Megamagic: Wizards of the Neon Age

My first instinct with Megamagic was to shelve it after the opening chapters, and that instinct was wrong. The early game is genuinely sluggish: maps are wider than their content justifies, the tutorial is thin, and combat feels underpowered while your spell roster is still sparse. Push through that initial friction, though, and something more interesting starts to emerge. The isometric action-RPG shell conceals a small but real RTS decision layer that rewards players who treat grim management as a core competency rather than an afterthought. Here is the actual loop: you play as Phoban, a wizard-school dropout turned fugitive, and your primary resource is a hotbar of four active spells drawn from a pool of twenty you unlock and craft from enemy drops across five magical schools: Neonmancy, Vegemancy, Sanctumancy, Fulgomancy, and Necromancy. Each school has a distinct tactical role, and assembling a loadout that covers offense, support, and control is the closest this game gets to genuine build thinking. Alongside the spells, you summon and direct grims, sixteen craftable creature types that function somewhere between Pokemon and an RTS unit queue. You direct them manually or let them free-roam, which works fine, but the tactical ceiling rises sharply when you start micromanaging their positioning during the nine boss encounters scattered across the chapters. The co-op option, which lets up to four local players each take control of a grim, is the sleeper mode here: suddenly that creature management layer feels purpose-built rather than incidental. The criticism that sticks, and it is consistent across reviews, is that the RPG scaffolding is thin. There is no gear to equip, no stat sheet to tune outside of health and mana growth, and character progression leans almost entirely on what you choose to craft. For players conditioned by loot-dense ARPGs, that will feel skeletal. The maps also include one-off stealth sections and sprint puzzles that appear once and disappear, which reads as design scope that outpaced development time. The story has charm: the 80s post-apocalyptic setting, a post-comet Earth where neon magic replaced nuclear anxiety, is genuinely well-realized, and the faction politics between the Order, the Punks, and the Techno Rangers give the world texture. What the writing delivers in wit, though, it sometimes loses in pacing, with the early chapters front-loading exposition in a way that buries the more interesting beats. The soundtrack, composed by Mitch Murder of Kung Fury and Hotline Miami 2 fame, is not a detail worth glossing over. It does functional work that the combat alone cannot always do, keeping energy levels up during the longer traversal stretches. Visually, the isometric art holds up well, with neon-trimmed suburbs giving way to sentient-plant forests, desert wastelands, and dungeon interiors that vary enough to avoid visual fatigue across the roughly ten-hour runtime. At a Metacritic of 67 and a Steam user rating that sits around 60 percent, this is not a consensus recommendation, but it is also not a throwaway. Treat it as a compact, low-overhead hybrid for players who want a taste of unit control without committing to a full RTS, and manage expectations on the RPG depth. If the aesthetic alone speaks to you, the substance is enough to justify the ride.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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