Mittelborg: City of Mages

My spreadsheet instincts told me there was something real here: a city caught between worlds, tempests that cycle between physical raids, magical barrages, aether breezes, and quiet lulls you can exploit for expeditions through a portal. On paper, that four-beat tempest rhythm - red for the Garrison, blue for the Tower of Light, purple for the Wind Catcher, yellow for the lull portal run - should produce constant micro-decisions about where to park your precious mages each turn. It does not. What Mittelborg: City of Mages actually delivers is closer to a digitized worker-placement board game with training wheels welded on permanently. The core loop runs like this: you start with one or two mages, drag tokens to structures each turn, watch a text box report the outcome, collect Aether, upgrade buildings from level one to three, brew potions, and die - usually because the early game is deliberately starved of resources and the first several deaths are practically scripted. The roguelike hook, such as it is, comes from the Chancellor's rebirth mechanic: you carry certain buffs forward across runs, meaning early deaths are supposed to feel instructive rather than punishing. A small subset of players genuinely find the incremental unlock loop addictive enough to pull them back. But the ceiling on strategic thinking is low. Mage assignment is the whole game, and there are never enough variables in play to make those assignments feel like genuine decisions rather than process of elimination. The hand-holding is the most frustrating structural problem. The tutorial does not really end. Advisors queue up objectives and lock out actions until the game is ready to let you proceed, which means the opening hours feel like an interactive checklist rather than a sandbox. For a strategy fan used to games that throw you into the deep end and let you drown productively, this is aggravating in a specific way: the game clearly fears you will make a wrong turn, so it ensures you cannot make any turn at all until it approves. Once the training wheels do come off, the decision space underneath is thin enough that the freedom barely registers. The localization compounds everything. Armatur Games is a small Moscow-based indie team, and the English translation reads as uneven throughout, which matters a lot here because the narrative - an investigation into why the Tree of Order is fading and where the previous Chancellor disappeared - is supposed to carry significant weight between tempests. Random encounter events ask you to make moral choices with meaningful-seeming consequences, but the logic connecting choices to outcomes is opaque to the point of feeling arbitrary. Scrolls exist specifically to tell you the correct answer to event questions, which effectively removes any role-playing weight from those moments. On the plus side, the hand-drawn aesthetic is genuinely attractive, the city silhouette has real personality, and the sci-fi-meets-fantasy setting has more lore ambition than most games in this price range. Steam user reception sits at a mixed 59 percent across 76 reviews, which tracks with the experience: some players clearly find a rhythm in the run-based structure and stay for the roguelike momentum, while the majority hit the ceiling of the strategy quickly and bounce. There is no mod ecosystem to speak of, no post-launch content expansion visible, and macOS support has been officially dropped for Catalina and above - a practical concern if you are on a modern Mac. If your benchmark for a resource management game is meaningful build-order decisions, escalating complexity, and AI that challenges you to adapt, Mittelborg will leave you flat. If you want something low-commitment with a stylish coat and a fantasy premise you can dip in and out of over a few evenings, it is functional enough to occupy that niche.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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