Mittelborg: City of Mages

I rarely leave bad reviews on Indie games. But I have a gamebreaking bug on the game, and the developers have not helped me though I've reached out multiple times, and send bug reports. They directed me to Discord, but my comment there has been ignored since late August. So I have never been able to actually play. Basically the sides the game flicker and make certain parts invisible. Maybe it's good! Definitely don't buy this if you have a Mac.

Does not feel like a game. Feels more like spending your time doing nothing more than a swipe in the map to move a mage and a click here and there. Only funny part are the random events, which anyway after a while seems to be the same. Cannot re-play too much. Guess it could be good in my phone on a boring time to wait an airplane or a train.

[b][i]Review copy provided by developer via Curator Connect[/i][/b] I do love managing things, and an enchanted city on the fringes of reality sounds like a real cool place to manage. Turns out Mittelborg is home to the Tree of Order, lynchpin of existence, and as the new chancellor it falls to you to protect it. Threats to the city come in the form of tempests, multi-day storms that can result in beastman raids, magical onslaughts, or calms where you can harvest ether or send expeditions out to the far realms. Assigning mages and reinforcements to different parts of the city is how you’ll survive these daily disasters, all the while upgrading different buildings, brewing potions, making event decisions, and following the string of quests that unfold the story of the previous chancellor. All of this would indeed be real cool, if it were an actual risk management game with any sort of depth. You’ll have like one tempest between the tutorial and your first upgrades that might cut things a bit close, but once you get a few mages and your ether production up, you’ll be immortal. Tempests are entirely predictable and damage can be completely mitigated, so all that’s left is sleepwalki…

Mittelborg: City of Mages is unsurprisingly about a magic city. It's kind of a management game, gain resources, upgrade things, make decisions, all that stuff. Make Mittelborg Magical Again! https://youtu.be/RANH74LRaOM

There is definitely sparks of awesomeness in the game, but sadly the game doesn't tell us enough on the go, and the fundamentals are boring. The main story is in short: you are crowned to be Chancellor of the city. You send your "working" mages around the city to focus on aspects of it, use the aether (money) to build and upgrade buildings, or buy things. You have to face tempest events which consist of days of: physical/magical attack, exploration, or "harvest" days, semi-randomly, not letting your defenses to fall and the Important Tree to be destroyed. All of this happens so you can propel through a quest that is collecting diary pages of your precedessor, because he disappeared and this isn't fishy at all. The game takes place entirely on the single screen you see on screenshots. Through "storms" are called tempests in-game, the UI is entirely different from the one shown on the screenshots. The small, round icons used for items in the lower left corner are much bigger. Trait bonuses on the top right are huge rhombuses, the red guard - blue mage circles are filled in, while they are cropped out at the bottom of the screen, at 1920*1080 resolution. Like they swapped the PC UI …

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