Mind Over Magic Reviews

This game has tons of potential... I love the concept... But in case the devs read this, here is what I want from it. I want a game where everything I work on is a boost and a nice or surprising help to me in my play. Lots of great ways forward all leading to good and helpful things. I would really love that. What I got was a game where too many of the things were absolutely necessary for survival. These things are often hard to make and harder for a new player to know that they need them... but worst, there are so many competing things that you need to survive that you can't make them all even if you knew you needed to. And you have to research them first. More competition for my mages time. In the mean time I am slowly dying for lack this one thing. And I don't even know what it is... and If I get that, then I have more things that I must have or die. Again... I do not so much mind the competition for my time... I mind how many things you have to have to survive. They are not nice to have or helpful to have... they are game enders if you do not have them. This leads to a type of play that I hate. Where you have to do things a very specific way or you will die. It's not fun. In the end, I tried slogging through with just the founder ghost... It seems like it can be done... but it's not fun. Three specific things to work on. One. Stone... I find it really too hard to come by considering how much you need it. Two... Roofs. I find them incredibly hard to work with. I had to completely change my style of play just to make roofs more manageable. Oh... and one more thing. Fight defense. I found it very confusing who to throw the shield on or whatever. Most games are much more clear in that regard. Maybe a veteran would laugh at my petty problems with these... but for a newb they nearly have me shelving the game. Update: So I played long enough to get past the starting difficulty spike and started to think... Hmmm... maybe this is fun after all... maybe I should change my review... Only to run head long straight into the if you don't do this stuff our way you can't progress... Meh... I can literally see the fun. But every time I almost reach it the game tells me I'm doing it wrong. If I did not see the potential I would not be frustrated.

Its good, but unfinished. there is almost zero update from the devs for almost 6 months. It's a good game, until you hit end game. And then its just a repetitive and boring ONI wannabe.

Unfortunately this is not about building magic school, but micro-managing personell. I expected something more like Spellcaster University, but this is not it. Also, all gathering has to be manual for some reason, you need to click-click-click to collect stuff. Which is sad, room system surely looks interesting, but not automated staff ruins it for me.

Boy could this game be great. And I really want to love it. It should be right up my alley. A magic themed, less "I need a phd in thermodynamics" version of ONI. Perfect. As it stands, I have to give it a thumbs down unless they cut the price in half. There's a lot of really cool systems promised in the game. The school building, dungeon delving, different races and types of students and teachers, items, rituals, and the list goes on. And at first, you think "wow, this is really cool! I get to run a wizard school!" But after only a few hours, the cracks start to show. What you thought was going to be a robust management sim of interlocking systems turns out to be a bunch of systems that kind of touch, but are only by themselves surface deep. Take combat, for example. At first glance, it seems really cool. You get to delve into your underschool to unlock more rewards, tech, building options, etc., or your school gets raided by a roving baddie. You fight on a grid style and it's old school JRPG feel of selecting your attack based on timers. That seems like a refreshing tie-in most of these mangement games are missing. But then you play a few battles. You realize they're all terribly easy. You realize races don't matter at all. You realize building your team X-com style means almost nothing as you'd have to be a total dunce to mess up the battles. So by your 5th battle, you're kind of over it. Or take the students and graduating them. At first, you think cool you get to bring in new students, choose which types because it's important to have different elements for students since they synergize with instructors differently, and then you get to learn them up until graduation. IF you manage to get them to graduation, you get rewards for your hard work. Sounds great. Until about a week or two in-game passes. You're established enough you can bring in a fresh student and graduate them out with a 100% success rate in about 20-30 minutes per student. Element types don't matter. None of the penalties for bad synergy does much other than maybe cause a student to break a chair once in a while. Remember in Rimworld where a few pawns freaking out and having a breakdown can threaten to take out your entire colony if it's the wrong psychotic break at the wrong time? Here, none of the breaks matter. It's like if every break in Rimworld were a "binge eating" break and only lasted 10 seconds. You'll accumulate so many items through graduating students that items will become absolutely meaningless. You'll hit max level with your instructors after about 1.5-2 hrs in game with that pawn, max. Speaking of which, why is the level cap for pawns so low? Very odd choice. So in the end, the game has a lot of promise to it, but delivers on almost none of it. Everything is very shallow and easy. You'll see pretty much everything the game has to offer after about 6-7 hrs. There's no challenge after that and no real reason to keep playing as you'll just continue the same loop of unceremoniously graduating students, fighting easy battles in the underschool, and pushing back the darkness with no trade-off for doing so. This could all easily be fixed with some patches and some redesign. A few easy fixes could be double the level cap of pawns, make a meaningful and difficult trade-off for pushing back the darkness, make mental breaks dangerous and mean something - possibly even threatening the life of your school, and then extend the time everything takes and up the challenge so meeting milestones like graduating students feels like an accomplishment. There's a GREAT game in here. But as it stands, it's not worth more than $10 or so since you'll only get about 10 hrs of fun.

Great game. Would be nice to have more streamlined groups and relics management though. [spoiler]Read Croa Corpse description carefully![/spoiler]

I do enjoy the game play, the building etc. The reason for a negative, is it is very easy to soft lock yourself and run out of stone. In order to get more you have to beeline a certain technology to get more stone. Once this is learned you can easily avoid the running out of stone issue. But this also creates the issue of, every start will be the same, you will research the same techs first each run to get more stone. This makes replaying the same each time. You will build the same rooms in the same order at the beginning of each run. Of course I learned this by soft locking myself on a run, and now I just do not feel like restarting and playing again. While I could deconstruct other rooms, but they are all in use and are needed at this point. If they are going to make a crucial resource be limited and then lock it half way down one tech tree, then they need to add more dang stone to the surrounding area. Otherwise move that tech up a bit, and allow it be be research in a basic research room. Not behind some keywords that a player is just starting to grasp. P*** poor design.

The build system is just not up to the task. The devs designed a cool tiered system for rooms that encourages rebuilding and evolving the school. And then they slapped a haphazard build system on top that makes rebuilding such an incredible pain in the butt that you are essentially forces to pre plan the entire building and not engage with any tier but the last one. Sadly the devs also refuse to acknowledge this problem, let alone improve it.

ok well, its good, but the management is like ONI on steroids. I like it, but you can tell it's got a very specific audience in mind.

Personally I consider this a vast upgrade to Oxygen not included, and consider that to be Mind over Magics predecessor spiritually. The addition of the combat system, layered 3D tiles, more space, many options. Well worth the full price. The game could use some scenarios, perhaps a little more endgame content... but that may come with time anyway. Can be overwhelming first few hours.

This game is simultaneously too easy and too difficult. It starts you out with a few helpful tutorials only to throw you into the deep end with no sense of direction. I have a magic school. Neat! Why do I have a magic school? What do I do with it? What's my motivation? No idea... Once you have the basic structure built, you can bring in students and gradate them in a day or two. Great! But why? You get some relics and some materials. But what do you do with them? Good luck, figure it out I guess. And then you finally do figure out what to do with them and you're left thinking, "okay but why do I want to do that?" You find a thing. You struggle to figure out how to use the thing. You finally figure out the hows and the whys and then you look at your screen thinking 'now what?' rinse and repeat. This game has so much potential but it feels hollow. It plays like the beta version of ONI.