MAGI

5 Good++
Yo man, this game is good. It’s got surprising strategic depth, which is important since it’s a strategy game.

It’s also well balanced (the newest version, anyway), meaning there’s not one build that can fuck everything else up.

The overall goal of the game is defeat death and become immortal, which has tinges of basic philosophy so you can look cool while discussing it.

Anyway, the way you do this is by beating the crap out of other wizards, learning spells in one of four categories. The four categories give a lot of variety in character builds, which is pretty nice since you can do a lot of unique combinations between characters (which get a couple of unique abilities) and spells, a surprising amount of which are viable in combat.

The game also has a Rogue-likeish save system, where when your character dies, he’s gone for good. This actually works well, since it forces you to experiment with character builds in order to win, which is of course coolio. Also, the only way to lose, actually, is to lose against the final boss, Death! See,

each battle takes up one year of your life, and every time you lose, a couple extra years are ticked off your life. When you run out of years, you’re forced to fight the scary-as-shit fuck-you-up-real-bad boss, and if you win, immortality is yours, woo. Else, you’re dead and you start anew.

Anyway my thoughts aren’t real coherent here but, y’know, FUCK YEAH. Good game.