Magic Stones time!

This is a paid review.

There just are not very many games out there when it comes to the Mac. But there is one indie developer trying to make a difference in the mac games arena. That’d be Winter Wolves Computer Games. You’re also probably wondering… huh? What is with that title? Magic Stones? It’s basically a fantasy game that is played out in a battle cards style. You’ll understand if you think Magic: The Gathering. Similar type of game except on a virtual scale. The storyline itself is based on Celtic mythology with you playing a druid that holds one of four types of magic at your disposal as your strength.

Playability:
This game was pretty interesting right off the bat. I tend to stray towards RPGs usually, so it was a good fit and it reminded me of the open-source game,Battle of Wesnoth. A couple bugs in the game itself, but nothing serious. Most of it was interface issues or the demo timer issue. The demo was fairly interesting being that while it hijacked the mouse for the first setting up part (you can’t see the mouse when you move it past the window itself). Once you’re on the main screen, it works just fine. The demo timer actually resets itself whenever you re-launch the game so you can basically play 90 minutes of Magic Stones, quit and start playing another 90 minutes. The re-playability is probably low once you beat this since all of the cards you can get are acquired through quests that are plainly written out. There is no sense of variable where there could be 250 cards but you only have a chance at the ten rare cards maybe say… one percent chance.

Other than that, the game itself is pretty smooth and fairly easy to understand without a manual if you’ve played enough RPGs. Turn based card game where you can summon avatars (5 at a time) to do your bidding or cast magic spells. With limited mana per battle, you have to be careful of how you strategize and use your mana carefully. Each avatar has a normal and power attack, defensive mode, and also special attack. Thus, it makes the game fairly interesting with the different shifts in battle sequences.

Controls:
The whole game seems to be a mouse-driven game. Most of the interfacing is fine, but there are times that you wish you could have a keystroke that does a “repeat last command” or “repeat last target”. It get repetitive when you were summoning the same avatar for all five spots and you had to click and drag for every spot. Same with targeting an enemy. Perhaps we’ll see some customization in controls later on in this game. That would make this game a bit easier to control.

Multiplayer:
None to speak of from what I could tell from the demo. Again, this game was fun to play, but the growth perspective of it could rise exponentially if there was a chance to battle against other players, buy booster packs, or do a cooperative battle against enemies. Being that it’s a turn based game, networking and growth of it would make it all the more fun.

Synopsis: All in all, this was a pretty fun game for MacOSX. If you’re big into battling card games, then you would probably find yourself immersed in this one alongside the quests and such that you would have to perform while you gained experience and eventually artifacts and more avatars. The nice thing about Magic Stones is that it’s been around long enough to not only have free expansion packs (more quests for the registered user) but you can also buy an add-on called The Magic Shop. For five Washingtons, you can have a chance at beefing up your druid just a bit more or buying artifacts outright instead of searching for them. You can buy this game at http://www.winterwolves.com and it’ll run you $24.95.