The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story™

I love league of legends, and I'm a League of Legends lore enthusiast. I have read almost all there is to read - I know every story, every animated short, and I've even read some of the physical books. But I cannot recommend Mageseeker. I like that it is accurate to a lot of the source material. I like that they actually get Sylas right - he's not a 'good guy'. He's a bad guy doing a good thing for a good cause, broken against the wheel of an oppressive system. However, like a majority of Riot Forge's catalogue, this game is long without enough depth. I find that as I explore Riot Forge's games, they have a large problem - they all drop at around the 40-60% mark and the gameplay becomes slow, tedious, and frustrating, if not for pure difficulty, just for annoyance's sake. A minor spoiler upcoming. Inside of the Morgana bossfight, if you attempt to steal her magic, she'll blackshield herself, gain a health shield, and block it. This sounds fine - it's accurate, I'd even argue. But it's not interractive or interesting. You've disabled the main mechanic, but you're punished for hitting it like you used to. There is no reason you should try to steal from her in this fight - doing s…

Good game, nice story, nice lore, nice fighting and skills. Don't buy for full price. It is good, really, but just not enough content to justify throwing this much cash. -30%< would start being worthwile.

I was so excited to be able to play through an extension of the League universe, but somehow this game managed to fumble being given League lore. If you play League, like League lore, or like having fun—please go and buy Silksong or Bastion or whatever and then go back and read the old Judgement volumes that Riot Games used to put out. I don't know if they were given excruciatingly tiny, cage-like restraints on what they could do with the characters in this story, but Sylas, Garen, Lux, and every featured champion are just wet blankets. They offer little to nothing to the overall storytelling and kinda just do whatever on a whim based on what the plot wants them to do. The paper-thin story would not be as much of a problem if the gameplay and combat weren't *egregiously* mediocre. Every encounter and wave of enemies play out exactly the same. You just use the same combo on every enemy and just obliterate everything. Your purchasable "upgrades" never feel strong. Interacting with the hubworld and going on missions feels pointless and detached from everything. I bought this game the day it came out. 3 of my friends bought it too—their highest playtime is *40 minutes*. I played thr…

no more cages!!

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. Sy…

Classic hero's journey, but very well done. Since the game runs for over 15 hours, and Silas the protagonist is surrounded by NPCs, it seems plausible that his character could have been a little more developed, or that alternative endings could have been fleshed out based on how ruthless he was for his revenge. That said, it's also easy for someone not on the dev team to make comments after it's already out. Gameplay wise, it is a really polished product. With progress comes a significant number of combat options that can be used without having to pause or change out anything. Whether it's stealing powers, whaling on monsters with melee damage, redirecting enemy fire, pulling enemies closer or throwing yourself headfirst into danger, juggling all the mechanics really makes Silas seem unstoppable at times. Would recommend.