Arcane Assembly

Arcane assembly is a game where the developer had a single interesting idea, decided to make a game about it, and then forgot to actually make the game about the idea. If it weren't for the main gimmick, this would be the most generic metroidvania i've ever played. And the game doesn't seem to realize it. The game's combat is quite good while you're experimenting with different spells, but the game is full of long platforming sections with no enemies that don't incorporate the magic system at all. Also the game seems terrified of throwing more than two or three enemies at you at once. I know it's to accommodate people who are new to coding, but, like, come on. You have given me the tools to build a nuke. at least give me some optional challenges or something.

Really fun game

Great concept, terrible game.

I don't regret buying this game, but I can only recommend it to people who, like me, are solely interested in the spell crafting. The game is short, the platforming is uninspired and completely disconnected from the spell system, and the story is nonexistent. If you're not already comfortable with scratch style programming, this game won't help you learn. This game is much better as a game-design inspiration and source of mental exercise for spellcrafting obsessed people than it is as an actual game. Mana cost being calculated upfront somewhat restricts branching conditional spells, but if you're clever you can work around it. By making sure no mana costing tasks are inside your condition checking 1000x repeat loops, and some careful delegating of spell components with variables and lists, you can be a lot more flexible than some reviewers realize. With all that said, I would have still given this game a positive review, if it weren't for the fact that the spell programming has numerous bugs and the game has been abandoned by the developer. To name a couple, a physics bug causes orbiting orbs to rapidly spiral outwards, making the orbit function almost useless except for making a…

I find the core idea of this game deeply interesting to me. Honestly, the game isn't good lmao But, it gives me so much hope and inspiration for programming magic, something I've always loved. No other game lets you program magic in an actual programming language and have that magic actually be useful for something. Noita technically has this but it's so rudamentory unless you go wayyy too far into the game, and even then... I genuinely adore this game, it's been more positive than negative to me desipte being a clear kit-bash, which deeply irks me, and having the metroidvania aspects of the game get in the way and be really frustrating/annoying/boring. But, despite all that, programming magic is so frickin awesome! I just enjoyed the ♥♥♥♥ out of it.

I liked this game, but I'm saddened because it could have been so much more. The *concept* of this game is amazing, but as others have noted it is severely hampered by not leaning into its premise. For instance, it provides you with a rich palette of programming options... but then most of the challenges in the game are platforming sections, which utterly ignore the premise. The various spell effects can't apply to "Self", which is a huge missed opportunity - imagine if, instead of gaining a traditional "dash" powerup, you were expected to fly by programming your character's movement? There are boss fights that feel like they want to be "traditional" run-around-and-memorize-pattern boss fights (think Hollow Knight et al), but instead you just assemble your nuke spell and burn them down. It should feel good to overpower everything so much, but sadly by the end it just feels a bit tedious. It's very short, but worth the price if you are the target audience - and you should already know if you are.