It’s vital that you pay careful attention to your surroundings and pick up everything that isn’t nailed down. 7 Mages can be very difficult, particularly if you can’t get on with its puzzles. This makes backtracking a breeze, and is a very handy feature for a portable RPG.ĭon’t think the presence of that feature means the game is a push-over. Simply open up the map and drag the character icon to any square you’ve set foot on, and provided there are no obstacles to block your way, you’ll instantly appear there. On top of the production values, 7 Mages also shows it’s a modern game by allowing you to easily zip around to any location you’ve visited, at no cost. Musical magic is a critical component of the game’s strategy, and the ambient sound effects are excellent. Sound plays a big part of the game as well. Monsters and NPCs are well-constructed and nicely animated, and even the still character portraits are drawn well. There’s quite a variety of locales on display here, and they all look outstanding. For starters, the visuals are absolutely gorgeous. While the game has one of its feet planted firmly in the past, it’s not strictly beholden to it. It’s an odd mix that feels like a Bradley-era Wizardry game in terms of mechanics, with some faint hints of SSI’s Gold Box series in the combat set-up. The puzzles in the game are more reminiscent of an adventure game, often requiring you to find and use particular items to progress. It’s sort of like playing a turn-based strategy game from a first-person view. Its combat is turn-based, and it allows you to split up your party members and control them individually. For the most part, 7 Mages resembles a first-person dungeon-crawl RPG, along the lines of things like The Quest ($4.99) and Legend Of Grimrock ($4.99). You’ll get interesting conversations here and there, but the focus rests squarely on the gameplay. It’s a decent enough framework for an RPG, though 7 Mages doesn’t do as much with its story as I would have liked. Replace the little rice-farming town with an island where magic materials can be harvested, the bandits with prospectors, and the samurai with mages, and you’ve basically got the gist of it. The story of the game is another take-off of Akira Kurosawa’s benchmark film Seven Samurai. Its apparent inspirations are numerous, but it’s safe to say that if you’ve got any love for computer RPGs from the late 1980s and early 1990s, you should definitely give 7 Mages a try.

7 Mages is a great addition to the iOS’s RPG library, and one that fills a particular niche few other games on the platform do. Well, the game has its flaws, but nothing like what I was fearing. For whatever reason, the game wasn’t on my radar at all, and when it released seemingly out of nowhere with gorgeous screenshots and some lofty comparisons being thrown around, I was skeptical. For the first half of my 20 hours and change with 7 Mages (Free), I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

7 mages map