Edit: This is an asset flip (I was previously unsure). The developer admits in the response to this review that they took someone else's assets, did not credit the people who actually created most of the things you see in the game, and put their own name on it to try to profit from the work of others without crediting or acknowledging them. Attempting to mislead gamers is unethical and dishonest. Plagiarism is unethical and dishonest. And they're trying to profit from this.
This is a hybrid 3D rendered 2D top down/iso style twin stick action shooter and tower defense game. You control a wizard and blast waves of enemies with a handful of spells, but you also need to build a little base with defenses, trying to fight back the samey waves of skeleton assets without base defenses would be too difficult. There's also a co-op mode.
Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game features low-polygon "retro" assets with cartoony, mobile app style shader effects, making this look like a barely functional mobile app from 15 years ago. This visual style is a method that lazy devs often use when they have a lack of interest/capabilty to create highly detailed, high poly models and instead use shader effects to disguise that shortcoming under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It's far below the state of the art visuals gamers expect as a result of their decisions.
The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 6 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Mage Fort is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The developer admits this is an asset flip. It doesn't matter where the assets came from or if they have permission or not. Indeed, if they did not have permission to use they assets they took from other people, this would be copyright infringement, which is a criminal offense in some jurisdictions and can carry heavy fines and possible jail time. Nowhere in my review did I even suggest that copyright infringement had taken place.
They took someone else's work, did not credit them, put their own name on it instead, and are trying to profit from this plagiarism. If this took place in film, TV, print media or music, they would be kicked out of the industry and would probably be facing a civil lawsuit. I cannot in good conscience recommend unethical plagiarism to gamers.
A side note, the developer also admits they didn't hire a team of talented staff to produce the game and tried to do the whole thing on their own, instead. This is a lot like boarding an airplane, and halfway through the flight, having the pilot come out and serve peanuts. It's going to end in disaster. It requires a team of competent people to do a complex job properly, and that's not what has happened here... another explanation for the poor quality of this game.
Nothing in the developers pointless, self incriminating breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands mostly unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
