Mighty Mage

Genre: Arcade / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Mighty Mage is an Arcade-style game with Roguelike elements released on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch in 2023. In this game, players select one of four elemental mage types and fend off slimes, bats, and enemy mages in wave after wave, selecting power-ups between waves.

I can’t help but feel like this game was created to imitate the sort of gameplay of Vampire Survivors, although that’s not to say that this replicates that game’s overall quality. Much as in that game, the player doesn’t actively target enemies or decide which of their spells to use. Instead, when players press the attack button, the game attacks for them, auto-targeting enemies using whichever abilities it deems appropriate that aren’t currently on cooldown. The only reason to release the attack button is because your character slows down while attacking.

This sort of premise and setup works well enough in theory, but in practice players will quickly find that this game is severely crippled by its many limitations. Upgrades you select between rounds are not nearly inventive or varied enough for this sort of experience – you just have your typical health, movement speed, attack speed, attack power, and critical rate upgrades to choose from most rounds, with every few rounds giving you one of a few additional attacks on top of your current ones. You don’t have anything even remotely approaching the variety and creativity of some of the better games in this genre, such as The Binding of Isaac.

This lack of variety and originality extends to the arena you fight in (it’s roughly shaped like a capital letter “I”, and never changes), as well as the opposition you’re facing – players will only fight six kinds of enemies throughout the game – slow-moving slimes that take multiple hits to kill, fast-moving but weak bats, and four different (but largely interchangeable) kinds of mages that attack you using extremely slow-moving projectile attacks. None of these enemies is particularly smart or challenging, and the only time you’ll really feel any sort of difficulty here is when numerous enemies spawn in a small amount of time, and/or when they spawn all around you.

Just how lacking in challenge is this game? On my very first run, I mindlessly selected an increase in attack speed, attack power, or crit rate in every round, and completed this entire game in 15 minutes while only taking one hit, and never feeling at all challenged by this game.

The really sad thing is, I feel like the core gameplay at the heart of this game works well enough, but what’s here feels like it doesn’t go past the very basic foundation of what this game needs to work. This game needs ten times the variety that’s present here, and without it, it’s just a bland cakewalk that’s over in the time it takes to have a brief coffee break.

I suppose I should also mention that this game oddly won’t let docked players get past the main menu – you need to undock your Nintendo Switch and select the option to start the game first, and then it works fine docked. Why? I don’t know, this is just sloppy design.

The presentation here isn’t bad at least. Mighty mage uses colorful, cartoony pixel art visuals backed by a synthesized soundtrack, and while there’s nothing here especially noteworthy or interesting, it works, at least.

In the end, Mighty Mage feels like the waste of a good foundation. The core Arcade-style Roguelike gameplay here is enjoyable enough, but the game is so absolutely devoid of variety that it ends up being bland, far too easy, and effortlessly completed within fifteen minutes. Skip it.

tl;dr – Mighty Mage is an Arcade-style Roguelike game where players take the role of one of four elemental mages fending off enemies in waves. The core gameplay here is decent enough, but the game is so terribly devoid of depth and variety that you’ll breeze through to the ending within 15 minutes. Don’t bother with this one.

Grade: D+

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