The game runs fine and doesn't crash or freeze or overheat my computer. It's the XCOM clone you'd expect with R&D, autopsies, base building, squad combat, psychic mind control, and some trade and diplomacy. It also feels really sloppy and unpolished. Only some enemy abilities are signposted, even with Hints on. The body part system interacts weirdly with the the hit point system. Multiple headshots to a human, for some reason, are not lethal. There are far too many different weapons, so I ignore most of them. Inventory items are free to teleport around the globe, but soldiers need to be slowly moved in an expensive plane.
Spellcaster University gets high praise from me for being an original game, especially one that isn't "lol so random" original, but well designed and put together. The deck of cards adds a randomizing element whether you get better Light Magic or better Alchemy instruction; the large number of draws and the opportunity to get mana elsewhere lets you direct what sort of school you want to build. It's a slow-paced game where you need to plan and wait, there's no immediate reactions or quick fixes. Building a magic school feels like something where the rest of the world has a say, to an appropriate level. You are dealing with a situation, not a sandbox. There's a cool talking skull. The gameplay has priority over the story, and it's solid gameplay. But you probably heard that in a dozen other reviews. So I will focus on my biggest complaint, "Good 2D game in a bad 3D engine", which I'm not seeing much mention of. The game is played from a side-on cross-section view of the magic school, where you place rooms and towers, next to and above each other. You only ever see the school from one direction, but you can look at it from slightly higher up in that direction, and zoom in or out to look closer. A lot of 3D rendering work went into the parallax landscape and the 3D student models moving around. This feels like a waste of time for someone only ever seen from one direction or *slightly* to the side of that direction. The entire game could have been 2D sprites, and then it would have been much smaller in memory and much faster to load. I have no idea how many people have bought the game, or how many times they played it. But if I imagine maybe a million times played - every second of loading time, multiplied by a million, is about two weeks of time that people spent waiting and doing nothing. Spellcaster University has several seconds of loading time, at several different points, all for no graphical benefit. Boo.
