Slaves of Magic

"It's fantasy XCOM" is a pretty good capsule summary of Slaves of Magic. It has the familiar two action points which Enemy Unknown popularized, though you're quite capable of attacking twice if you don't move. Rather than your gear being bottlenecked by your ability to buy newer, fancier swords one at a time however, you can deploy as many of a newly researched piece of gear as you'd like—provided you have enough smiths on staff to handle the gear you're equipping your team with. You get the ability to start teaching your soldiers magic relatively early in the campaign; there are three schools in all, each quite capable in its own right, and you're sure to want to mix and match. Each campaign will last you ten hours or so, and as time goes on the grim human soldiers of the inquisition will be replaced by more fantasy races such as dwarves, orcs, elves, and goblins.

This is a stripped down fantasy version of the original x-com. The game play loop is 1. Do a mission, where you bring 6 to 8 soldiers, Either kill things or gather things or escort a dude. 2. Come back from mission build a simple base (technically bases), and research and build new items. Yes you can research and learn magic. 3. Do it again while working on objectives that lead to a final battle. They didn't reinvent the wheel but they did a nice job copying it and putting their own twist on it. The game has lots of skills to learn and you are able to mix and match (with research). The game was clearly designed to be replayable, although the mission design might not have enough variety to keep me interest through a second play through. Like the games it was inspired by your soldiers will died in the early game, and some of the missions are not meant to winnable. It's clear which ones those are and you can mostly avoid them. You can also cheese the escort missions by hiring cheap recruits and letting them die while your escort gets to the exit. This isn't a big budget game and it shows. The graphic are ok, the UI is passable but sometimes not helpful. The tutorials are bare bones and it can lead to some trial and error in the early game. One tip, your soldiers can teleport out at anytime. Although there is a delay. As an example there is a limit to the amount of equipment you can take into battle, while that limit has been going up but I don't know why. The number of smiths would be my guess. i have had two crash to desktops in my 10 hours. The game autosaves going into and leaving battle so it wasn't to bad but they clearly didn't get all the bugs out before shipping. There have been three hotfixes in the first week. I don't write a lot of reviews. While this game has some warts I'm enjoying my time with it and I hope enough people give it a chance for them to release DLC or a sequel because under the warts are excellent bones.

I don't know if this game is for everyone, but it's definitely for me.

This was clearly made by someone who is a fan of the XCOM formula. Playing on both the tactical and strategic layer, the sense of hopelessness in the face of an invasion by unknowable and superior forces, slowly reverse engineering their mysterious powers and turning their own tools against them, monthly check-ins with the ominous shadow council funding the resistance, throwing untrained rookies into the meat grinder in a desperate attempt to stave off oblivion. A lot of soul went into this game, and I'm really glad someone cared enough to make something fans of the tactical turn based genre have been begging for for a decade+ now: a real Fantasy XCOM. Most people don't understand the XCOM formula or what makes it unique; they just see "turned based" and "dice roll attacks" and think "it's like XCOM". The dev clearly understands the vibe of the genre and has adapted it to fantasy quite well; this game is ACTUALLY like XCOM. My biggest gripe is the turn system: it's a bit awkward, with the distinction between "turns" and "rounds" not well explained, and it definitely feels a bit clunky only being able to move half your team at once before the other side moves half of their team, then you get to move the other half. But because each unit has a fixed cost to "activate", if for some reason you get a unit that costs an extra point to "activate", it will throw off the entire flow of your turn. I got used to it, though, and I suspect there are upgrades/research to make it less annoying as you progress. If you like ruthless tactical turn-based games, if you're a fan of the genre, if you want to watch a bunch of untrained peasants die horribly in the name of glorious resistance, if you appreciate games clearly made with heart and soul, this game is for you.

I'm a beginner in this genre, but this game hooked me instantly! I love the RPG-style progression and how each character levels up in their own unique way. The developer is very responsive and quick to fix issues, which is a big plus, though I personally haven’t encountered any bugs during my gameplay. Keep it up!

Only briefly played through the starting mission and the initial steps of the world map, but it's pretty obviously a fantasy take on old school XCOM/Xenonauts. If you like fantasy and you also like XCOM, you'll probably like this. The campaign/story seems to be modeled slightly after XCOM 2, though I only played briefly so there could be a lot more. You play as the commander of a group of rebel humans fighting back against an alien (in this case supernaturally alien) threat. There's technology to research, you can recruit more soldiers, level up existing soldiers into classes, and so on. The art is a kind of early 90s XCOM vibe. Seems interesting! I'll put more time into it.

The reviews are kinda harsh for the game in my opinion. This game does play like XCOM and Battle Brothers that is a fair comparison and it makes a bit more sense than battle brothers since in battle brothers you can play so a certain difficulty but you have to have a particular start in order to actually win on that difficulty. Took me a while to figure that out. You can't just start as a slave on intermediate and expect to win its statistically impossible. Anyways. This game for what I've played so far is indeed "fun" for the most part. Ya visuals aren't triple A title but you should buy it and the dude may get a team and make a slaves of magic 2 which has all the visuals and updates you would want. Update: Its a solid game but there are so many rng eliminates and feel bad mechanics

Greate and adorable game! The myriads of visual details, and complex yet easy to approach mechanisms show that the game was made with love by the devs! The game has complex mechanisms but can be understood from the get-go, partly due to the hints (appearing on the left, that can be opened) that are helpful at the beginning. But most of the things are self-explanatory, thanks to the great visuals and that hovering the cursor over or clicking provides more info. Missions are well designed, I liked that their length is not too long. The characters have various stats, and leveling-up provides new many new skills, that can be used as combos, introducing new layers of depth and strategy as the game moves on. Parallelly more complex enemies appear. So, the game becomes more interesting and intense as time goes on.

Someone finally made Fantasy XCOM. With a bit more polish it will be kino. Currently it's very good. Main problems are clarity of the tooltips and some things working differently than expected(read the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tutorials morons) but anyone with a bit of a gamer brain can figure those out. On the good side, the tactics are good and require a bit of thinking - the game uses an "initiative budget" system, where each turn you get a pool of points for activating characters. Once you run out, the enemy moves theirs with their own budget and then it's back to you. You need to think about who to activate and when, adjacency bonuses, range, etc. Also, breaching rooms can be quite stressful(and deadly) - best to do it with units who hold a shield. There's a lot of room for the game to expand and polish and the devs are very responsive to questions and bug reports. Just please... read the tutorials if you are confused about the initiative system - it's a really cool mechanic that some people seem to be utterly unable to comprehend despite the WRITTEN TUTORIAL... ekhm. 9/10 - would slaughter spiders from another dimension in a medieval toilet stall again.

Really enjoying recording this for my Youtube channel and having my arse kicked by the campaign, which is unforgiving and punishes mistakes swiftly. It's still early days in my campaign but I look forward to seeing some of the later content. Highly recommend for people who enjoy tough fights! I would also suggest completely disregarding the negative review of Frostfeather - who has played the game for about 40 mins before making up a bunch of lies and nonsense, and now refuses to edit/update the review or even engage in conversation about it. The only thing around here that actually deserves 2.5/10 is their review.