MageQuit

Genre: Arcade / Party

Players: 1-8 Competitive / Team Competitive (Local), 2-10 Competitive / Team Competitive (Online)

.

Review:

MageQuit is an Arcade-style arena-based Party Game released in 2019 on PC and Xbox One and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021. In this game, players take the role of battling wizards trying to use their spells to take out their opponents in an enclosed arena.

The presentation for MageQuit leaves something to be desired. The game uses unimpressive, low-poly 3D visuals for its characters, arenas, and spell effects, and despite none of these being particularly impressive or even stylistically distinct, the framerates can still absolutely chug in the game’s 10-player matches in a way that detracts from the gameplay, even if the majority of those players are bots. And while the game’s soundtrack has a nice medieval fantasy-style flair, you won’t really be listening to it much amidst the chaos of the battle.

Getting to the gameplay, this game has a few major issues here as well. The controls are clunky, with your wizard moving slowly, and taking far too much time to turn around. The slow turning can also make aiming a pain, as there’s no second stick for aiming – you always aim in the direction your character is looking. The game doesn’t properly display cooldowns in a way that’s easy for players to read, meaning it’s far too easy to be reliant on using an attack that you don’t realize just isn’t there yet. And hit detection in this game seems spotty at best.

Suffice it to say, MageQuit has more problems than you can shake a wizard’s staff at. And yet, despite this, it kinda’… still works?

There are multiple game modes, but by default, players start out each match with just two abilities selected out of a pool randomly determined when setting up the match – a standard attack using B and a dash/movement ability using L. after subsequent matches they’ll be adding on one new move at a time until they have a full loadout – a melee attack using R3 (pressing in the right thumb stick), a secondary projectile attack using Y, a shield using R, a grapple attack using A, and an ultimate attack using X.

Each round of the match, points are tallied based on kills, and the loser gets first pick of the next group of abilities, with the number of each of these limited. This means that those who are falling behind will be given a wider range of options, and the player in the lead will be stuck choosing between only a few options other players didn’t want.

The matches themselves are delightfully chaotic, with tons of spells flying around, especially if you’re playing with a full player count (though, again, watch out for that nasty slowdown), and there are some great weapon synergies too. You can aim to combine multiple attacks that push players away, hoping to drive them into the out-of-bounds area where they’ll gradually take damage. You can use a grapple that pulls enemies close together and then hit them all with an area-of-effect attack. Or maybe select multiple quick attacks that you can combine with a teleport to zip in, do multiple attacks, and zip out.

In the end, despite its numerous flaws, MageQuit is a blast to play, and it is a superb choice for a party game. It’s just a shame that it has so many flaws and technical issues, because otherwise this could have been a much better game. And the slowdown on its own is reason enough to favor the releases of this game on other platforms over the Nintendo Switch version. Still, if Nintendo Switch is your platform of choice and you’re looking to expand your Party Game collection, this is well worth picking up.

tl;dr – MageQuit is an arena-based Arcade-style Party Game where players take the role of wizards blasting each other with spells in an enclosed arena. There are some frustrating design and technical issues here, unimpressive visuals, and some hideously bad slowdown on Nintendo Switch. Yet despite these issues, MageQuit is still a delight to play, and Party Game fans looking for another game to throw down in should definitely consider this one, though you may be off getting this game on another platform if you can.

Grade: B-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}