Day Six

• Game: Magicians & Looters
• Source: Groupees' Build a Greenlight 5
• Started: 05/12
• Ended: 06/12

As suspected, I wasn't too far away from the end of Magicians & Looters. It's perhaps a bit shorter than your average SpaceWhipper, even including its peers in the traditionally lighter Indie market, but that also means it doesn't overstay its welcome either. My opinion on it hasn't shifted: It's not particularly remarkable in any way, besides splitting the hero into three separate protagonists with their own separate strengths and weaknesses that are subsequently suited for different parts of the game. Beyond that, it's just a fairly solid SpaceWhipper with everything you could ask for. There's trinkets, hidden areas, new equipment and abilities in hard to reach places, backtracking when a new power is unlocked and some well-balanced boss fights. The player grows stronger by finding XP Orbs, rather than fighting enemies (which just awards money), and these orbs are all hidden away in each area. The game does tell you how many there are to collect, though, and also tells you which region each piece of missing equipment is. It manages to reveal enough without revealing too much, fortunately, as these items can still be tricky to find even if you've narrowed it down to a specific region of the game.

Likewise, the consequences for getting yourself killed are very fair. Whenever the player character is defeated, all their gear flies out of them like a Diablo character (and a musical sting plays that is more or less a sad trombone), though the player actually only loses a small percentage of their cash. Because gold is an infinite resource it's never the end of the world, and there's plenty of hidden caches and loot chests to ensure a thorough player isn't a little short when shopping at one of the game's many vendors. The player is also kicked back to the last save point, but their collectibles/map progress is retained. They can also warp to any region once they're a high enough level, so the end-game backtracking dash for 100% completion isn't too obnoxious either.

The presentation isn't much to write home about (though I did find the music catchy enough, excepting perhaps the final dungeon's dubstep) but the core is solid and sometimes that's all that matters in a SpaceWhipper. No trapping collectibles in areas you can't return to, no weird difficulty leaps, no overlong backtracking, no entirely incongruous tower defense RTS sequences, and really no amateur errors in general that often plague Indie additions to this genre. I can respect a well-made game, even if it doesn't offer a whole lot new to its genre's formula or has much in the way of fancy visuals or trenchant wit.

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