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You’ve probably played twin-stick shooters, but have you played twin-stick dodgers? The answer is probably a ‘no’ followed by a swift ‘eh?’. Well, it’s the best way we can think of describing Mighty Mage. It’s a game where you don’t shoot – not really – and instead you dodge the enemies. It may look like a twin-stick shooter, but it’s our newly patented ‘twin-stick dodger’.
We should probably describe things a little better. At the start of Mighty Mage, you choose your little dude. He comes in fire, water, earth and electric flavours, but the choice is largely arbitrary: they play very, very similarly, and the main difference is the colour of the spells that tumble out of your body.
With that fundamental choice out of the way, you step through a portal which – confusingly – leaves you in absolutely the same place as before. Then the enemies start streaming through some portcullises, and it’s your job to wipe them all out to complete the level.
It took us a while to fully understand what was happening next. Because we were jamming the analogue sticks in the direction of enemies, and we were tapping away at the face buttons hoping to lob some magical plasma in a slime’s face. But nothing was happening. The buttons did nowt. All we could do was tap A to dash in a direction.
A tutorial would have been nice, Mighty Mage. Because the answer is exceptionally simple – just not what anyone would have expected. You can hold RT (or tap it, if you feel it makes a difference) to auto-fire at the enemies. You can’t direct where the mage fires: you’re holding RT and hoping that he zaps the closest and most immediate threat. Concentric circles ring the mage, showing the range of his fire.
It feels wrong. It’s a feeling that never truly goes away, but you do start coming to terms with what it wants you to do. What it wants is for you to choose when to fire – which slows you down, we should note – when to dash, and when to simply peg it about the room. It’s a game of fight or flight, except the fighting mostly involves holding a single button down.
There’s a certain amount of fun and elegance that comes from managing the room. You’re always looking for an exit, ensuring that you don’t get stuck in a cranny. When you’ve got some breathing room, you are squatting on that RT button, hoping that you can keep the enemies at the edges of those circles around your mage.
But as gameplay goes, it feels like something is missing. And we’ve got a decent idea of what’s missing. The problem is that nothing changes. The gameplay doesn’t get deeper or more strategic: it stays the same all the way through to the game’s end. And running away isn’t particularly empowering. When your spells are firing off like Bonfire Night, but you had very little to do with them, it can feel oddly cheap.
There’s a combo between the level of challenge and the length of Mighty Mage that makes it more of a problem. Because there are twenty levels available per mage, and it only takes twenty minutes to complete them all. Multiply that per mage – fire, water, earth and electricity – and you don’t have a supremely long playtime. But the real kicker is that the stakes are so, so low. We never felt like we might die (something that’s problematic for upgrade choice, as we never went for speed or health boosts, as we didn’t need them). It’s just way, way too easy, and there’s no real option to hoick it up.
It sounds like we’re down on Mighty Mage, but there’s a detail that brings it together. Between levels, you get a choice of upgrades. Most of the time, these are stat boosts. You choose from four options – one is always health – and they might jack up your speed, crit damage, likelihood to crit, DPS and more. On rarer occasions, you get new powers that appear on your World of Warcraft-style hotbar. Except, of course, you don’t actually activate that hotbar yourself: your little mage does.
Simple as it is, the upgrades kept us playing. We loved juicing up our little wizard, making them a killing machine that barely needed us. We’d aim to get to a point where, for the first few moments of a level, we could stand in the middle of the arena and hold RT, unleashing hell on anyone who dared approach us. On the later levels, we felt like the most powerful wizard in all of the land, and all we had to do was press a trigger button.
But then we played each of the different mages and we did the same thing, over and over. The water mage doesn’t have a different style of play from the fire mage. They’re just different coloured explosions. There’s a missed opportunity there. If one was more into stunning, for example, then we’d play differently, and it’s what Mighty Mage desperately needs. Without it, we were replaying for the achievements, which, if you’re interested, are yours in just over an hour. But Gamerscore should be the last reason to play a game.
Mighty Mage is a shooter without the shooting, and it’s as bemusing as it sounds. We’re not sure what the developers wanted: are we meant to treat it like an idle game? A dodge ’em up? Or are we genuinely meant to squint and consider it a shooter? We’re not entirely sure the developers even know.
A game dedicated to getting out of the way? It’s not exactly a killer pitch. But if you can find some fun in the dodging then there’s an upgrade system in Mighty Mage that sprinkles magic on top. We’re just not sure it’s quite enough.