The Mage's Tale - inXile VR game set in the Bard's Tale universe

[StaticSpine]

I don't think anyone here will be playing the game, so

 

[Infinitron]

Apparently the lead designer of this game is David Rogers, same lead designer as BT4: http://voicesofvr.com/548-mages-tale-lead-designer-on-rpg-character-progression-gameplay-mechanics/

Some reviews: http://www.roadtovr.com/review-mages-tale/

Review: ‘The Mage’s Tale’
A beautiful, classic dungeon crawler with a side order of camp

Stepping into The Mage’s Tale, a first-person dungeon crawler RPG that puts you in the enchanted boots of an apprentice mage, is a bit like jumping into your own personal ’80s sword and sorcery flick. With elemental magic at the ready, you get to experience classic dungeon crawler stuff like exploration, spell crafting, puzzles, and battle against a number of monster types—and all of it in the immersive realm of VR. While at times a little rough around the edges, The Mage’s Tale is a charming throwback that vaults you head-first into a dank and mysterious universe of inXile’s other series, The Bard’s Tale.

Gameplay
The evil wizard Gaufroi has kidnapped your master, Mage Alguin. As his apprentice, it’s your job to get him back by finding his powerful fellow mages, a quest that takes you through ten dungeons where you’re confronted with various puzzles, traps, and monsters—where there’s always a chest that needs looting at the end.

Walking into a puzzle room usually elicits a hint from your Alguin’s familiar, a magical goblin whose name I can’t remember. For the purposes of this review, he shall henceforth be known as ‘smarmy turd’ (ST for short).



ST is a constant thorn in your side, and tends to tutorialize puzzles and generally point out the obvious. He does however make the dank dungeons placed before you a little less lonely, so I guess he’s got that going for him. When not tutorialized by ST, puzzles are explained by a changing cast of ever-present talking wall monsters, who offer riddles to help you along the way. Puzzles tend to be fairly simple, but because The Mage’s Tale offers so many varied types, you’ll always be on your toes figuring out the next one (if ST hasn’t spoiled it already, that is). You’ll find yourself fetching missing parts to puzzles, looking through magical orbs to locate important runes, cranking machines, freezing water in pipes so you can light a torch that’s being dowsed; the variations are so rich, that even the smarmiest of turds can’t ruin it for you.

When you’re not cranking weird machines and blowing out walls to reach hidden chests though, you’re probably blasting away at the world’s many monsters. Enemy types tend to be mostly ranged, like archers and mages, so they usually keep their distance allowing you to block with your arcane shield or plink away with your magical abilities. There are however a number of melee fighters to watch out for later in the game including shielded goblins and hammer-wielding giants. Enemies don’t have health bars, so you usually end up blasting away with whatever appears to work best on each enemy type.



To my utter dismay, dual-wielding is not a thing in The Mage’s Tale. Oh well.

A big personal attraction for me to the game is spell crafting. I would have loved to find ancient books filled with spells, but unfortunately crafting is done entirely through trial and error, as your cauldron will unhappily vomit out bad combinations, forcing you to start over again until you find something that works. Because there are more than 2 dozen ingredients and over a 100 combinations, you’ll spend plenty of time mixing and matching until you get that perfect lighting spell that has both impressive range, rips health from your enemies when they die and tosses out confetti on the monster’s dead body.



Chests usually offer some sort of magical ingredient you can use in crafting, be it base elemental spells like lighting/fire/wind/ice, or a modifier like poison, extra recharge, or triple shot. My absolute favorite part of opening chests isn’t receiving points for upgrades, or new magical reagents, but tossing them into the awaiting mouth of my teleporting frog-buddy, whose name was mentioned once and forgotten forever.

Without revealing too much, the story line isn’t anything you wouldn’t find ripped from a Dungeon Master’s Guide, so don’t expect any great innovations in story telling here. But then again, that’s exactly you’re in for with The Mage’s Tale, a faithful classic that lets you fire lighting at wise-cracking goblins.

For those of you mashing ctrl+f and searching the article for ‘gameplay length’, you’ll see I finished in a little over 7.5 hours, a slight tick under the advertised 10+. I’m far from a completionist, so I don’t mind leaving the game’s many collectibles behind in the dark dungeons where they belong, so you may well spend 10+ hours collecting everything, not to mention trying your hand at mixing together ingredients to get better spells.

Combat can feel a little repetitive at times. This is dampened somewhat once you get a good number of reagents to add to your base spells and start to naturally rotate through different attacks instead of just picking the strongest one. Just like classic games of yore, combat can be a process of trial and error, so expect to get smashed a few times by a giant before you know his weak spot. To get a good idea of what combat looks like in The Mage’s Tale, check out the video below. And no, you can’t get a sword or any other melee weapon.

Immersion & Comfort
Relying on classic dungeon level design and an appropriate mix of irreverent campiness (a goblin told me to “kiss his ass”), it’s easy to like The Mage’s Tale, especially as it follows some well-established practices in RPGs that date back to the pencil and paper era of Dungeons and Dragons. Bringing those places to life, and in a grand way, is ultimately one of the coolest things about The Mage’s Tale. It’s truly a breathtaking adventure into the known unknown.

Despite this, one thing that I can’t quite get around is the game’s character animations. An otherwise good-looking game with a varied palette, awesome magical effects, and impressive architecture, The Mage’s Tale is blighted by its clunky and wooden characters, that when confronted in VR look just terrible. A competent swath of Scottish and English voice actors do their best to bring the characters to life, but I can’t shake the feeling that every NPC is actually chewing on a magically invisible potato.

Another gripe is the game’s ‘force grab’. Striving to make your life easier by giving you a telekinetic powers and saving you from constantly bending over and letting you get to items just out of reach, actually activating the force grab it is somewhat of a pain. Instead of using the omnipresent gaze-based cursor to highlight objects, you actually select the item by pointing your finger at it, which is extremely fiddly. It doesn’t sound difficult to grasp at first, but I can’t count the number of times I waved my hands to no effect at a nearby bottle or mushroom. Also, force grab seems to take precedent over natural object interaction, and trying to lift open a chest or grab one of the many collectible monster cages without critically highlighting it first, usually means your hand will pass right through it without the slightest bit of recognition of intent. Because force grab is usually used during downtime from battles, its more of a constant annoyance than a game-breaking feature.



During battle however, the game’s UI is remarkably intuitive, giving you access to either a spell menu with 4 selectable elemental spells, or an arcane shield that lets you reflect incoming arrows and enemy magic. You can access these on the fly, and mix and match your attacks/defense to the best effect. Popping the menu open and quickly shooting out a flurry of different spells is just so gratifying.

To the dismay of some players, locomotion is teleportation only, and is done by one of two ways; you can select the teleport spot and potentially move farther (and quicker) using your right thumbstick, or use your left thumbstick for a shorter blink teleportation. Even in close, quick combat, I felt ultimately very comfortable using either method. A snap-turn (aka ‘VR comfort mode’) exists so people using a two-sensor setup can adjust themselves for optimal hand controller tracking. As someone who owns a two-sensor stock Rift/Touch setup, I would highly recommend getting a third for better coverage, because it seems I was constantly facing the wrong direction at crucial moments.

Comfort-wise, I was very happy with The Mage’s Tale, but once battles really popped off and multiple enemies force you to go mobile, you really start to buck up against the limits of the locomotion style. Snap-turning and teleporting at high-speed can start to feel like a bit of a slide show, and while it’s ultimately comfortable, it certainly dampens the immersion. I hate to think how much I missed in the dark corners of the game by spamming the far-teleport button.

http://www.gamerevolution.com/revie...vr-review-a-polished-mini-rpg-worth-exploring

The Mage’s Tale (VR) Review – A Polished Mini-RPG Worth Exploring

It's been just over a year since I became an early adopter of consumer grade virtual reality. Considering its challenges, it's been an impressive year. Though, I would argue that the greatest hindrances of its success right now is that many of the best experiences are very similar to one another. These include ported survival games, basic arcade-style shooters, and, well, Elite: Dangerous.

What the technology has needed more than anything is a proper RPG, a game where you interact with realistic NPCs, build up a character, and enjoy the beauty of a large world. While The Mage's Tale isn't the full-blown RPG I have been waiting for, it's a great dungeon crawler, and certainly one that will entertain Oculus Rift owners more than most titles they find on the Oculus Store.

So how good is it? Let's dive right in.

Your Tale

At the beginning of your adventure, your magical mentor by the name of Alguin is seen being kidnapped by none other than the evil Mage Gaufroi. As with the rest of the narrative pieces you will be presented, this interaction is a visual spectacle. In-fact, The Mage's Tale is undoubtedly one of VR's best presented story-driven titles, delivering well-told voice acting, high quality character models, and smooth animations in a visually stunning package.

Narrative delivery is A Mage's Tale core competency, rising well beyond what many other games have demonstrated during the past year. What's here is most similar to the brief yet impressive demos offered by The Lab (Valve), with an incredible level of detail that makes characters believable and entertaining.

"The Mage's Tale is undoubtedly one of VR's best presented story-driven titles"

Playing against this is how few in number the narrative pieces are. When you encounter them, they significantly amplify entertainment value, but you will spend most of your time alone in dungeons, so you could argue that the game doesn't make full use of its greatest strength.

Nonetheless, the adventure runs at around 12 hours in length, which is well above the average VR title. At $39.99, inXile Entertainment has presented a compelling product in the realm of VR.

Dungeon Crawling

The interactions throughout the game are simple yet varied, consisting of gathering keys to unlock doors, taking out enemies with a combination of magic and fantasy weaponry, and collecting items. As with other VR games, some of these gameplay elements are made far more enjoyable thanks to VR and motion controls. For example, picking up a new sword and stashing it in your inventory isn't just two or three button presses, but rather you stretching your arm out to grab the weapon before sheathing it. As such, The Mage's Tale is yet another example of how VR can make games much better if you're in the mood.

In terms of gameplay, the star of the show is magic. There's a great variety of magical types, each feeling powerful in the hands. The feeling of casting fireballs at foes and destroying them from afar is great, especially in tougher scenarios where your will to survive is challenged.

Made better, you can craft magic of your own. This is performed by gathering ingredients, and then mixing them into a cocktail of sorts. Things like green homing fireballs and blue chaining lightning are possible if you desire. Though mixing ingredients in the cauldron is neat, having to teleport out of the game world and into the main hub, each presenting lengthy loading screens, does undermine the immersion that The Mage's Tale works so hard to develop.

As well conceived as it is, The Mage's Tale does grow repetitive over the hours, retreading a lot of the same core gamplay elements that have been done countless times in similar non-VR games over the years. Thus, its respectable length will probably pose a challenge to the interest of the common player. Those who do find it enjoyable enough to pursue the ending will get their money's worth.

Conclusion
Story-driven VR titles are uncommon in the current realm of VR, and that needs to change sooner rather than later. The Mage's Tale has stepped in to offer a taste of what's to come with reasonable success.

REVOLUTION REPORT CARD
3.5
RATING



Outstanding narrative pieces
Crafting magic is a neat concept
Gameplay feels tight, and offers several control options
12~ hours of length rises above most VR experiences
Becomes repetitive fairly early
Porting back to the hub to craft undermines immersion

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/mages-tale-vr-dungeon-crawler,34831.html

'Mage's Tale' VR Dungeon Crawler, Hands On

If you’ve been looking for a properly polished VR game that offers hours of story-driven gameplay, you should put inXile Entertainment’s Mage’s Tale on your shortlist. The developer masterfully merged the best parts of dungeon crawlers into a challenging first-person VR game that transports you into the Bard’s Tale universe.

Virtual reality systems suitable for home use hit the market a little over a year ago, but we’re a long way from mass adoption. The hardware is expensive (although the price is coming down), and that’s a major factor holding many people back from jumping into first-generation VR hardware, but content availability is just as big of a concern. Critics and gamers alike regularly lament the lack of highly polished AAA VR content. Most of the big developers took (some are still taking) a “wait and see” approach to VR, letting the indie crowd figure out the dos and don’ts of building VR games.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. Bethesda has welcomed VR with open arms and has three major titles launching later this year, and Insomniac Games has three VR games under its belt, too. inXile Entertainment is another exception to the rule; the RPG developer just launched its first VR title.

inXile is by no means as big as Bethesda, and it doesn’t have the backing of a major company like ZeniMax to help pay the bills for a large development team, but the company is no stranger to developing games. inXile’s first title, The Bard’s Tale, came out in 2004, and the company has churned out a half dozen RGP titles since. It's also currently working on a follow-up to the Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate. The events of The Bard’s Tale IV unfold somewhat after the story of The Bard’s Tale III. Mage’s Tale bridges the gap between those two chapters.

There’s Been An Abduction!
In Mage’s Tale, you are the apprentice of Mage Alguin, a powerful master wizard who will teach you the magical ways of the mage. When you start Mage’s Tale for the first time, you’ll be greeted by Alguin and his assistant Crooks. The first thing you’ll notice is Alguin’s towering stature--he must be seven feet tall. One imagines this must be what it feels like to look up at meet Gandolf the Grey. Once you’ve come to terms with your master’s height, you’ll probably notice the level of detail in the character model.

Moments after you meet your master, Wizard Gaufroi appears through a portal and attacks the old mage. Alguin prioritizes saving his young apprentice instead of saving himself. As he puts a shield up to protect you, Gaufroi delivers a powerful blow that knocks Alguin to the ground. The evil wizard quickly grabs the mage and pulls him back through the portal.

Following the attack, Mage Alguin’s trusty assistant Crooks calls out for his master, hoping to find him in the pile of rubble that Gaufroi’s attack left behind. To his dismay, you’re the only one stuck in the debris pile. “You don’t know where Master is. You don’t know anything” chirps Crooks. “I’m stuck here…with you.”

With no way to reach Alguin’s friends and colleagues, you’re the old mage’s best hope for a rescue. It’s too bad that your training had just started when the ambush occurred. You’re just going to have to learn on the job. Crooks is right: At this point, you don’t know anything.

Let The Learning Begin
Crooks is no mage, but he’s an invaluable resource to help you along the way. He doesn’t know many of Mage Alguin’s tricks, but he knows the equipment back to front. He’ll help you navigate through the dungeons of Skara Brea and get you familiar with your skills and abilities. Crooks also teaches you the basics for conjuring potions that grant you magical powers.

As helpful as Crooks is, he’s far from a perfect resource. He can transport the two of you to different locations, but he doesn’t have fine control over the destination. When he transports you somewhere, he always misses the target. (What kind of dungeon crawler game would this be you could teleport directly to your destination, anyway?) Without him, though, you’d be completely lost in your quest to find your master.

Further, although Crooks doesn’t have the same power as a mage, he knows about it and exactly how you should wield it. He teaches you how to use the Arcane Sight aiming system, what to do when you find a magical ingredient, and how to create new abilities with said ingredients.

inXile Entertainment gave the aiming system in Mage’s Tale a fancy name, but don’t let the title fool you; "Arcane Sight" is a pretty basic mechanic. You’ll find a cursor on the screen that is attached to your gaze. To attack an enemy, keep your gaze locked on your intended victim to highlight the target. When the highlight changes from white to blue, launch your spell. You don’t have to wait until the blue highlight appears, but your attack is much more effective once you lock on. Don’t confuse the aiming lock with a homing lock, though; it’s still possible to miss after locking onto an enemy.

Fire, Ice, Electricity, Wind
Before you get yourself into a fight, you’ll need to learn magical abilities with which to defend yourself. You start the game with a fireball ability, which you can access by pressing the B button on the right Touch controller or the Y button on the left controller. The spell menu appears in front of you when you press either button. Reach out and grasp onto the spell of your choice.

To add spells to your inventory of abilities, you must collect special items with magical properties. These magic items are strewn about the dungeons of Skara Brea. Keep your eyes open for holes in the wall with items hidden inside. You’ll also need to keep your wits sharp. Many of the items you’ll need are hidden, and you’ll need to brush up on your puzzle-solving skills to uncover them.

Mage's Tale includes four basic magical abilities: Fire, Ice, Electricity, and Wind. Each one can be modified to change the color of the magic power. Color doesn't appear to affect a spell's strength, but we found a "party" modifier that adds confetti and party horn noises to your attack.

inXile didn’t build an inventory system into Mage’s Tale. Health potions are the only item that you can keep on your person for later. You can put one health potion flask on your belt; everything else gets left behind or picked up by a helper. Instead of carrying the items you find in a bag or a satchel, when you discover a spell ingredient, it immediately goes back to Mage Alguin’s workbench. Alguin has a pet toad named Fergus that appears through a wormhole any time you find something important. Toss your magic component into Fergus’s mouth, and he’ll make sure the item is on the bench when you get there to conjure up your next spell.

Once you have the necessary reagent to concoct your first potion, Crooks will guide you back to the old mage’s lair. You can return to Alguin’s workbench at any time with a simple gesture: Hold both your hands above your head, and you’ll teleport back home. When you’re ready to return to the dungeon to continue your quest, you can step through a special mirror that will bring you back to the same spot you left. The magic mirror also lets you return to old locales in case you missed something on your first pass.

As you progress through the game, you’ll gain Arcane Power that helps you grow stronger. Every time you defeat a wave of Gaufroi’s goblin and troll minions, you’ll find a cluster of Mage Stones. Collect enough Mage Stones to level up, and you’ll get to choose between two different class upgrades each time. When you’ve gained enough Arcane Power to level up, an orb on your right hand will light up. Touch the orb with your other hand, and the skill upgrade will appear in front of you.

Clever Locomotion System
Locomotion in VR games is a difficult problem to solve, and many developers have thrown solutions at the wall to see what sticks. inXile didn’t create a new locomotion system for Mage’s Tale, but the developer combined a couple of different locomotion solutions to create a unique implementation that works surprisingly well.

Mage’s Tale features a Blink-like locomotion system that lets you teleport from spot to spot to traverse long distances quickly. The thumbstick on the right-hand touch controller initiates Blink to teleport forward. It also lets you snap-turn left and right. The game also features a form of smooth locomotion that we had not encountered before.

The left-hand thumbstick allows you to move forward and back, and strafe left and right. The developer used a clever locomotion system that we would call “step locomotion.” It works the same way as smooth locomotion; hold the left joystick in the direction you want to move, and you’ll move through the world at a constant pace. However, step locomotion avoids triggering motion sickness by pausing briefly at every “step.” The pause motion combined with the sound of a footstep works surprisingly well, and if you need a break from it, the Blink option is always available in your right hand. You can switch between the two locomotion systems at will without having to change a setting.

Riddles, Puzzles, And Booby Traps
Every class of game includes specific features that define its genre. Adventure games offer interesting to worlds to explore; simulator games try to replicate something from the real world; and role-playing games let you build your characters stats over time, level up, and collect new gear to make you more powerful. Dungeon crawler games are best known for their secrets and booby traps that you uncover while exploring dark and scary dungeons filled with monsters and creatures that go bump in the night.

inXile Entertainment didn’t just add secret rooms and hidden item caches to the map, although, you will find those spaces here and there. The developer masterfully injected riddles into the game that help you solve problems and find the secrets. Pay attention to the riddles that you discover and read between the lines. When a rock wall tells you “Break the ice. Raise the bar. These old tropes will get you far,” know that it’s telling you how to solve a problem that you’ll soon encounter.

10 Dungeons: 10 Hours
Mage’s Tale features 10 dungeons for you to explore on your quest to find Mage Alguin. So far, we’ve explored only one, and it's taken us about two hours. inXile Entertainment said that it should take you approximately 10 hours to complete the game, but we suspect you could prolong the story by a few hours, especially if you’re a completionist.

Mage’s Tale is an Oculus Touch exclusive, and it’s available today. You can pick up a copy on the Oculus Store for $39.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah it seems to be reviewing great....then again, so did Torment.

 

[Renevent]

I don't care you don't like it, but it's a very immersive experience. Nothing up to this point in the digital gaming world comes even close.

Being dipped in a vat of hydrochloric acid is also "a very immersive experience"

Except that will probably kill you. Playing VR at worst will make you motion sick if you're an old curmudgeon or frail ultra autist (which I suspect some of you are).

 

[Iznaliu]

Except that will probably kill you. Playing VR at worst will make you motion sick if you're an old curmudgeon or frail ultra autist (which I suspect some of you are).

Small details like that don't matter.

 

[Zombra]

The Mage’s Tale is a bit like your own personal ’80s sword and sorcery flick.

For the first time, I felt a twinge of interest in this game.

 

[Infinitron]

A couple of gameplay vids. Movement in VR seems kind of annoying.



It's not an inXile game without singing:

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

The Mage’s Tale is a bit like your own personal ’80s sword and sorcery flick.

For the first time, I felt a twinge of interest in this game.

I never understood why are you guys so skeptical about this thing. And just to be clear, I think VR is a pointless fad, but go ahead and name me one video game genre that is better suited to VR than oldschool dungeon crawler. I'll wait. Literally everything that makes crawlers fun can be ehnanced by VR. And I see they've hit #1 on Oculus Store, good for them.

 

[Reapa]

The Mage’s Tale is a bit like your own personal ’80s sword and sorcery flick.

For the first time, I felt a twinge of interest in this game.

I never understood why are you guys so skeptical about this thing. And just to be clear, I think VR is a pointless fad, but go ahead and name me one video game genre that is better suited to VR than oldschool dungeon crawler. I'll wait. Literally everything that makes crawlers fun can be ehnanced by VR. And I see they've hit #1 on Oculus Store, good for them.

uncanny valley?

 

[Zombra]

I never understood why are you guys so skeptical about this thing.

Oh, it may be "good for what it is", but I'm not interested in stuff like "gesture controls", and a single character non-RPG action game about shooting fireballs at skeletons doesn't thrill me. If a non-VR game with a wacky imp leading me through a cartoon dungeon was released I wouldn't even think about watching the trailer. I have no objections to VR really, I'm sure it's very immersive, I've done cheap smartphone VR and it's "neat", but it didn't change my life and didn't make me lust to do it again. Using my real life neck as the main interface isn't exciting either; my hands work fine. There are a lot of reasons I'm "meh" here ... but I like 80s sword-and-sorcery.

 

[Iznaliu]

A couple of gameplay vids. Movement in VR seems kind of annoying.

Well Fargo's real-life movement is also kind of annoying, so I suppose that's realistic.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[mindfields]

BT4 definetely has the chance to be solid RPG, InXile aren't focusing on some large, expensive goals like world-altering choice & consequence and/or PST-tier writing, they just need a good combat and character system and some decent enemies. Of course the casuals from Codex will cry because of muh story and emotional engagement.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.pcgamer.com/the-mages-tale-is-one-of-vrs-biggest-games-yet/

The Mage's Tale is one of VR's biggest games yet
InXile's VR Bard's Tale spin-off is one of the Rift's longer games, but feels a bit like 'My First Dungeon Crawler.'

The Mage's Tale is one of the first VR games I've played that feels like the full package. It separates itself from the multiplayer shooters and shorter showcases the Vive and Rift are currently known for with a long campaign (over 10 hours), dungeons to explore, spellcrafting and leveling. It's more than a good idea for VR that loses its shine after 30 minutes. Even so, The Mage's Tale is a light, action-oriented dungeon crawler, with simple leveling and combat that doesn't strive for the party tactics of a game like Legend of Grimrock.

Developer InXile built The Mage's Tale as a more action-y spinoff of The Bard's Tale, a traditional dungeon crawler series with turn-based combat (except InXile's own action RPG spin off in 2004, which this is more like). You play a young mage whose master is ambushed and kidnapped, and have to strike back solo rather than with a party of heroes, wandering the oddly linear halls of a subterranean dungeon to grow stronger and rescue him. The rhythm of that exploration usually involves entering a large room, fighting some goblins or undead, solving a puzzle, looking for secrets, then moving through some corridors to do it all again.

It's a fun but simple dungeon crawler, with a dose of inXile's silly fantasy humor sprinkled throughout—at one point I saved a talking wall from drowning by lowering the water level. The wall then poetically explained he had tried drinking enough of the water to save himself. The studio's experience with the RPG craft shines through in VR, but the more intimidating parts of the dungeon crawler genre have been trimmed away in this instance.

Solving many of the puzzles is just a matter of flipping the right switches and often only opens a hidden wall with a secret item, allowing you to walk past the challenge if you prefer. Leveling up, which would mean meticulously distributing points in a traditional RPG, is reduced to choosing one of two permanent buffs each time—do you want extra health or faster spell recharging?—instead of using a skill tree or ability points. The familiar trappings of an RPG are here, but they don't share the depth of inXile's other games. Additionally, I could nearly always find health potions directly after a fight, so managing damage as I got deeper into a level was never really a concern.

The combat is focused on movement, with just you and your Touch controllers fighting in real-time rather than a party. You pick customizable spells and then hurl fireballs, ice lances, electricity, and wind at your enemies until they drop dead, physically moving to dodge incoming arrows and running away from swords as you do it. Throwing spells is easy—you get a soft lock-on to whatever target you're looking at—and spells can be modified to better home in on enemies. You still have to aim your throws, but it helps avoid the unwieldy throwing of a game like Superhot VR, where I often found myself spiking shurikens or bottles straight into the ground. The downside of this system, however, is that it doesn't take long before tossing homing spells in an overhand motion gets a bit dull.

The Mage's Tale's varied arena designs help keep the combat interesting. While I started out in straightforward shooting gallery-style rooms with nothing but archer enemies, the levels quickly became more diverse and complex, requiring more and more movement. I could just stand still at first, but the introduction of shielded melee goblins pushed me out of my hidey holes and forced me to hop around the map as I charged up spells. Movement is accomplished with pretty standard point-and-jump teleporting or short hops and turning via the left analog stick—both work fine, but not having a third Oculus sensor setup behind me meant I couldn't physically turn around without losing tracking, which is a big detriment in this game, and a problem the Vive version won't have when it is eventually released.

The spell crafting is charming in its presentation, if similarly straightforward. You can find bottles that form a spell's base—fireball, lightning, etc.—and then add a few modifiers (also hidden around levels) to make the spell your own. For example, my fireballs were green, would seek enemies, and cause a burn over time, but I could have made them orange, bounce around the room, have a longer range, and burst with confetti upon hitting an enemy. Returning to my cauldron to throw new ingredients in the pot was as simple as raising my hand in the air, so finding a new ingredient and then testing out every possible combination with it was a blast.

I haven't beaten The Mage's Tale yet, which is an exciting thing to be able to say about a VR adventure game right now. There's a lot more for me to get through, and I am looking forward to doing so if only to see what other strange effects the spellcrafting will allow. Even if VR doesn't have an especially deep RPG yet, it's got a fun and accessible one, and The Mage's Tale is the type of extended experience I'm glad VR developers are now spending the time to make.

 

[ArchAngel]

Reviews are pretty good for this, seems Inxile might get more jobs around making VR games :D

 

[Iznaliu]

Reviews are pretty good for this, seems Inxile might get more jobs around making VR games :D

Choplifter VR?

 

[Saxon1974]

Might pick this up if not for the 600$ for the equipment that I don't have

 

[LESS T_T]

Steam/HTC Vive release is coming next week:

The corrupt wizard Gaufroi has kidnapped your master, Mage Alguin, and only you have any hope of saving him. You may be an apprentice now, but to save your master, you will need to explore ten deadly dungeons, decipher mind-bending puzzles, avoid terrifying traps, and vanquish hordes of vicious monsters.

Until you are able to wield every elemental power in the palm of your hand, evil remains ascendant! It is your turn now to sling gouts of flame, javelins of ice, arcs of lightning, and swirling tempests! Don your wizard’s robe and begin your Mage’s Tale!

• Collect mystic ingredients, which you can use to craft hundreds of custom spells in your very own Mage's Workshop.
  
  
• Explore the ancient crypts, sewers, and dungeons to discover devious traps and secret rooms hidden around every corner.
  
  
• Experience a story that takes place in the same world as The Bard’s Tale series and soon before the events of The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep!
  
  
• The Mage's Tale is an adventure designed from the ground up to capture the magic of the VR gaming experience.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I'm genuinely curious about the sales. Everyone's so hyped up about VR, but the fact is that only 1% players have it, and it mostly sucks. Going to be interesting to see the first major failure or success in the RPG section of VR. Knowing that it's Fargo, it'll probably be a failure.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[vonAchdorf]

It's released now:

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I checked and nobody even bothered to crack it. Interest level: 0. Metacritic score: 71.

 

[Zombra]

Is there normally a lot of overlap between software pirates and people willing to blow money on VR rigs? Not saying MT is a smashing success but I'd like to see that Venn diagram.

 

[Zombra]

Only one coupon, will have to set up a raffle. Brofist to enter!
Now THAT'S what I call a harvesting scheme!!

 

[V_K]

Only one coupon, will have to set up a raffle. Brofist to enter!
Now THAT'S what I call a harvesting scheme!!

I love how everybody's cautiously avoiding to put any reaction on your post.