Spellmasons is an immediately engaging turn-based roguelike filled with magic, mayhem, and one or two completely avoidable deaths. (Maybe that last one’s on me.)
The game was developed by Octavia Blue and it has been out on Steam PC for a year now, so I am a little late to the party on this one. Sorry about that.
Most of my time with the game was spent in co-op, but I’ve also played a bit on my own. For the co-op session, a good friend and I dived into the campaign one evening and we played it until we met a grizzly end at the hands of an angry mob of monsters. In fact, we might have died a few times, but hey: it’s a roguelike and dying is all part of the fun, right? RIGHT?!?!
What is Spellmasons then, my young apprentice?
The gameplay in Spellmasons is highly tactical, but I think it’s also surprisingly easy to pick up and play. Indeed, the complexity seemed to be layered in at a pace that my old brain could handle.
I think the thing I liked most about Spellmasons is the simultaneous nature of the turn-based action. In most games of this ilk, you take your turn, and then your friend takes their turn, and so on and so forth. This back and forth can really suck the energy out of an online experience, especially if you like to take your sweet time. But not here.
In Spellmasons, you and your teammates do whatever it is that you’re doing at the same time as each other, so while you can work together in order pull off an attack, you’re also free to focus on your own thing.
In terms of the story, the game is all about an evil wizard who is apparently eager to kick our/your proverbial backside. Playing alone -which is fine, by the way – or with a team of up to eight people, you must run a series of gauntlets before a final confrontation (that I must admit I didn’t get to) with said evil wizard. Simple and effective
Roguelike tactics and deadly magic tricks
Your journey through Spellmasons will take you through procedurally-generated arenas filled with monsters, baddies wearing strange skull helmets, giant ponds, and various potions to pick-up and glug.
The fun comes via your ever-growing book of magic tricks. I think I’ve only seen a small slice of what’s in the game, yet in my time playing I was still able to use my limited spellbook to slash and poison my enemies. What’s more, new magic options are added all the time, broadening your tactical options as you go further into the campaign.
When working in co-op things get even more interesting, and we were able to synergise our actions with ease. For example, one of us would pull an enemy into a pool of water, leaving the enemy in the wide open and ready for the other to administer an arrow to the eye.
Despite my initial thought that it would be complicated, it’s actually really intuitive and it didn’t take my co-op partner and I much time before we were coordinating our attacks. One of us would use the pull or push spells to move our enemies out of cover, then the other would hit them with a barrage of attacks to finish them off. Effective.
Well, when I say “effective”, it actually didn’t take that long before the challenge ramped up and we were completely overwhelmed by a wave of enemies that came rushing at us. Before our untimely deaths, however, I had been really pleased by the intuitive mechanics and how quickly everything had clicked for me.
Is Spellmasons worth picking up?
I say this with the caveat that I’ve not played as long as I would for a full review, but yes, I think that Spellmasons is worth your time, especially if you’ve got one or two rogue-loving friends. The game has already been out for a full year so the devs have had enough time to iron out any wrinkles, and the whole thing felt very polished (the latest content update was as recent as February 10th, so it is still being supported by the devs).
The pixelart is fairly basic but charming, in a blood-splattered, violent kind of way, and the soundtrack is pretty good, too. The standout feature, however, is the way that the devs have implemented simultaneous turn-based gameplay; you can work together or do your own thing and the experience flows nicely either way.
I think you’ll have to like complex roguish games (although I’m not sure I’d call this a roguelike in the traditional sense) and turn-based tactics to get the most out of this one, but the co-op twist is well implemented and if you’ve got a couple of friends who are also into this sort of thing, I suspect you’ll have a lot of fun with Spellmasons.
