I’ve been constantly flummoxed by my own complete and utter distaste for MOBAs. On paper (on screen? on digital?) MOBAs should be perfect for me. They are straight-up team battles. They involve tight understanding and execution of your and every other hero’s skills. And they’re often third-person, over-the-shoulder perspective. All the things that I would list as important features. I stink at FPS games, what can I say.
And yet, I haven’t found a MOBA that I actually enjoyed yet. There have been a few that were fun for the moment. Playing the many versions, re-implementations, and revivals of Paragon, including the most recent in Predecessor, have had their highlights. But overall I walk away a bit let down.
Often it has to do with the speed of combat. Time-to-kill is a hard metric to get right, and most games flail with it, but many MOBAs make me feel like I’m swinging a ten ton hammer. It’s just so slow. Over in the MMO PvP world, we’ve got Guild Wars 2’s combat, which can have you spiked down before you finish blinking. And the issues I had with one of the big daddies of the MOBA genre – SMITE – were really bad.
Enter Spellcasters Chronicles, which shocked me. It’s fast-paced and engaging, even in early access, and the climax where titans are spawned, rampaging, and overall burninating the countryside was epic.
It’s a MOBA, OK?
To understand how the game plays, just start with MOBA and we’ll carve its niche from there. It’s a bit funny that developer Quantic Dream describes Spellcasters as a team-based, action-strategy game without putting MOBA anywhere on the box. If there’s a checklist of the key features I expect out of a MOBA, then Spellcasters ticks every one of them off. Multiple contested lanes (typically three of them) – yes. NPC controlled minions spawning and auto walking their lane to contest and claim enemy towers while simultaneously defending your own – yes. Hero teams where you level up during the match – yes.
There’s a light bit of story because of course there is. It doesn’t matter in the least, but I guess a game would be sort of weird not to have something. It’s explained through the tutorial that immediately launches once you load into the game (if you’re able to – more on that below). The voice acting is well done, and it’s a good natural progression into how to play and the core mechanics. As a pro-tutorial gamer, this one gets a positive reception from me.
There are currently only six heroes in the game, which feels a bit limited. Each one has a really nice art style and unique theming. I really like the Fire Elementalist. That’s no shock to anyone who knows my affinity for fire users.
Another pretty cool feature is that while your hero choice does matter in that each one has a unique basic attack, defense, and ultimate ability (as well as three passives), the remainder of your skills are entirely customizable. Spellcasters refers to it as your Deck, but it’s really just your hotbar. You get five skills that are entirely yours to fill.
And those choices fall between minion summons and actual combat skills. So you could build out where you have few to no summons, or perhaps you’re insane and choose to only use summons and have no added combat skills. Perhaps if you’ve got a proper team comp, it would make some sense to have a player dedicated primarily to summons and others to the direct PvP – then that build would make sense.
At the beginning of the game, only a select number of the fairly vast options are available, but as you play matches you’ll earn credits that can be spent to unlock additional skills. It’s a cool system that I really appreciate. It offers some good build decisions.
During a match there are also chests that can be looted to replace some of your existing skills with upgraded and improved abilities. During the heat of a match, it was tough for me to tell what I was supposed to do with those skills to make sure they replaced a skill I didn’t want to use anymore. At least I suspect there was something that prevented it from being completely random.
Now, I mentioned that there are minions summoned during a match, but unlike in some games where it’s a constant stream being generated or that appear based on your team’s progress during a match; in Spellcasters you actually have to place the minions yourself. You’ve got to fly over to a zone you control and cast them. You pick up XP by defeating enemies to refill the skill so that you can continue to summon more too.
The last major feature that made Spellcasters stand out to me was the titans. Near the end of the match, and I wasn’t sure whether there was a time limit or whether I’d just gained enough XP over the course of the match, but eventually you’re able to summon a titan to join in the fray. These are colossal monsters that are extremely difficult to take down and do a huge amount of damage to the towers they are attempting to overtake. I know that Gigantic: Rampage Edition had a similar titular moment when massive monsters participate in the fight, but these titans are truly epic in scale.
You gotta fight until the end in this one!
Once a match begins, I went through the steps that I’ve come to understand as common in a MOBA: pick a lane, summon some minions, and try to kill the enemy or their summons to level up. Rinse and repeat until you’ve progressed enough that the game begins to get exciting.
And oh boy does it get exciting! I’ll be honest and say I was pretty flat and mid about the experience throughout most of the match. Not because it was doing anything bad or boring per say; I just was kind of going through the motions. It was just fine.
But then the Titans began to appear. The scale of which made the whole match feel like an epic, movie moment showdown. You’re flying through the air, throwing spells left and right, all while dodging to survive the enemy’s assault. There are dozens of minions, both on the ground and in the air, vying to take control over the contested zone and then, centered in there, are titans. These insanely large monsters make you feel like a mosquito just pecking away at them.
And the true moment of awe came when two titans engaged each other in combat! It felt like Godzilla and King Ghidorah were suddenly real and I was just there to spectate. It was pretty awesome. Getting backhanded by a titan wasn’t so much, fun but that’s to be expected.
Technical difficulties almost killed it
Now, a final note before I close this one out that I have to mention is all the technical hurdles I had to jump through to even play Spellcasters. Truly, it’s one of the worst and toughest set of issues I’d gone through. I had to power up and install the game on four machines before I finally found one that would run the game.
First, I attempted to play the game on my new (or new-ish at this point) Linux rig. While I realize Wine and Proton aren’t perfect substitutes for a Windows PC, I haven’t had any real issues playing any games on it yet. Some games weren’t optimized and took a little bit of massaging to get to run on it, but I’ve never experienced a full on crap-out the way I did with Spellcasters. It simply refused to run. I’d launch the game, it would think about it for a few minutes, and then it just closed back to Steam. Very weak.
So I launched on my tried and true Windows 10 PC. It’s an oldie, but everything runs on it. Not great by any measure, and usually I have to set new games down to the lowest setting, but it will run. Spellcasters simply crashed after launching. No errors or warnings even – just back to Steam again. OK, how about the Steam Deck? Nope! At least with the Steam Deck, though, I got a warning that the game required 16GB of RAM, and my deck had only 14GB free. Of course, if it didn’t run on my Manjaro PC, odds were low for the Steam Deck, but it was still a noble attempt!
Ironically, this column was on the verge of not existing at all thanks to all these issues. Finally, as is usually the case in most things, my wife bailed me out: “Do you want to try it on my machine?” So I did, and… it opened! It brought up the splash screen to click and open the game. Then, I kid you not, when I clicked to open, it crashed again! Holy moly! Four PCs, four crashes! I asked her one more time to launch it and click open the moment the splash screen appeared, and then boom! We were in. The rest is history.
I will note again that the game is in early access; obviously we can make allowances for a game that isn’t fully done cooking. If you can get Spellcasters Chronicles to play on your rig and you’re a fan of MOBAs, then you should certainly check it out. It’s free and available on Steam right now.
