the few games that tried a new, interesting idea and made it work. There's no game that's really comparable, and after all this time I think that says a lot about it. Six dollars is an easy commitment for a long, challenging, and supremely unique game like this.
