More and more indie developers are cutting their teeth by
looking to make games for older systems. The Gameboy and NES seem to be among
the most popular currently as budding creators look to get creative with the
limitations of the 8-bit systems. There are also emerging markets for these
releases with routes both physically for the original hardware and through compilation for the Evercade and also into digital store fronts.
Magic and Legend is a five level action platformer which
sees players descending through a level and dispatching alien invaders across different
time periods. If you kill all the invaders you move to the next level when you
reach the portal at the bottom of the stage. If you don’t then you get sent
back to the start of the level to deal with any that have evaded you.
You can play as either a melee or ranged weapon character
and each stage comes with its own set of weapons appropriate to the time period.
It plays pretty well with your character responsive and moving in a logical
manner and the five levels are undoubtedly fun. There are also bonus levels on each
stage that take inspiration from things such as Ghost Busters, Super Mario Land
and other iconic films and games of the time to create entertaining diversions.
The game ends with a decent boss battle as well where you
have to hit multiple points in order to win the day. Magic and Legend is fun
enough for repeat playthroughs which is handy as you’ll likely make it through
on your first attempt. In fact, we actually got through the five levels without
losing a single life, so there is certainly some fine tuning that could be done
to turn this from a fun distraction into a fully polished title that could sit
along side the original library of Gameboy releases.
There are some things that do make this stand out as an
indie title though. Collision detection is pretty much non existent with no
feedback given when you strike an enemy and the simple deletion of one of your
hearts all to show for it. There is also no real point in the
collectables you can grab in both the bonus and main levels as there is no
score board present. This is a real shame as high score chasing would certainly
have given an extra impetus to your play. We also encountered a bug where the
game would let us progress without clearing each level and simply making it to
the bottom, although this only seemed to happen once.
Overall, Magic and Legend: Time Knights shows a lot of
promise but also a fair few rough edges. The core of the game works well with
good controls and a fun gameplay loop. But it’s the details that are missing
that prove to be the big difference between this and original Gameboy releases.
As a result it comes across as a fun prototype rather than a fully fledged and
finished title. We hope that this proves to be a jumping off point for something
truly great in the future as most of the core building blocks are in place for
what is a short, yet fun, distraction.
Overall 6/10
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