The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story™

A bit more jank, a lot less salt. For a couple of years now Riot has tried to seperate their universe of Runeterra from the large but also overwhelmingly negatively regarded shadow of League of Legends. The most prominent example is probably the vastly popular animated show Arcane but the other is their, sadly now defunct, videogame publisher Riot Forge. Together with the help of outside studios the yield of games has been really solid across the board, with the best one probably being Ruined King in collaboration with Airship Syndicate, the makers of Battlechasers: Night War and Darksiders Genesis. The other titles have sadly gone without that much notice and the best known recent release is the awkwardly named 2XKO. Still I have to give kudos that they tried to do something different with every game they published. Mageseeker is a top down pixel artstyle action game in the vein of Dablo or Path of Exile but in a smaller scale both in size and presentation. Which does not mean that it does not do well the things that it attempts. The game casts you in the shoes of Sylas of Dregbourne, a rogue mage and aspiring anarchist in the very clean but rotten kingdom of Demacia. Sylas is gruff, innitially abrasive and headstrong with thrist for vengeance but never entirely unlikeable. He has a reason to be furious but fury alone is not enough to fuel a rebellion, is it? The game is very pretty and pleasant to look at and listen to with pixelated but detailed setpieces, fun bossfights and a surprisingly emptional story to round it up. Combat is relatively simple but satisfying and will keep you on your toes to not get shredded by the pretty sizable amount of enemies the game throws at you. Sadly the hooking mechanic never felt entirely intuitive and can be frustratingly finnicky at times. Especially during high stress situations. I have had no game breaking bugs or glitches but had a couple of instances where the character became both almost immobile and immortal or where I suddenly could not attack anymore. Still those bugs were not enough to dampen the fun too much. Mageseeker is a fun little game for everybody who wants to learn a bit more about the world of Runeterra but does not want to have to queue up foir a LoL lobby. (As usual this review has been written without the use of AI of any kind)