Mage and Monsters - Fantasy Sorcerer Army Building Roguelike

what's up guys the gals and welcome back to the nerd castle today in the world of indie games we're gonna be taking a look at a little compact title called mage and monsters this is a game where you are a wizard who is leading an army into battle in a gladiatorial arena and i played the demo and actually i think it's a very tight demo i think this is a game that has a solid sense of what it is the developer posted it as a demo on steam so that he could take feedback and i found the game to be pretty fun actually i played it a bit before recording this episode and had a good time with it uh what it really reminds me of is that the game kind of reminds me of the battles from heroes hour where they're like large in scale but it's like heroes hour i guess if you took out like all of the city management bits uh that's effectively what this game is going for in major monsters the core nugget of the idea is that you are a wizard and you are fighting other wizards inside a gladiatorial arena using an army that you are assembling so like the first round it'll be like a 4v4 and then after that you get to draft more units or more spells or more upgrades or whatever else and your army gets larger and larger and larger until it's like a 50 v 50 or like a 70 v70 and this is very much a spectacle game this is a game that you look at you're like dude this is awesome because like everything is exploding there's poison gas flying everywhere from you casting wizard spells you've got dwarves and you've got minotaurs fighting and kicking the crap out of like elves and priests and like little grim reaper guys pretty pretty interesting little title so i'm hoping that he decides to go all in on this one and actually develop out the idea because i think it's pretty good so far i've seen prototypes a lot worse i'll tell you that so let's play some major monsters shall we we'll jump on into a new game so we get to pick our character we can play as proselytis we can play as astrina or we can play as medela this guy right here is basically a lightning mage she's a fire mage this is a healer we'll start with priscellus because he's got that awesome magneto helmet on and i like it we also get to pick our starting fighters because i love dwarfs i'm obviously going to go for dwarf warriors there you go so it's a 4v everybody with the q button i can fire off a lightning bolt right here and the core game is basically like you fight enemies and when you defeat the enemy army you have a very very rapid draft phase in the middle like just happened right here we get 30 bucks and then we get to pick a boon uh we can get like a blessing spell we can get an impending doom spell which basically converts one of our units into a suicide bomber or we can get six footmen to develop out our line i will probably go with the six footman for right now and the two dollars that sounds pretty good so now we've got 10 guys out of 20 and then with our money we can choose a bunch of things from the shop over here and these are all kind of permanent bonuses that follow you for the rest of the game when your units die in the arena they are resurrected after the fight is over so you don't have to worry about running out of units or anything else like that the only thing that matters is that you survive the next round if everybody dies that's it the game is over and it will roll your unlocks and what you got for making it that far on into the game and then you start over from the beginning but i found the game to actually be really really really entertaining it's one of those games that you can just like turn your brain off and be like huh this is awesome uh so anyways we've got 20 bloggers down here that we got to fight they're very very weak units one thing i would like is when you mouse over the top of this right here a little box should pop up with all of their stats so you can figure out like am i up against like a weak enemy am i up against a strong enemy but there's only like a couple of them how fast are they how hard do they hit all that kind of stuff so that you can kind of mix and match with your own guys i would also recommend that they get a pop-up box for each of the mouse overs when you go over the units right here that does the same thing as of right now you can click on these guys to find out what their stats are but i would very much prefer a text box you mouse over and a little unfolding text box comes out we only have 50 bucks right now there's also another mechanic you have to be aware of with this title so the mechanic is the more money you have banked i.e inside your wallet the more money you make from each fight because you're generating interest basically so that is the fundamental action i think this mechanic is very very good this is actually i think the mechanic that kind of ties the whole game together because do you scrimp and do you save and do you get a fat bankroll so that every fight you're getting huge amounts of money or do you spend your money and you give up on future money in order to make sure you win right now and i find that idea of that exchange and that kind of resource management to be very very compelling for right now we're just going to run it we should be able to take these bloggers no problem there goes our little warriors right there we'll chain lightening these guys up because it one shots them and that'll clear out the field a little bit hopefully we'll get two casts i don't know if we will the fight may be over by then we're not really losing anybody and it looks like we have actually slain all the boggarts pretty easily if you're saying to yourself this looks really really easy wait till you get further on into the game it gets worse uh we can get a fire tornado yeah i got it i gotta get a fire tornado that just it sounds too awesome to let up on we've hit the tier one of rewards now that means every single fight we're getting 10 golden interest as long as we don't drop below 100 gold so that should make our paychecks a little bit better we've only got 10 guys right now we're going up against 24. that's okay i am unafraid let's see this let's see this fire tornado yeah fire tornado worked out pretty well for me that thinned them out pretty good however those little mushrooms right there they do hit considerably harder than everything else we've gone up against luckily with a little bit of finger wiggling we've managed to pull through and we're all right we're going to want to pick up some more units right here i'm going to take the archers that sounds good we'll take the archers that puts us on 155 gold for the moment i don't know if i want to upgrade anything anything uh we're not unit capped yet so i'm not gonna let's go ahead and we will run it one more time we're going to go ahead and get them with some lightning right there we're going to run the exact same strategy we did last time with the fire wave unfortunately fire wave didn't claim as many victims that time around as i had hoped it would our dwarves have been laid low i'm going to supplement them with a little bit of lightning right there and the lightning clinch the fight for us and we are out of here very nice all right so what do we have we got some more dwarven warriors we've got some more archers or we can take 75 bucks right now which puts us into tier 2 reward territory i'm gonna take the dwarvish warriors i'm gonna take the dwarvish warriors that sounds good so now we've got a full battle force we'll fight one more battle and then i'm gonna increase my unit cap i think we can also tear up our units so there are three tiers of units as it stands right now you can see the locked ones right here that's tier two and then there's a tier three from what i've seen there's also three tiers of spells from what i've seen so far in this build and the spells do get pretty wild and pretty crazy and pretty supplementary let's go ahead and we will ready up for this fight it looks like it's a bunch of boggertz we'll go ahead and put out a little flame spell right there just kind of see who we can bowl over unfortunately the unpredictable nature of the fire tornado cannot be tamed uh we are going to throw a little bit of damage on these mushrooms down at the bottom they do have wizards i didn't see the wizards i showed a lightning to the wizards uh yeah let's go ahead and burn the wizards i don't care if i hit my own men the dead cost no the dead cost nothing arrows cost money that's that's my opinion right now all right 65 bucks right there and that should take us up to tier three i think right getting closer anyways we get toxic blast which is a delayed mine you put it on the ground and it ticks for a couple seconds and it blows up and does 20 damage we can take some cultists these guys hit really hard but they have like no hp or we can summon four archers at our chosen location i'm gonna go for the four archers i think that sounds pretty good i don't know what the cooldown is gonna look like on our range summon but you know hopefully it's good enough we're gonna go ahead and get the next tier of units right there and i think we're gonna run it we might lose right here this is kind of like the uh the risky business of the day i'd like to eliminate as many of their wizards as i can for right now we do have a lot of archers though it looks like the cooldown is fairly long on the archers so we're going to want to really plan where we deploy those at one thing i do think that the game is missing for the sake of uh for the sake of feedback is a deployment phase i think the game should allow you to deploy your units as you see fit one of the things that i've noticed is because they come in from the left side of the screen and they come in a long line and you don't get to decide who is where in that structure what will happen here is sometimes you'll end up with like your healers running into combat first or your mage is running into combat first and i'd really prefer to avoid that another thing that i would recommend is if you don't particularly like anything on this list there should be like a bypass and get like 40 bucks right here bypass with 40 gold that you get uh the reason for that is there is an actual tile that gives you 75 gold so it shouldn't be as valuable as that but it should give you a little bit more than what the best reward is maybe you get 35 gold for passing something like that would be really really nice because there's literally nothing here that i want right now i don't want any of it i don't want to take the spells because we have limited slots so i'm just gonna take the warriors even if we don't end up using them for right now we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna take let's take rank two spells and see what comes up in the next draft we'll send them into combat uh looks like we've got ourselves a pretty solid gathering right here of ghouls i'm going to deploy my archers in the back although i can't guarantee that they're going to be all right we'll throw another chain lightning on in there it looks like our melees did a pretty good job of blunting the assault so i think we're gonna be okay the archers are chugging out here they're putting out lots of flip flip bow damage looks good and we are victorious so with the money we have on hand reign of death that'd be pretty spicy oh i can level up my fire tornado too yeah let's level up the fire tornado to tier two yeah we got another pip on it very nice i'm gonna go ahead at this point and i'm going to take so i've got to be above 200 gold i think what i'd like to take we're gonna take plus five to our unit cap we can't fit them all in for right now but that will let us fit in a couple of more and then allow us to grow a little tiny bit as well i'd like to get tier two units pretty soon we'll probably pull the tier 2 units after this fight that's going to bottom out our cash flow quite badly but it sort of is what it is let's go ahead and we'll put a little flame tornado right there since it's only dealing half damage to my units now we need another lightning bolt right there just to kind of flatten them a little bit archers are doing a great job you guys keep on firing normally i'm not a fan of kind of like the long far away range combat but you guys are doing a pretty good job right now at keeping my entire war effort alive we do have a stuck enemy unit right there a little bit of a bug but that's okay we've got ourselves a prototype build so i'm not gonna be too hard on it i do think the core idea of the game is very good though i think it's a very very good core idea i think i'll probably take some more futmen yeah give me the futman i want the futman and then from our futman let's get t2 units so we are now officially into the second tier i'm gonna try to get my money back on this fight but i don't know if we're gonna win tough to say uh we'll go ahead and send everybody in let me get those archers up we're gonna go ahead and lightning these guys we're gonna light off a firestorm right there in the middle where the gap is being closed okay they do have a numerical advantage that is no lie we'll go ahead and fire off a little bit of lightning right there which is going to finish off the last little group give me a little firewall right there very nice almost lost an archer but apparently the archers in our army occupy a very privileged position where they rarely die and have to go through kind of like the the the chain resurrection thing that's been happening we can level up our chain lightning or we can summon three bandits at a location that's not a bad spell it will allow us to reinforce with melee and bandits our tier 2 units that can take quite a beating this however [Music] raises us up to 14 bounces on our chain lightning and the damage goes from 20 to 30. so that hits considerably harder tough call i'm gonna do the summon melee because i think that fixes a problem in that our front line keeps going down uh we're gonna have to run this again because i don't really have the money to do what i want to do we're gonna chain lightning those guys back there we're gonna try to firewall these dudes right here we're gonna put in our archers we're gonna put in our bandits right there to run down the mages and just cause some chaos in the back street with the fat heat and then it looks like we're actually pulling through pretty good yeah i like that i could deploy my my bandits anywhere that i want on the battlefield that's a really nice come up i am going to take oh summon range now gives you apprentices or we can upgrade this to summon knights yeah let's do that let's upgrade it to summon knights i've never seen the knights before we haven't gotten to tier 2 units yet in any of our drafts and so like might as well we've got 334 gold let's upgrade everybody's hp by 20 percent and then we'll run it get the lightning on in there nice very nice bounce right there we're gonna want the firewall in kind of back there we'll put the knights in right there to cause some chaos just kind of keep them from bombarding the front line too much lightening those guys out looking good build seems to be fairly solid so far give me a few more archers just to work on the bone king burn them up too bone king so thick right now so thick and juicy give me a few more nights over here a few more archers actually they're all down we're good okay another 90 gold coming on and you can kind of see where the push and pull comes from with like how much money do i spend versus how much do i hold on to like i think the developer has actually come up with something fairly compelling here it's a simple game it doesn't require a ton of thought but there is almost kind of like a gambler thing going on with this title where you've got to pick and choose you know what do i want to do what do i want to do here uh we've got attack drinks a potion after three attacks drinks a potion that gives double damage so he'll end up doing 18 damage and he attacks quickly we can get chain lightning level two or we can get apprentices i'm gonna get chain lightning level two i think that spells are kind of carrying us right now a hundred and eighty boggards that's a lot of boggards right there that's a that's a solid quantity that's like a felony quantity of boggarts right there i'm gonna go ahead and deploy a flame basically i think the key to this fight is gonna be cool down management and figuring out where i want to engage at oh my god there's so many of them okay give me some flames down there line is holding give me some lightning right there we are going to have to thin them out up top so that's what we're gonna do it looks like we are winning and i think it was a really good decision for the dead bodies to be left on the battlefield i think that was a fantastic choice it lets you in the after action kind of like notice basically the scale of the fight that you just undertook i'm gonna go with three apprentice upgrade for our summon spell for range we got 451 bucks right now we're really starting to put some serious money down range i'm gonna go for an upgrade spin right here and i'm gonna pick up oh we've got upgraded dwarves and we've got upgraded bandits i'm gonna take the upgraded miners that sounds good and then we need to mess with our army list uh so i think we take down what do you guys have going on 40 health okay since they're a straight upgrade we'll go ahead and put these guys in just to help out a little bit and then we got pretty stiff competition on this next go maybe [Music] let's call it plus 20 damage on all melee units i think that'll help get the wizards in damage is going out we seem to be doing okay give them a little bit of supplementary help down on that flank right there give me some fire up here very nice uh give me some more knights give me some more mages hey i think if we had played our cooldowns a little bit differently that would have been gg's but we got it 100 gold in the tank let's keep her going so we can get 75 gold right here we can take four more miners to replace some of the guys that we have i'm gonna take the 75 because i want to increase my pop cap and so that gets me there and uh 28 witches and five ogres we can take that no problem we don't need to spend we're okay let's chain lightning all these guys get them with a little bit of fire back there give him a little bit of chaos on that side i deployed the wizards in the wrong spot that was my bad see how many we can get with the lightning right there lightning went okay they've only got one wizard left melee's tagging down the last ogre up in the top quadrant and it looks like we've got ourselves a w on our hands very nice very very nice i would like the ability to push pause i don't know if that goes against the spirit of the game but being able to zoom in zoom out push pause all that kind of stuff i would definitely just for me personally find that to be very agreeable we're gonna take four more bandits right here and the four bandits have been automatically folded on into our battle group we have two more of you guys we can bring in and we've got to fight three skeleton kings it's gonna be a tough one this is not going to be an easy fight go ahead and put down the knights real quick we'll burn them up a little bit i don't know how much that's going to help i may have just wiped out my own front line i may i may have gotten a little bit greedy with the flame wall but it looks like they're going down i think we're all right give me some more wizards give me some more nights very good this is going so much better than my last build my last build was going terribly like i was getting stomped out by this point let's get a few more bandits and we're going to start getting rid of these little shield guys and replacing them with bandits we have 581 dollars for all intents and purposes that means we have 80 bucks that we can spend right now there's nothing i can afford for 80 spen or 80 bucks except for another reward so let's let her float for a little bit i think we can take this next fight without it i want the wizards to die if we can focus entirely on wizards i think that would be ideal we'll burn them up since they're holding back although i don't think we got the full mileage out of that flame wall right there uh top flank is about to go down we'll hit it with some lightning we need some more knights over here to occupy some more wizards just to add a little bit more dps to the situation and i think we are home free there we go perfect 150 bucks should buy something nice and with our upgrade we've got healers in here too my experience with the healers though is that they always die and they don't heal fast enough i ran the healers pretty aggressively when i was first trying them out and i was kind of like meh about it i'm gonna take the centaurs because centaurs are really good for horde fights centaurs have a cleaving attack and they're really good against stuff like 500 stack boggards or you know like 200 stack mages things like that they're really strong against and i find them to be really helpful uh we can go for just about anything we want right now i think i'll probably take the ranged unit damage i'll probably take we've got like 150 let's run this and see if it happens i don't know if it's going to happen but we're going to give it a try really good flame wall right there getting some good mileage we just really need the line to hold here and soften them up enough that spell casts start dropping them give me some more knights give me some more wizards actually our battle force came through that one in solid shape right there we didn't have to worry about it too much this is the wave that wiped me out on the last run so i was kind of worried about it i was a little bit concerned i don't know how many waves there are inside this kind of alpha demo but i'm really really enjoying the game i think it's pretty rad we'll get a few more centaurs just in case we go up against a horde fight and we need the cleave damage i can get more units without killing my 500 bonus let's go ahead and throw the centaurs in there might as well throw a couple more of the little shieldy boys in there too army's looking pretty good ready let's run her get some lightning off trolls going down pretty good right now we're getting bowled over like a little tiny bit but i don't think it's gonna be that bad with summons summons seem to be very very strong from where i'm sitting right now like summons by you a lot of time like basically they allow you to like infinitely reinforce positions as long as the cooldown comes up quick enough and you'll be all right uh let's go ahead and we will take a few more bandits and with what we've got going right now we've got 200 gold to throw around let's get rank 3 spells i'd like to level these up a little bit further since we're leaning on them pretty heavily take another upgrade spin we can summon three paladins now very nice and there's our paladins uh this game is using a sprite pack a fairly common sprite pack i don't know if you recognize some of the characters uh from like nomad survival and like two or three other games that are on steam but it is using sprites from an asset pack i do think it would distinguish itself a little bit further uh hopefully the game does good sales so that they could actually like customize out some of the the assets uh but you know it's not one of those things that hugely annoys me paladins you want to get in there and take care of this like i've never really been too bothered by like pixel art sprite packs or things like that as long as the game is good and makes enough adaptations to the overall idea to make it enjoyable ooh i can get five apprentices now yeah dude even more apprentices uh nine minotaurs and 12 mages oh boy it's getting a little scary in here i'm gonna give everybody a health boost even though i lose my level five gold bonus we got most of the mages with the chain lightning cast our line is not getting bowled over but it is kind of faltering give me a few more mages the mages hit really hard i think we would actually benefit pretty pretty aggressively by raising their attack power by another 50 or so although honestly we came out on top pretty solid i'm fairly happy with the victory right there how long is this demo is it going to end this is the farthest i've been now let me get 75 bucks because we're kind of in the market now to where we're just unlocking upgrades hey all normal levels have been overcome very nice you've defeated all the normal levels in the limited version of magen monsters and are now entering the end game spend all your gold now you will not be coming back and the end game rounds of monsters will spawn until your army will perish oh i kind of dig that though that's pretty cool all right let's spend all of our money and see how long we can last uh let's get range damage up we'll get melee damage up we will get spell casting damage up and that's pretty much all of our cash roll em boys roll them bones okay i i didn't mean to wipe out my own units right there but it's it's it's what happened all right we're gonna address it we're going to talk about it i'm not proud of it but it's a thing that occurred now let me get some more of you guys out here oh i thought there was going to be no break in between the rounds gotcha there is a break in between the rounds though which is actually fairly generous oh don't push too far boys keep on going keep on going you gotta fight for your right to keep living get a few more down dude i kind of want to do like an all summon build but since we've hit the end of the video here yeah that's pretty much my thought is a the 50 unit cap you got to crank that up this is one of the this this is one of those games that's gonna benefit tremendously from being divorced from any semblance of anything that even remotely looks like uh like sanity or decency or like standards uh you're gonna you're hey if you really wanna capture people and get them into this game you need to get it up to like 300 v 300 where it's just absolute mayhem and chaos other than that the only thing that i thought about is that when you mouse over things in your army menu uh you want some pop-up boxes right there with all of their stats likewise i'd like to see that for the enemies down at the bottom uh the ui is a little tiny bit utilitarian it gets the idea across and it functions perfectly fine but i do think some people are going to be like a little bit off put by kind of almost what look like default unity menus and so anyways that was my initial thought is that the menus kind of look cheap compared to the rest of the game and so maybe getting some menus on in there that have a little bit more like filigree or like a little bit more you know something something to them make them look a little bit more ornamental and a little bit more pretty might be an okay idea but other than that i think this is a great idea for a game like a really really fantastic idea for a game especially if you can kind of like meta game out and sort of if you can metagame meet out the content and what i mean by that is like every single run you're unlocking new units or you're unlocking permanent buffs for pre-existing units or you're unlocking like extra spells that you didn't have at the beginning of the game extra enemy monsters and stuff like that boss fights things of that nature different arenas i mean all of that's really really great and honestly if this game comes in a package that costs as much as like you know vampire survivors or something like three to five bucks this is exactly the kind of game that i put stupid amounts of hours into even though they're very very simple and they are very very kind of refined in their premise i love army versus army things it just it entertains me especially when they've got a really really good loop with the whole like money management system that they have in the game i like that a lot and so anyways i'm i'm digging the game i think this is a really really really good first pitch i honestly sincerely do i mentioned the stuff that jumped out at me uh custom sprites a little bit more of like a pretty sort of inline ui stat boxes for enemies and also for your characters inside the in between menu um but other than that zoom in zoom out pause i think you're i think you're in pretty good shape and of course the deployment phase as well that's just kind of my thoughts that's that's my thoughts i'll see y'all later thank you for stopping on in this is magen monsters i'm looking forward to seeing what they do with this one it's always the simplest games that get me just like with man just like exademic it's like it's the simple games that always get me i'll see y'all later thank you for stopping on and it's time for me to go bye-bye everybody

Channel: SplatterCatGaming

Views: 121,343

Keywords: Mage and monsters gameplay, mage and monsters walkthrough, mage and monsters playthrough, lets play mage and monsters, mage and monsters review, mage and monsters impressions, mage and monsters preview, mage and monsters guide, mage and monsters tutorial, mage and monsters download, mage and monsters demo, mage and monsters music, mage and monsters soundtrack, mage and monsters trailer, mage and monsters steam, mage and monsters pc game

Id: kgDpEmsnIMI

Length: 28min 39sec (1719 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022