Ages of Mages: The last keeper

I came into Ages of Mages: The Last Keeper expecting throwaway shovelware and walked away with moderately mixed feelings, which is already a better result than half the indie co-op pile. The core loop is a third-person twin-stick shooter beat-em-up with roguelite-adjacent elements: you push through stages, clear hordes, collect wands, and dump points into per-class skill trees between runs. The left stick moves, the right stick fires, and your MP bar is the only resource that really matters in a fight. When it empties, you are stuck jabbing at close range until you hold down the recharge button, which adds a small but real rhythm to engagements. The four mages, fire, ice, lightning, and nature, play distinctly enough that swapping between them for repeat runs actually changes how you approach crowds. The Ice Mage's wide-spread attack and freeze mechanic makes her the comfort pick for solo grinding. The Fire Mage's teleport and Phoenix skill open up some genuinely clever movement options. Nature has a healing spell that becomes the backbone of any co-op team that bothers to coordinate. Each class carries an independent skill tree and over 20 wands with different properties, so there is legitimate build variety hiding under the simple surface. The game spans 7 chapters, 38 stages, and 14 boss fights across randomly generated dungeons, which is more content than it looks like at first glance. Here is where I have to be straight with you: the presentation is cheap, and some design decisions will flat-out annoy you. Players have flagged that your projectiles cannot hit enemies on higher elevation, while enemy archers can reach you from anywhere on the map. Staff item descriptions are absent entirely, so wand selection is a guessing game. Death strips your equipped staff and, depending on where you die, forces low-level grinding to recover lost ground because XP from failed stages does not always carry over. Difficulty also spikes erratically the further you push solo, which makes the uneven scaling feel punishing rather than challenging. Framerate hiccups have been noted too, nothing catastrophic but noticeable enough to matter in crowded stages. The saving grace is that this game was clearly built for local co-op first. With three friends filling the other mage slots, the class synergies click. The Nature Mage keeps the party alive, the Ice Mage crowd-controls bosses for extended freeze windows, and everyone else just dumps damage. Short stages become a natural rotation of chaos and quick lobbying for the next run. The community sentiment on Steam settles around mostly positive, and that tracks, provided you have people to play with. Going in solo is not broken, but the difficulty spikes and missing quality-of-life polish hit harder when there is no one to cover your flanks. If you are evaluating this as a shooter, the netcode question does not apply because the multiplayer is strictly local. What does apply is input feel, and on controller the twin-stick response is workable without being slick. Do not expect precision aiming or any movement tech worth talking about. This is a session game for the couch, not a ranked ladder, and that lens is the only honest way to evaluate it. Fred, Scout Team