This builds into one of my biggest problems with the game, the length. There is absolutely no excuse for a role-playing game to be only three hours long. I sat down expecting to have a lengthy experience ahead of me and it was over in only a few hours. The game didn’t present any sidequests or anything to extend that play time and there is no replayability whatsoever. I am very disappointed when even a $14.99 game doesn’t last me more than three hours, but there is no reason at all for a game at $29.99 to be this short.
Magus may very well be the easiest game I’ve played in a long time, with not one death the entire game or even getting close to it. As aforementioned, combat consisted of holding down the magic button and gliding around the screen as you kill the enemies. There is pretty much no strategy needed at all and I found myself looking down at my phone while in combat sometimes, due to getting so bored, and still wouldn’t have to worry about losing too much health, because it was that easy. There is no excuse for an RPG to be so easy to where you don’t even come close to death once, and that was with almost no strategy being used whatsoever.
This game almost feels like it came a decade too late graphically. At best, Magus looks like it would have been released in the early days of the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3. The game itself is just downright ugly from the characters to the locations. The Burial Grounds area stood out above the rest in terribleness with ice designs that look like they could have come from some Nintendo 64 or PlayStation games even. The blocky and blurry textures stand out terribly to where even my sister commented on how bad it looked when she saw me playing the game.
The game has some semblance of a story, but it is incredibly forgettable and due to the terrible conversation style mentioned before, you will find yourself breezing through a good bit of it after awhile more than likely. The end has what you might consider a twist, but I couldn’t care enough by that point for it to be poignant at all. This is caused by how bad the dialogue in the game itself is throughout, reaching the levels of dialogue from terrible movies such as Troll 2 and The Room. Almost every line is very stiff and stilted to where there is no personality at all between any of the characters. By the time you are done with the game, there are no character traits to remember anybody by, which is another great mistake for something that is supposed to be an RPG.
The physics of the game are very bad as well, with Magus seeming like he is on roller blades gliding around the entire time. There is no natural movement at all in his character and the enemies move much in the same way, which looks even worse when they are constantly coming at you. I can’t even count the number of times an enemy would run into the wall and get stuck during battle. Even one of the late bosses in the game got stuck on a pillar and just stood there jumping in midair for awhile, which actually made the fight even more annoying. Combined with the terrible AI in the first place for the enemies, this made the combat even more tedious.
Just about the only positive I can think about this game is that it did not break on me while playing. I was able to start the game and play through it without any freezes at all. The technical side of the game was okay outside of the enemies getting stuck on items. The hit detection wasn’t fantastic, but it worked for the most part, so the game is playable from a technical standpoint.
If this is the type of effort we can expect from their co-developed games, Aksys Games might be better off going back to what they do best, localizing games from Japan. Magus is just plain bad from start to finish with about the only redeeming factor being that the game is not completely broken technically. You are able to play the full thing, but will be done in about three hours, with no replayability found here whatsoever. A length like this is a total joke for what is supposed to be a role-playing game. As a result, there is no way you should ever pay $29.99 for this game, or even the $24.99 it is now available for on the PlayStation STore a little over a week after release. This may be one of the worst modern games I’ve ever played, so I recommend you stay far away from it.
[Editor’s Note:Magus was reviewed on the PlayStation 3. The game was provided to us by the publisher for review purposes.]
