"Terrain of Magical Expertise" is truly mediocrity intensified and weaponised. I've never seen such mediocre crap in over 10,000 reviews for the worst of the worst here on Steam. I think this is based on some Flash web series or something? That nobody ever heard of because it's garbage, so the solution is apparently to try pollute Steam with it? The publisher is a mainland China owned business, so that may explain some of the poor quality here.
Well, the voice acting isn't bad but I feel bad for the voice actors because if anyone ever found out they were involved in this, that's the end of their careers. The game itself is really something... awful. It's got that godawful meta "Oh this is a game about a game therefore I'm an excellent writer here's all my fanfiction characters" vibe to it. The cringe on this one goes to 11.
Most of the furry orientated "gameplay" is largely unskippable visual novel/e-book trash, but it's interspersed with some truly badly done minigames like a mini-tactical turn based strategy section. Suffice it to say there's no actual deep or interesting gameplay here, and nothing of merit or value as a real, serious PC game.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The artwork here is terrible, it's a hodge-podge of amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
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, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this game.
PC gamers will be insulted by the presence of console peasant children's toy controller prompts, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for.
While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this game was never accepted on the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2023 (and this was released not so far back in 2021), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Now, here's the real whammy here... the price for this garbage. If this was priced at 50c I'd be pretty offended, because it's not worth that much.
"Terrain of Magical Expertise" has the completely unrealistic cash grab price of $20 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. That's right, the developer thinks this game is better than Watch Dogs: Legion, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, Grand Theft Auto V, Red Dead Redemption 2, and the entire Mass Effect Trilogy pack, and has thus priced their game accordingly higher. You can't make this stuff up... what a joke!
This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
This game also features a number of suspicious, likely fake positive reviews. The reviews all appear at almost exactly the same time, within 24 hours of the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and all have very similar wording and writing style. Amusingly, the number of suspicious reviews is incredibly similar to the peak player count for the game, yet the game only has 1-2 people launching it every week or so, then quickly deleting it when they see how incredibly bad it is. This review count, then, is highly unusual given the very low quality of the game and poor player counts. The "Positive" review score on this game should be taken with a large grain of salt. This might be done to deceive and scam gamers into paying for a bad product.
