Realms of Magic Reviews

Good Game

A great little game. axe go brrrrrr

Fun game, kind of like Terraria but a bit more laid back. Player drives the story, so if you want to side track yourself by making a huge farm for 3 hours, no one will bother you. Combat is a bit easy, with no real challenge, except for keeping an eye on the health bar. (No other feedback when your health gets low) Leveling system reminds me a bit of TES: Oblivion. Character level is based on experience, but you also gain experience by increasing profession levels, so they intertwine a bit. All-in-all a good solid game.

There's a good game here but it's got some amateur mistakes and design philosophy. First, the positives. Artwork is fine mostly. It's a 2d survival crafting game. It's hard to screw this up. You have two hotbars you can switch between. One is for tools I think, which has an icon for using them. When you have a tool equipped, using this icon uses whatever tool for whatever material you're clicking automatically. so if you have both an axe and a shovel equipped, using the button/icon on a tree cuts it down with the axe and digging on the ground uses a shovel without you having to switch tools. The game takes place in a zelda 2 style map. You have the overworld map and chunks which you load into. I think it works well and takes me back to the nes/snes days. This game also has rpg stats and level up mechanics. I love this stuff in crafting games but you rarely see it done properly if at all. I always have to rely on mods for this like Starbound with RPG Growth, but I'm glad it's just part of the core game here. it adds depth. Skills, weapons, farming. it's all here and it's done well for the most part. There's magic which supplements non-magic combat pretty well. Negatives. As soon as I got started, maybe 10 seconds into launching, I was hit with an unskipable cutscene so I walked away for a few minutes and came back to the title. Got to character creation. A lot of options but it's standard stuff. Humans, elves, orcs, that sort. I chose human and noticed the hairstyles are REALLY bad. Like, the person who drew these should stop drawing sprite art or go watch a tutorial. ALL of the decent non-long hair styles aren't sitting far enough down on the characters' heads so they appear to be almost bald and wearing poorly placed wigs. Hairs need to be redrawn and positioned properly. Game is riddled with weird english. I get that it's not everyones' first language and I'm usually the last person to criticize grammar, but come on. it's just weird when I talk to someone, and they say stuff like 'One gold is pretty much, but I'll get it for you.' that makes no sense. Game is very brown. that's just a personal nitpick. If you like brown and tan mixed with washed colors, you're gonna love this. as far as I can tell, there are no sliders or variables you can change to alter your world, like enemy spawn rate or hunger depletion rate. It comes as it is. There appears to also be no modding support. Finally, gonna complain about this as I always do with survival sandbox games: why can we not claim land? I'm so tired of these games missing one important mechanic. Territory. Ingame currency -> buy plots of land -> invite people who are allowed permissions in this area -> taxes come out of residents' pockets and pay the upkeep -> expand with more money. This is an integral thing that kept a lot of Minecraft PVP servers and Terraria servers going back in the day. I rarely see this mechanic implemented even though it gives us something to do, a reason to care about building and defending. In games like this, NPCs could fill the role of the player residents. It's a amazing mechanic and, again, missing here unless I'm just not far enough along and it surprisingly is in this game. 7/10

Great blend of Terraria and a very simple Skyrim. More people should be supporting this game!

Progress and advancement seems to be more tied to doing fetch quests rather than resource gathering and exploring. That's not really what I want when I play these games. I like getting powerful by grinding... And while you can do that, it just doesn't feel as satisfying because you do a quest and then you literally get the gear for free that you just grinded for. After a few quests like that, it makes you not want to grind, which for me takes away any play-ability. If you are fine with that, then you might like this game. I didn't so I can't recommend.

A rough little gem, but a gem nonetheless, and one I thoroughly enjoyed to completion. Someone else described it as a cross between Terraria and the Elder Scrolls games (the earlier ones especially), and I'd say the comparison is pretty apt. The open sections give you the freedom to dig / chop / build to your heart's content in a 2D world, like Terraria. The storied sections have you running around completing quests, chatting to NPCs, and generally killing with whatever arsenal of weapons and magic you feel like, much like the Elder Scrolls games. Is it as good as either of them? No, of course not. Terraria has had many, many years to get to where it is today, and TES has all the resources of Bethesda. RoM is the first game made by a small indie dev, and it shows. Both in the rough edges, and in the love that was poured in to making it. It is imperfect, but endearing nonetheless. Like Terraria was in the early days. I definitely got my money's worth, and with a (free) remake version in the works, plus a sequel down the track, I look forward to coming back to the Realms of Magic in the future.

I really can't help but compare this game to Terraria for good and ill. It looks a lot like Terraria and has too many similar mechanics and activities for it to be a coincidence. This is one of those games where I get the sense the devs played another game (in this case, Terraria) and got the idea in their head of how they'd have built it, instead. The most obvious change is the existence of a plot/story. This leads to a weird dichotomy in gameplay, because the "local map" you play on is relatively small, but you can open up a world map and go to different local maps by clicking on a grid location. Most are procedurally-generated "sandbox" maps, which are basically just like Terraria where you can dig, explore, build your own house, etc. Then, there are plot maps that are always the same, almost all the objects are fixed in place without you being able to dig or place any blocks and most furniture being non-interactive. I find this quite jarring. In particular, some areas in the plot maps, despite the game training you to stop trying to mine, you're meant to dig through special walls, (with "muck" blocks or the like, while the similar-looking mud blocks are still invincible.) You're meant to find all the secrets in these plot areas, but since the game changes the rules on you depending on location, it's hard to remember all the tricks you're supposed to be using to search. The plot is also... not fantastic. It goes for a rather misanthropic "comedic" tone that leaves me not caring if I save or wind up dooming everyone. It's like Monty Python's take on mud-stained illiterate peasants without the charm or flamboyance, and instead a general disdain for everyone. The first town has a town idiot who steals women's clothing, introduces a guy as the local wife-beater whose violence everyone just ignores, and instead everyone warns you to stay away from the brutal authoritarian guard captain... who's also the only one with actual main plot quests. As other reviews mention, there's little role-play here, as you only get choices during quest dialogue, and your options are effectively "agree to whatever they say," "agree but complain about it," or "refuse to do the quest." There's one main plot quest per chapter where you get A choice (basically "kill everyone" or "don't",) but otherwise, refusing either says "OK, I'll wait here until you agree" or "tough, do it anyway." Another huge change is the RPG leveling system. You have a race that gives bonuses, (or penalties for the gnome,) but the rest is based upon gear, finding scrolls (rewards for quests or in treasure chests in sandbox maps,) and spending talent points in one of seven talent trees. There are a heavy and light weapon tree, a general mobility/recovery "combat" tree, and four magic trees: fire, ice, nature, and necromancy. Because of how combat works, these have serious balance issues. That brings me to the biggest change: Combat. Unlike the NES-inspired Terraria, you can walk through enemies just fine, you only take damage if you're there when an enemy launches one of their heavily-choreographed attacks. The combat is more like one of those "2d Soulslike" games where you right click to block and get a dodge roll where I-frames are second tier in the "combat' tree. It seems designed to want you to dodgeroll, then stab the enemy in the back before waiting for the next attack and rolling again, although its stamina regeneration can be limiting. Or you can just play a nature or necromancy mage and just drop summons on the enemy while hiding on a ledge like a total coward. Even if you're a melee brute, you can easily just take a time out by jumping up on a ledge for a breather, as nearly all the enemies lack the scripting to understand how to jump more than a couple tiles up. Your MP and HP regenerate, theirs doesn't. It's like if going back to bonfires in Dark Souls didn't respawn enemies, you just clear them out once and they're gone forever. This is both good and bad; Enemies in Terraria were often more [i]annoying[/i] than threatening. I wound up just avoiding caves and tunneling blindly through the solid stone to pick up random metals I happened to bumble on rather than constantly fight unending streams of monsters while I'm trying to get some mining done. Having the ability to just kill all the monsters in a given chamber and mine in peace means I'm not sick to death of the combat and actively seeking to avoid it. On the other hand, no respawns mean clearing a map makes it [i]completely dead[/i] with no danger and nothing to do but continuously farm crops. I find myself missing those periodic monster-spawning events like blood moons from Terraria so that there could be some peaks of action spacing out valleys of farming. The maps are also gated by area. This means that in the starting province, I dig down to see how far down the bottom of the map is, only to find that in those maps, once you hit a certain depth, content just [i]stops[/i]. You can only find tin, copper, salt, and coal in those maps, and if you go too deep, you just stop finding [i]anything[/i] but stone and dirt. No lava or underworld at the bottom, the boundary is just boredom. This results in a sort of forced pacing, because you can easily spin jute into burlap and gain weaving skills, which unlocks the ability to spin linen, but you don't get flax until the next province. Meanwhile, you could focus on getting to the next province as fast as possible by just exploring sandbox maps for chests with map fragments (10 fragments to get to the next province, easily obtained in even a single sandbox map, of which dozens are in each province,) but when you get there, if you hadn't spent time farming jute and grinding weaving, you couldn't use the linen you found, anyway. You're time-gated behind both, and neither has anything to do with the main plot and quests. You're forced to split your time, which, if handled deftly might be a brilliant way to keep the game from getting too stale, but if there's one thing in this grab-bag of systems you don't like, it can repeatedly force you to do stuff like go mining for sandbox chests for map shards. There are a lot of decorative items, and obviously, the devs loved setting up tons of detail in their hand-made plot maps, while seemingly all the stuff you see you can eventually build with enough skill ranks and materials. The issue is, the game isn't built to let you have a home base - you can't carry rabbits from Splinterville back to your Woodsbury-area hut, so you need to build a new base in every province to get all the resources, and you can't mark a base with anything more than a tiny icon in the corner of a grid spot. Also, because of the aforementioned lack of respawning enemies, raids where you defend your giant castle from assault like Terraria are right out. It winds up making you feel like spending time actually [i]using[/i] the intricate decorations are a waste of effort since you never need them and will just be moving on, anyway. Ultimately, I still find it interesting, with a clunkiness in combat and the relatively low amounts of combat being the weaker points of the game. It's strong point, however, is the fusion blend of genres and the simple fact that I still just plain like this kind of freeform sandbox explorer/builder with a side of RPG build crafting.