Dawn of Mages

My first instinct when I saw 'third-person arena shooter with over 100 builds' was healthy skepticism, because that kind of number usually means someone counted colour variants. In Dawn of Mages it actually checks out on a mechanical level: you pick one spell from each of five types (Main, Close, AoE, Deadeye, Ultimate) and one from each of five elemental classes (Fire, Ice, Lightning, Poison, Void), and the combinations do meaningfully change how you play. A Void-heavy build leans on lifesteal to sustain through trades. Lightning hits harder but buffs enemy stamina, which is a genuine trade-off you have to think about before the match starts, not mid-round. That pre-match loadout decision lands somewhere between a card draft and a class picker, and it gives the opening minutes a quiet tension I didn't expect. The free-targeting system is the other thing that sets this apart from tab-targeting fantasy games. You're aiming projectiles manually, which means mouse precision and reaction time matter in the way they do in a shooter, not an MMO. The Deadeye spell slot even requires a magical scope mechanic with no quick-scoping allowed, which is a small but telling design choice: the devs clearly want skill expression, not cheese. The Breach ability adds a high-risk wrinkle too, letting you punch an insta-kill gateway through most walls on a 30-second cooldown. Used well it's a flanking tool; used predictably it burns your cooldown for nothing. Here is where I have to be straight with you, though. This is a host-client Early Access game with two Steam reviews on record. Dedicated servers are a roadmap item, not a reality yet. That means peer-hosted matches, which means variable latency depending entirely on who's running the lobby. For a game where spell projectile timing is everything, inconsistent netcode is a real problem, and right now there's no way to evaluate how bad or tolerable it is at scale because the playerbase isn't there. AI bots fill matches when humans don't show up, which keeps you from sitting in an empty lobby, but bot lobbies won't tell you anything about how the TTK and the build system hold up against real opponents who are also drafting aggressively. TwoShrinks, the two-person dev team behind this, shipped a Linux version after launch with cross-play against Windows players, which is a solid move for accessibility. Patches have addressed movement, spell balance, and map fixes since launch. The roadmap is ambitious (Team Deathmatch, ranked play, Capture the Flag, eventually dedicated servers), and the no-cosmetics-only monetisation promise is the right call. The problem is that ambition on a roadmap and a functioning competitive arena are two very different things. If you're drawn to the build system and the spell-shooter premise, the bones here are worth a look. But if you need a populated ranked ladder to stay interested past the first few hours, this one needs time and a much bigger player count before it can deliver that. Fred, Scout Team