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Review IGN nukes Mage Knight: Apocalypse - 5.4

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,044
Tags: Bandai Namco Entertainment; Mage Knight: Apocalypse

<a href=http://www.ign.com>IGN</a> has posted a very negative <a href=http://pc.ign.com/articles/737/737330p1.html>review</a> of <a href=http://mageknight.namco.com/>Mage Knight: Apocalypse</a>, giving it 5.4 out of 10 (would have been less, but graphics scored 7/10) and concluding that "Mage Knight is a mediocre game that gets old after a few hours."
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<blockquote>To get to each Aspect, you'll need to kill a whole lot of baddies. Each dungeon map in the game has an very linear layout. Moving from start to finish will require the slaying of all the enemies standing around, which are all apparently waiting for you. Occasionally there are extremely light puzzle elements...
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Regardless of which character you picked to start the game, they'll all end up in the party by the end. Though you'll be the only one directly controllable, there are some limited party control commands like attack, follow, and stop. You'll quickly come to realize how useless these commands are.
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Party members in this game get lost constantly. Over the course of a stage, your squad will get split up or stuck behind a wall, a pillar, or their own clumsy feet, leaving you to fight alone. We tried on numerous occasions to go back and retrieve our allies to little effect. Many times, even as we were standing directly with no obstacles between us and slamming the follow button, they wouldn't budge.
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When you die you'll also automatically respawn at the save point. This initially proves to be convenient but later reveals itself as a device that removes nearly all the challenge from the game. Let's say you're at a boss encounter or a fight with a particularly nasty group of monsters. They kill you. You respawn at a nearby save point with any squadmates that happened to go down and all your armor, weapons, and statistics intact, then run back to the conflict. As it turns out, absolutely nothing has been reset, so you just continue the fight. Rinse and repeat until you win.
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Another feature that drains challenge from the game is incredibly overpowered character abilities. ...</blockquote>And so on, and so on. What's that? Is there anything positive about the game? You betcha!
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<blockquote>On the positive side, Mage Knight gives players some cool customization options, even if we've seen them before. Weapons and armor can be fitted with magestones, which serve as damage or resistance bonuses based on what color elemental combinations are entered. </blockquote>Awesome! I must have this game.
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Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,044
More reviews if someone cares:

Computer Gamer Ro - 44%

No wonder that right now the multiplayer servers for Mage Knight are few and mostly empty. Even if you can escape the stupidity of the AI, you can’t avoid the other shortcomings of the game.

Armchair Empire - 65%

The game’s plot, in what I’m finding a disturbingly common problem in FRPG’s, is hampered by a lack of compelling or even comprehensible storytelling. Even during the exposition-heavy early episodes, I experienced a number of “did I miss something?” moments. It’s hard to care about what the traitorous [fill in the blank] has conspired with the foul [fill in the blank] to do to the innocent [fill in the blank] when you have no clue who any of them are.
 

suibhne

Erudite
Joined
Aug 21, 2003
Messages
1,951
Location
Chicago
Most car wrecks are at least momentarily interesting. In this, I guess the moment has passed. :lol:
 

denizsi

Arcane
Joined
Nov 24, 2005
Messages
9,927
Location
bosphorus
No doubt the game sucks, but IGN giives such a low score to a shitty game? Too good to be true. I smell.. shit.. that is conspired.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,044
GameSpot review - 44%

Because of your unhelpful companions as well as the high volume of enemies in the game, you'll die a lot. ... You'll quickly fall into a very repetitive and annoying cycle of death where you resurrect, fight, and die over and over again. ... It removes any sort of challenge or sense of attrition from the game, since the only penalty for dying is coming back to life a few steps away with half of your mana and life back. When you have a sliver of health left why bother wasting a potion or a healing spell when you can just die and regain half your life? Not only does it make absolutely no sense, it just isn't fun.
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Mage Knight Apocalypse is a poorly executed take on a tried-and-true formula. The game has everything you'd expect from an action RPG, but none of it is handled well. The multiplayer is a hassle, the single-player is riddled with bugs and frustrating design flaws, and the presentation is sloppy. If you can somehow overlook all of these flaws, you could spend a lot of time going through all six chapters of the game with each of the five characters. But when you consider how many similar games of better quality are already available, you're left with very little reason to play this one
 

Surgey

Scholar
Joined
Aug 14, 2006
Messages
618
Location
Unicorn Power!
denizsi said:
No doubt the game sucks, but IGN giives such a low score to a shitty game? Too good to be true. I smell.. shit.. that is conspired.

Or the publisher didn't slip IGN a fifty.
 

Araanor

Liturgist
Joined
Oct 24, 2002
Messages
829
Location
Sweden
Hey, they have to keep up the pretension of being a review site somehow...
 

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