Magicians & Looters

Short game, only 4 hours start to finish. Rather fun beat-em-up. I'd not call it a metroidvania, as it only has the bare minimums of (get X, backtrack, get Y, backtrack, ect ect).

I found myself having a little fun with it at first. But there are a number of design decisions that I don't agree with. This game desperately needed a character hot-swap for what they were trying to do (turn the metroidvania gates into character specific obsticles). Instead you end up doing a deeply tiring amount of backtracking. Every gated area I encountered required a party member I wasn't using. So I'd have to go back to the start of the level, switch characters, go all the way back, clear the room, go all the way back, get the character I wanted to play, go all the way back, check the next room and find out it requires the other OTHER character I wasn't using. There are some other concerns for me too: combat clunkiness, player character balance issues and hit-every-wall-for-secret-doors-syndrome. But the game's major selling angle was the humor. And mostly it didn't really land with me.

A very linear metroidvania, with slightly annoying controls and typical retro graphics. There's nothing really exceptional about it, except for how mediocre it really is. The combat is functional, but not much more. Exploration exists, but it never really feels worth it. Most of the upgrades don't seem to do much, and all three characters are mostly identical. For some reason, the developers decided to split exploration abilities between them, so you will need to switch occasionally, but this is mostly just annoying. There's also humor, in that typical "comedy RPG" style, that is making snide references at the way videogames work and poorly thought-out stories you might see in an NES title. Really, there's nothing here that hasn't been done better a thousand times 10 years ago.

Fun game. Decent gameplay, good music and the jokes are actually kinda funny...

Metroidvania with a really good balance between combat and platforming. There's a little bit of backtracking here and there but mostly for items and not actually progressing the main quest. The story, characters and script are original but the dialogue (especially among your party characters) can be hit or miss at times. The music score is good. It reminds me of the music in Super Metroid, mostly serving as background environment music, so you'll either notice it or you won't. (Except for the warp rooms. You'll always notice the music there.) There's little reason to play this game a second time though, unless you're hunting for achievements. And if you're hunting for achievements, keep in mind there is an achievement that requires you to beat the game within a time limit of 2 hours.

Being self-aware about an uninspired aesthetic is not a replacement for such.

The game itself feels unimpressive. The graphics seem unpolished, the dialogue is childish, and the gameplay itself is simple and not very exciting. Overall, the game seems like it brings nothing new to the genre, and isn't very fun to play.

It might be fun, but at present the game randomly causes my computer to crash with a irql_not_less_or_equal error. Probably best to wait until they've had a chance to work out all the bugs.

As soon as I started playing I was hooked. Awesome game.

An extremely solid indie game in a genre I love, Magicians & Looters is a pretty easy game to recommend. At its core it's a platformer with (small-ish) sprawling, fully backtrackable levels (all the better to go hunt for any missing treasure) and lots of combat and exploration. The levels start out pretty linear but they start spread out as you unlock traversal abilities like wall-running, rolling and tall jumps (but weirdly enough, no double-jumping or dashes). I... guess that's a long-winded way of saying that yes, this is a metroidvania game. You play as one of three apprentices of varying skill with weapons and magic, which you can switch between in special rooms. They each have customizable equipment slots and unlockeable abilities - I actually needed to plan their builds for different bosses in my playthrough, and that's something I don't remember from other Metroidvania games, at least to this extent. Most of the combat is weapon-based. Magic is important, but unless you eq...