Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

KickStarter Mage's Initiation - A Classic Sierra-style Adventure/RPG

lightbane

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,207
Soo, is this game "good" like Unavowed, or actually good for real instead?
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,179
Location
Bulgaria
:hmmm:

I wasted half an hour to do the most useless and retarded thing.

There is a bunch of eagles that guard the path,they are bothered by a bunch of normal wasps......soooo what do you thing you have to do guys? Do you thing you could just use your fire magic and burn the little pests??? Fuck no that will make it offensive or what not. You have to get incent burner from a dude that will give it to you after you had traversed a wasteland and found his shitty bag or something. Then you have to pick berries for which you just burned a bunch of ants,the go back to your tower and make dust of the berries,then buy some meat and empty bottle from the town. After you have the ingridians you have to go to the wast nest,put the meat and the incent beneath it,wait for four wasp to come to the meat,then fire it up and in the end put them in the bottle.
:retarded:

Nigga you could just burn the pests in like 5 seconds,but noooo that is not right! It really retarded design.


Also a hint for all the players here,you can skip animation with ESC,it really speeds up the exploration and travelling.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,179
Location
Bulgaria
:negative:

Fuck that shit,the fire mage is beyond useless. The retard can't light a candle to see in to a dark cave,his light spell is just a flash for a second and does nothing. Incredibly poor puzzle design.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,179
Location
Bulgaria
Anyone else playing as a fire mage? I am stuck near the end of the second trial,where you have to find the fire mage that killed the people. I have to talk to that retard the air mage in the observation hall,but he keeps ignoring me watching some birds fuck. Does anyone have an idea on how to get past it?
 

Boleskine

Arcane
Joined
Sep 12, 2013
Messages
4,045
https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/37028

Mage’s Initiation: Reign of the Elements review
Written by Evan Dickens — February 1, 2019
mi-fp2__huge.jpg



The Good:
  • Incredibly beautiful pixel art
  • Well-written dialogue and observations throughout
  • Succeeds in telling a classic fantasy story and creating a genuinely interesting new world
  • Voice acting is generally excellent, especially considering the diversity of characters
The Bad:
  • Battle mechanics are clumsy and simplistic
  • RPG elements are de-emphasized too much
  • Protagonist’s voice is a bit too sincere at times
Very good

Scoring System - Editorial Policies

Our Verdict:
Mage’s Initiation is like a modern-day Sierra On-Line gem, an extraordinarily polished adventure game. If the battle sections were improved and the RPG elements better integrated, this would be a near-perfect experience, but it’s still a game that should cast a spell on any genre fan.

A commonly overused cliché in the world of entertainment is that something has been “a long time coming.” In the case of Himalaya Studios’ Mage’s Initiation: Reign of the Elements though, such a description is entirely warranted, because this is a game more than a full decade in the making—an adventure/RPG hybrid in the spirit of Quest for Glory that has been in development longer than the entire nine-year lifespan of all five QFG releases combined. Fortunately, five years after its successful Kickstarter, 2019’s first great delight is the release of this nearly forgotten title. It’s a beautiful, substantial, and incredibly polished game that serves as an important reminder: no matter how many years it takes, some things are definitely worth the wait.

Mage’s Initiation is the story of D’Arc, a 16-year-old lad who, having been found to possess the gift of magic (essentially a position of deity in this world, where those without magic are the poor Giftless) at the young age of six, has spent the majority of his life growing up in the Mage’s Tower of Iginor, one of many such towers in the land of Ele’wold, where technology and invention are considered evils. The story begins as D’Arc has finally reached the age to attain his full initiation as a mage. The game’s first hour is a prologue in which D’Arc approaches the four Mage Masters in the Hallowed Hall, and through answering a series of situational questions becomes aligned with one of the four elements (Fire, Earth, Water or Air). These elements determine the array of spells you’ll learn throughout the game as well as some of your passive abilities. For what it’s worth, though I thought I was varying my answers from the earlier preview demo, I still found myself playing as a knowledge-seeking Earth mage—clearly there is no denying my roots.




Once your elemental affinity is established, D’Arc’s initiation requires him to undergo a test quite familiar to adventure fans: the three trials, magical items to be gathered from a castle across a lake, the high mountains of the isolated Flyterian civilization, and deep within the Goblin-infested Bloodbark forest. The trials must be performed in that specific order, and they neatly split the game into three acts. Each act begins with new spells to integrate and an opportunity to train in the Fire Hall before doing some necessary reading in the Earth Hall library and visiting the Air Hall to observe the realm of Iginor. The gameplay has been constructed very intuitively, making it consistently clear what your current task is and sprinkling light clues throughout both conversation and world interaction to make sure you never get off track.

The game controls like a Sierra-style adventure, but one that is very sensitive to the player’s experience. You can play it in the traditional top bar format, with large icons that helpfully include a small white dot to help you know exactly what you’re interacting with (a feature Sierra did not adapt until 1993). But if you prefer, you can opt to change the interface to a right-click compact verb display or a more traditional verb coin. You can also move the hotspot label bar to either the top or bottom of the screen, and even turn off footstep sounds, though I’m unsure why you’d want to decrease the realism. This custom user-friendliness is another area where the game’s lengthy gestation paid off. The one less-than-friendly design element is D’Arc’s movement—the walking pace is very slow, eliciting a longing for the old-school speed slider. Double-clicking allows for running, but that’s even more problematic, as the awkwardly flailing animation is the only thing in the entire game that looks visually subpar—and despite the violent leg movements, D’Arc still doesn’t get across the screen fast enough.




Mage’s Initiation is truly adventure-like in its heavy emphasis on character conversation. There are many non-player characters to interact with, and nearly everyone gets extremely substantial dialogue trees—lots of them have over 20 different topics to cover, and that’s only during your first conversation with them. This may seem overwhelming, but the dialogue is efficiently written in true Golden Age fashion, without a lot of unnecessary back and forth, just snappy doses of necessary background information and onto the next topic. In each of the two succeeding acts, every character in the Mage’s Tower unlocks a whole new series of topics about the trial at hand, and sometimes ancillary subjects related to Tower politics that become significantly more important to the primary story near the end.

The real hook for the game, however, lies beyond its aspirations as a traditional 2D point-and-click adventure and within the realm of RPGs in a genre hybrid model popularized by the excellent Quest for Glory series. This is hardly the stat-fest of Lori and Corey Cole’s creation though, as Mage’s Initiation only allows for four upgradeable stats: Strength and Intelligence have direct effects on the damage and the accuracy/speed of your spells, while Constitution increases your maximum Health, and Magic increases your maximum Mana. You also carry a Conductor, which allows for you to equip two gems (available gems mostly come from enemy loot drops) that have varying stat increase effects.

Unfortunately, the incorporation of role-playing elements is the one area that brings disappointment because the combat is a little undercooked. Once an enemy enters your current screen, the perspective does not change but the game flips into real-time battle mode, overlaying your spell options and shifting your character into full-time running speed. You’re a mage, so there are no weapons and no melee attacks; all your options are long-range magic attacks. However, your enemy—or occasionally enemies—will run around the screen as well, and since you are a distance fighter trying to create space and they move quickly to cut you off, you’ll often struggle to maneuver past them without being hit. Perhaps realizing it was their weakest gameplay element, the developers have telegraphed their decision to de-emphasize the combat, promising that Mage’s Initiation can be played as a pure adventure, though the right approach to that would have been to turn off optional combat entirely rather than just provide the opportunity to constantly run away from it.

The game’s marketing materials seem very proud of the distinct lack of necessary stat grinding, and indeed, you could wander around the forest hunting goblins and skeletal archers for hours and you would not gain a single additional experience point. Instead the game’s points are meted out for solving puzzles and forwarding the story, again in true Sierra fashion, and I did not even advance to a second level (each level provides four points to distribute among the four stats) until almost three hours in. If you were a kid like me who loved every XP-accumulating, grindy minute of hardcore RPGs, you won’t be able to scratch that itch here.

Having said that, the increase in stats feels unnecessary unless you turn the battle difficulty slider up all the way. Otherwise you can almost always ignore your additional spells and just spam your primary projectile (the first spell given to all four classes) and enemies likely won’t get close enough to kill you. This is easy, but also necessary sometimes because all spells other than the basic projectile sap your mana rapidly, and mana only regenerates to a low level and very slowly, while health doesn’t regenerate at all. I basically spent the entire second half of the game with less than 20% health. Mana and health potions are very rare as dropped loot items, and are expensive to buy since gold can’t be farmed through grinding nearly as easily as the QFG games. The game sorely lacks an inn or Erana’s Peace-type location to rest and restore your stats.




If the RPG elements are largely underwhelming and ignorable, there is so much more to admire about Mage’s Initiation that makes it such a spectacular adventure game otherwise. The amount of detail and substance in every aspect of the design is incredible, resulting in an incredibly meaty game. Each of the three acts features lengthy exploration in a unique region, punctuated by a number of fetch quests that are thoughtful but never needlessly difficult (and easier to manage with the learned Ele’Port fast travel spell). The game features a substantial number of inventory puzzles—you’ll accumulate more than 10 items other than potions pretty quickly—but there’s no way to get into an unwinnable state and each relevant hotspot is clearly identifiable in its environment, so most adventurers will be unlikely to find much barrier to their progress. Other than item gathering and usage—which all adheres to playing this as a pure adventure, with no affect from your character’s stats—and the generally obvious times when your passive spells are necessary to advance, the only challenge is paying enough attention to the dialogue and D’Arc’s observations to know what to do next.

In a game full of strengths, its biggest success is one that you don’t have to just take my word for—the background pixel art is simply extraordinary, across the board and in every scene. The intricate design in every single scene is stunning, like the masonry buildings in Iginor that appear to have been built one unique brick at a time. Each Tower and town interior is packed with detail and examinable objects, while the outdoor locations are alive with characters walking around and interacting with merchants. Panoramic vistas of mountains, trees, rivers, and even the desolate wastelands can only be described as uniformly gorgeous. Just one look at the first backdrop behind the Mage's Tower demonstrates how unique each beautiful hand-painted stroke truly is. Part of the reason the quasi-landscape-mazes and the somewhat redundant fetch quests never get irritating is that you’ll never get tired of looking at the scenery, which is a credit to the brilliant John Paul Selwood, lead background artist. It’s not just the backgrounds though; the close-up, perfectly lip-synched character portraits during dialogue are equally impressive.




The music is great accompaniment, never too prominent or epic in scale. No tracks demand a dedicated re-listen, but they’re pleasant and serve as an appropriate complement in times of leisure, while ratcheting up the intensity at key moments of confrontation. The area just outside of town is music-free, allowing for the peaceful sounds of wildlife to come to the forefront. Mage’s Initiation is fully and wonderfully voiced for the most part, an even more impressive feat given that it features multiple races and a mix of very diverse heroic and evil characters. Particularly noteworthy are the deep-voiced statuesque Flyterians and the sneeringly nefarious Goblins. The only voice that misses the mark is the very teenage D’Arc, with his overly sincere tendencies to emphasize multiple words in every sentence. When speaking to others or making gently humorous observations about the world around him, his voice is tolerable, but when given intense lines like “The walls are sick with entropy,” his melodrama is a bit cringe-y, though over the entirety of the game his earnestness ultimately won me over.

After the three trials are complete, a fourth act ties together the story with an exciting and climactic ending that closes a narrative thread slowly developed throughout the game, a genuine reward for those who have paid close attention to the lengthy dialogues. My playthrough took nearly 13 hours, with none of that time feeling bloated, and while I completed my Earth element-specific quest, the achievements (of which I only completed 15 of 44) tell me that I missed an entire side story. Replaying with a different element looks to be a very similar experience apart from some variation in abilities and puzzle solutions, but the fact that each element gets its own half-hour side quest and an entire array of separate spells, both battle and passive, is another demonstration of polish and deliberate design. While it may not lend itself to immediate instant replay, this is an adventure I’m much more likely to return to in future years. In the midst of an era where game prices are in a constant race for the bottom, the very reasonable price point at launch dramatically undersells the depth of the experience, making Mage’s Initiation an incredibly good value.

Rather than a simple throwback to the classic RPG-adventures of old, this game feels more like an evolution of where Sierra might have gone if the Golden Age had continued, a better-looking combination of the best adventure elements of King’s Quest VI and Quest for Glory IV. Games that are significantly delayed too often are born bearing visible scars of their messy production cycle. Instead, Himalaya has delivered a completely professional product by insisting that they take their time to get it right before release. It looks as good as any 640x400 resolution adventure ever has, presents a diverse and fascinating world to explore, and offers an astounding amount of substance and even replayability. It does not commit to its RPG elements as well as fans of that genre will like, and it could use some tweaking of the combat and controls, but the storytelling and obvious attention to detail consistently wash away any such picking of nits. Mage’s Initiation: Reign of the Elements is the game that announces Himalaya, previously known for their excellent free remakes of classic Sierra adventures, as an A-list independent adventure developer. More games in the series are planned, and while I certainly hope it won’t be another decade before a sequel, I’ll be the first to say that if this is the type of quality we can expect from them in future, it’s worth every bit of waiting.
 

Sizzle

Arcane
Joined
Feb 17, 2012
Messages
2,471
It's nice to see PoE's attribute design utilized in other games (and genres!) :D

ECPVSVv.png
 

Blackthorne

Infamous Quests
Patron
Developer
Joined
Jun 8, 2012
Messages
981
Location
Syracuse NY
Codex 2014 Divinity: Original Sin 2
I been playing it a little this week. I like it so far. Some of the writing is hokey in points, but hey, whatever. The combat is okay - RPG adventure game combat is really hard to nail down. I don't even have one QFG that I really like combat in.


Bt
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,179
Location
Bulgaria
I just finished the game and it is pretty meh at best. The game have a lot of problems,the best part of it is the art....as long as it is not a cutscene. The whole mage part is pretty pointless,most puzzles are centred around a non mage characters while all their spells are more or less the same and useless. There are passive spells that i never got use in the whole game,like the flash light. The differnet mage classes do have different spells,that do exactly the same thing. Only the animation is different and the outcome is exactly the same. The whole mage shit feels like a tacked on and a side thing when not in combat.
The mage part comes in to play mainly during battle,which are tolerably bad. All the offensive spells are useless except the starting one,you could just spam it till the enemy dies,the other ones just use too much mana and are meh. The combat itself is you being in square and trying to shoot some enemy that comes from the sides,you could also move with wasd trying to dodge attacks. The enemies are mainly the same in mechanical aspect,except a few range ones. Still there is a decent variety for this kind of game.
The worst part of the game is the writing and the insufferable voice acting. The protagonist's VO is the worst i have heard in my life,at some point i just muted it and put some music. The writing starts serviceable but it becomes annoying later on,it gives you a few stupid choices in places that you don't care yet it takes them away when you want to make a choice. It is all the typical faggy do gooder mage student,it really made me feel like vomiting a few times. In the end you end up siding with the most annoying people :roll:.
Big problem for me was how the game interacts with you. For example when you try to open some box,trunk or whatever,the game tells you that the protagonists have no interest of exploring it. I frequently find my self talking to my self "Yes but i do want to see/do it". Many times i find treasures that i would sell for money,yet the character whines that he doesn't need them or what not,yet i have to grind killing goblins for a few coins :roll:.
And be warned if you decide to play the game,most of the side things are chapter locked and you could get fucked over if you advance the main story expecting to gain access to the needed items later. Mainly after you deliver the egg. I didn't managed to find the bakers friend,do the ghost quest. The game doesn't translate it well to you,and later on locks you off.
As for the puzzles....well they are badly putt on,the bad writing does helps for it. A lot of them are about running back and forth and centred around wasting your time. Most of the things i had done felt redundant as a normal person in this situation could do it a lot easier and smart. Like putting a rug over a spiked fence is beyond pointless,as if i haven't jumped enough such fences as a kid :roll:. As i said the writing helps for the confusion,the player is given the idea that the character doesn't want to have anything to with the said fence. As the whole the puzzles are shit in my humble opinion.

In the end i wouldn't recommend this game. Maybe if you have played all the other good aventure games like Infamous quest,heroine quest,A Tale of Two Kingdoms,book of unwritten tales,etc etc.
 
Joined
Feb 28, 2011
Messages
4,120
Location
Chicago, IL, Kwa
And done (as a water mage).

Overall the game is good. I would be hard-pressed to come up with a title that more perfectly warrants a 3/5 rating.

The Good:

Background art is fantastic. This is probably the biggest selling point for the game. Every single screen looks absolutely gorgeous, even the generic maze tiles look great. Evokes KQV/VI/QFGIV in all the best ways on this front.

Lots of fun optional look/touch/feel text with the cursor. Something that is totally optional, but lots of fun with the P'n'Cs.

Optional content. At least I'm assuming so based on the fact that I ended the game with 470/500 points possible.

The Meh:

VA is all over the place. Goblins are fun, most mages are pretty good, D'Arc is terrible.

Character Sprites are weird. I got used to them, but they do not mesh well with background art.


The Bad:

The cutscenes. HOOOOLLLLYYYY SHIT. How did these make it through a basic review? I've seen pornimations that were more competently done.

The narrative. Was there one? Seems like someone left this out. Shit is fucking terrible.

Puzzles are too easy. There are a couple good ones (my favorite was the one requiring D'arc to identify the "sparsest" hall), and none require weird moonlogic, but on the whole they are too easy.



Will likely do another playthrough as a different element, so may amend this mini-review later.
 

Lambonius

Infamous Quests
Developer
Joined
Jan 18, 2014
Messages
53
I'm thinking that someone at the senior design level at Himalaya/AGDI has either bad hearing or just some truly bizarre tastes when it comes to voice acting. This has been a recurring problem with their games for years. Anyone remember the voice of Al Emmo? *shudder* It's not just the expected quality variation because of it being a limited budget game either--this is an issue of casting and directorial decision-making that seems to be consistently flawed in this one area in particular.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,716
Location
California
I hope the game does well -- and I hope someday to give it a go. I'm a little confused over the effusive praise for the backgrounds because, to me at least, they don't look that great -- the perspective, scale, and lighting all seems a little dodgy, and I think they compare unfavorably to comparable scenes in QfI.

E.g.:
ss_d18ef91ea9a1668d4b6472a34a0cfa42bb99bb8d.1920x1080.jpg

ss_1a3750a0e01631f63cc3c4e9c197b4977944879b.1920x1080.jpg
MI is obviously higher resolution, and the line work is nice, but the coloring, lighting, etc. all seems a bit worse. Maybe my taste is off, though.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,716
Location
California
Just watched one of the cutscenes. I hadn't really understood the complaint, but they do seem a bit odd. (In some ways, they remind me of the Myth cutscenes, which in their own way broke tone and style quite a bit.)



I'd say the game overall strikes me as being a little uneven because of noble technical ambitions -- to do a higher resolution AGS game, to have lip synch, to have fully animated cutscenes, etc. -- that might not have been the best way of showcasing the team's work. It looks pretty great though.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,179
Location
Bulgaria
LoL MRY ,you like that meme worthy animation but dislike the backgrounds....ROLF.


The backgrounds are decent for the genre,they are not shitty nor amazing. It is just what people expect from such games.

The animations on other hands are horrible,they look like a cheesy cartoon for 5 year olds. It would have been a lot better without them. Maybe some writing or stale images dialogue.

I'm thinking that someone at the senior design level at Himalaya/AGDI has either bad hearing or just some truly bizarre tastes when it comes to voice acting. This has been a recurring problem with their games for years. Anyone remember the voice of Al Emmo? *shudder* It's not just the expected quality variation because of it being a limited budget game either--this is an issue of casting and directorial decision-making that seems to be consistently flawed in this one area in particular.
Don't know about it mate,but the protagonist is painful to listen to. The other voices are ok,mainly because you don't hear them every time you looked at a item.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,716
Location
California
LoL MRY ,you like that meme worthy animation but dislike the backgrounds....ROLF.
I don't like the animations, and I do like the backgrounds. I hadn't understood the criticism of the animations because I had never seen them until I went on Youtube -- the Steam page doesn't show them, so I thought people were complaining about the so-so but not bad still images.

The backgrounds are decent for the genre,they are not shitty nor amazing. It is just what people expect from such games.
I agree, but the reviews (including in this thread) say that the backgrounds are "fantastic," "nothing short of beautiful," "spectacular," etc. While the higher resolution is neat, I'd put them at or below other AGS games.

Like this image from A Tale of Two Kingdoms seems comparable or slightly better.
atotk2.jpg

[EDIT: I think they might both be by JP Selwood, actually.]

I also agree that the main character's voice is odd.

Maybe I need to play the game though to better judge the backgrounds. Sometimes thing feel really different, and better, in game, based on how rooms fit together, how the backgrounds animate, and so on.
 
Last edited:

Fizzii

Crystal Shard
Developer
Joined
Sep 26, 2013
Messages
185
LoL MRY ,you like that meme worthy animation but dislike the backgrounds....ROLF.
Like this image from A Tale of Two Kingdoms seems comparable or slightly better.
atotk2.jpg

[EDIT: I think they might both be by JP Selwood, actually.]
Uh, this bg is actually by me. It's a bit of a different style to JP's, and the way I use colours is different to the way he does. The QFI bg is by Jon Stoll - I love his nature art.

I can't say I like the look of the animated cutscene - the style just doesn't fit the rest of the game. Not to mention the characters aren't even the right proportions. It's not a design decision I would have been on board with, anyway.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,716
Location
California
Sorry for the misattribution! I quickly glanced at credits on Mobygames, saw that he had worked on both, and drew the wrong conclusion. I like your background more. :)
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,179
Location
Bulgaria
I also agree that the main character's voice is odd.
It is odd if you play it for an hour,by the third act you would want to rip your phones apart and punch the monitor. I was not joking when i said that near the end i just turned off the sound and just played something in the player.
 

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
I dunno, I found the animations quite fine - they're done in the cel animation style that was briefly popular in adventures in late 90s (see Discworld 2, for example). There may be some perspective issues with fitting the animated characters onto the backgrounds, but that's not the main problem. The main problem is, as Fizzii said, they clash with the art style of the game itself and, more importantly, the non-animated cutscenes.
 

Berekän

A life wasted
Patron
Joined
Sep 2, 2009
Messages
3,101
Playing this one has to wonder where did they invest all the bajillion years they've been developing this.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,489
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/121878-mage-s-initiation-reign-of-the-elements-reviews.html

Adventure Gamers 4/5:

Mage’s Initiation is like a modern-day Sierra On-Line gem, an extraordinarily polished adventure game. If the battle sections were improved and the RPG elements better integrated, this would be a near-perfect experience, but it’s still a game that should cast a spell on any genre fan.

GameSpot 6/10:

I ultimately enjoyed my time following D'arc through his journey, and Mage's Initiation left me curious about the events still to come. It's an entertaining adventure game, but its ambitions to incorporate a meaningful diversity of role-playing options fall disappointingly flat and feel inconsequential. Mage's Initiation is a fair appropriation of a hybrid formula that I was happy to consume, but its shortcomings made me more eager to revisit the series that inspired it for another run-through.

Games Xtreme Scoreless:

Mage's Initiation: Reign of the Elements is a game that simply can't be missed if you're a fan of classic point and clicks. It's got everything and so much more, really immersing you back into the past, with adding everything that we've learned from the present. There's so much to do, giving tons of game time and the story is lighthearted and fun, making it a great pick for any age. I can't wait to sit down with my kid and dive into it for another playthrough--greatly looking forward to seeing the path they set as a wet-behind-the-ears mage!

PC Invasion 3/5:

It's not the reigning champion of this hybrid genre, but Mage's Initiation is a promising challenger. If sequels expand on the basics shown here, this could well be a series worth watching.

Impluse Gamer 3.6/5:

Despite its flaws, Mage’s Initiation is a nice homage to the classic point and click adventure genre. This game isn’t Quest for Glory, but it felt similar enough at times that my nostalgia kept me wanting to play more. I wouldn’t pay the price of a triple A title for this game, but its $14.99 price point is reasonable enough to recommend it. If you’re short on cash though, maybe wait a bit and grab it on sale.

VGU 8/10:

Overall, Mage’s Initiation: Reign of the Elements is exactly what fans of traditional adventure games deserve in a spiritual successor. The immersive graphics, along with the strong voice acting, logical puzzle structure and RPG game mechanics deliver everything that is needed for a medieval masterpiece. If you are a fan of old-style point and clicks or are searching for a trip back to the golden days of gaming, Mage’s Initiation could be just the game shaped time machine that you have been looking for.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom