Mind Over Magic

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.

The negative reviews on this game make me both sad and slightly mad. I picked this up ageees ago during early access and enjoyed the journey through to full release. it is, a management game, you work to build up your resources, you need this that and the next thing, but then you also need to train some students. It grows and grows and grows and I really enjoy the build. I'm frustrated by how some people have said its a slow grind, well naturally you need to gather resources? I have my current school at late game. I don't need to worry at all about resources, I have every single room made and upgraded to be the best it could be. This is what you work towards! and I loved getting to this point. It took A LOT of work to get this far, but thats kinda the fun of it no? Building up to get everything you need? to the point where you don't even need to think about it anymore cause you got that shit sorted? The fighting is a lot of fun. you work towards building up your mages, there are many...

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.

The game is knowledge test and tedious. you didn't have enough wood from start of the game to repel the fog ? Your playthrough is screwed. you didn't know about the room system ? well the game gave you codex and expected you to read, and study it. now undo and rebuild everything. at least rebuilding gives you 100% material back, but not the time wasted. you train students and graduate them... why ? they gives you relics. what are relics ? oh you didn't know ? that's not our problem. The game fails at teaching you basic fundamentals and setting you on the GOAL.

After 41 hours I'm ready to write a review. This game can be good but I want you to know what you are buying first. A) This game is VERY slow paced. If you want a game to zone out and "watch play itself" this can be good. But if you don't want that, let me stress this is VERY slow paced and will not fit you. B) This game doesn't explain itself that well. Overall it's not super-complicated like dwarf fortress. It does have some tutorials. But it's not the best at explaining its mechanics. You will figure it out eventually or can just ask here or on reddit, but it's not ideal. C) The way this game is written you basically have to cycle through characters. So don't get too attached to anyone because you WILL have to retire a lot of them. Ok with all that out of the way, I think this is a fun "colony" sim game set in a wizard school. The main feature that sets this game apart from others is, you have to "puzzle out" how to fit the weird rooms together. The...

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 resea...

The game just becomes to tedious.

Pretty good, I am no expert in colony building games but this one pulls me in more and more.

when you want to enjoy Hogwarts without the troubling associations with its author.

A nice mix of automation, combat and resource management. Highly recommend.