Spellcaster University

One of my top favorite games.

It is a fun game. Ending of campaign is underwhelming would like to see a giant battle of some sort happen where all your students fight the boss.

Top.

[Edit: Adding Achievements in an update.] The way rooms interlock, especially with some of the fractured stages, make it feel a bit more of a puzzle game than a sim game. Regardless, it has a deceptive depth like pokemon once you get into optimizing for student and teacher traits. It's also easy to pick up where you left off. Most of the signalling is pretty clear. Campaigns don't run too long. It's not an overly challenging game though, and sometimes it can be frustrating to place augments in the rooms as the game doesn't seem to detect the overlap/collision well at certain zooms and angles. But both those things are easily forgivable.

A 2d, side view city builder where you build up a Hogwarts styled magic school. You build rooms in the school that teach students or meet their needs in some fashion (bedrooms, etc). As the student’s train, which you can guide through custom schools (i.e. Hufflepuff)), they generate mana of their specialties which is the way you get new cards which get more expensive (per category) as you buy them. These cards are mainly new buildings, special items you place in rooms, and artifacts but can also be things like new students. These cards are a random choice of three card, so you will never be able to build exactly what you want, when you want which will make each school unique. The students have a graduation date (from 3 to 7 years) and will get a random profession based on their skills which can give you certain boons such as an increased chance of getting certain good traits, getting more mana and many other things (there’s probably 100 or so professions). Besides this there are factions to interact with, dungeons to explore and some goals you try to complete (sort of random) to get better end game bonuses. Each mission ends when the Lord of Evil arrives with his armies, which cannot be stopped but can be slowed down (or sped up) by some rare actions. There is also a campaign that has you building schools in different areas which have some special bonuses and challenges to deal with. I found the game to be very fun, at least for a period of time. Guiding your school to certain goals was cool, with easy building and mostly understandable actions. It’s fun seeing your school and students grow and change over time and seeing your actions having effects. There is a good variety of buildings, factions, items, artifacts, etc so there is a lot of room to try different strategies or to try and get different graduation professions. The main negatives are that the formula can start getting a bit stale after you learn the mechanics. The game will start feeling kind of samey with you largely focusing on 2-3 domains and just largely recruiting students over and over. That is actually the biggest downside of this game. You will end up spending most of your time assigning students to schools. They come pretty often and there aren’t that many other things that happen often, so you end up doing this over and over. It gets old. Especially as you get experienced and you crank the speed up, this can start happening in quick succession. Other than assigning students you are just purchasing cards, placing your cards and dealing with an occasional event which are usually just a quick dialog choice. The dungeons are a nice change of pace, but average just one per mission so are pretty rare. Making this a bigger part of the game would have been nice, especially if they were actually given some goal to accomplish. Faction mechanics could have also been a bit more pronounced. You mainly just get some items, mana or faction affinity when dealing with and it’s usually quite easy to be friendly with everyone. They could have had them attack you (the orcs can do this, but only them really) or somehow interact with you more. Overall, a fun builder game that just maybe wears out it’s welcome a bit sooner than you might like. This game would mainly be for people who are fine just playing the campaign once, and who are into either builders in general or just building a magic school. Would mostly recommend getting this on sale.