Quite possibly the worst PS3 exclusive. Built around an original idea, the developers essentially created a bog-standard fantasy RPG. Only rather than going with any form of combat traditionally found in the genre they made the action that of a third-person shooter. While this is creative and even rather compelling, the problem is that due to constraints with the budget and likely time as well the game was released in a clearly unfinished state. Something that can be seen in the bare-bones plot, mind-boggling design decisions, and graphics that were behind the times even back in 2014.
As a game where you play as a newly awakened god, Magus certainly does a good job of making you feel like an all-powerful deity. There's no challenge at all as legions of enemies fall at your feet. Rather than being entirely intentional however, this is more so the result of poor difficulty balancing. There are a lot of broken systems in place that allow you to get too strong too quickly, such as the companion who can turn any item you're not using into a permanent stat boost. Plus, the vast majority of threats you encounter are melee attackers while you use an entirely ranged form of offense. So you can literally just strafe around hordes of foes without taking any damage.
Things are so easy you can pretty much autopilot your way through every battle by holding down the R1 button and circling. Your basic attack is a rapid-firing spray of magic that doesn't use mana and makes leveling up kind of pointless. Why invest your skill points in new abilities when the best spell you can get is given to you from the very beginning and doesn't run on a cooldown timer like rest do after all? It also doesn't help that some of them are rather bafflingly implemented. Like how your defensive knock-back included to help prevent you from getting hurt on those rare occasions when you get cornered counter-intuitively takes away some of your health whenever you use it.
Unfortunately, the writing doesn't fare much better. It's evident that this is the area that got the least amount of attention during the development cycle. The lore is weak, the story is often nonsensical, and there's no character or world-building going on at any point. The conflict never makes it out of the set-up phase that would occur in the prologue of any other RPG so nothing really significant happens by the time the credits roll. It also tries to give players the illusion of choice through dialog choices, but conversations always turn out the same way no matter what you pick and there's fairly regularly only one option to choose from anyways. The lines themselves also make your character an unlikable jerk by default. Why the devs decided to make nearly every interaction with another person end with you announcing you're going to murder them I have no idea.
Despite all of its flaws, or perhaps as a result of them, I can see Magus having a bit of a cult following as unlike a lot of bad games it isn't frustrating to play. In fact, it's short and breezy making it effortless for the right audience to have a quick laugh at it's expense. Personally though, I found it to be too boring to even ironically enjoy as I ran around its maze-like levels of identical corridors blasting any brainless knight or monster foolish enough to get in my way. That's because it lacks the charm and hidden depth that makes titles like Two Worlds or Deadfall Adventures endearing regardless of their faults.
You can tell Aksys and Black Tower pushed this out incomplete though it was due to not having the sufficient resources to fully realize their vision with the hopes that it would break even and just maybe somehow perform well enough that they could try again with the sequel set up in the cliffhanger ending. Obviously that didn't happen. Instead what we got is a weird, largely overlooked footnote in the PS3's library that will one day be completely forgotten. Which as sad as that may be is a fate I can't say the game is not deserving of given that it is legitimately terrible.
4/10
As a game where you play as a newly awakened god, Magus certainly does a good job of making you feel like an all-powerful deity. There's no challenge at all as legions of enemies fall at your feet. Rather than being entirely intentional however, this is more so the result of poor difficulty balancing. There are a lot of broken systems in place that allow you to get too strong too quickly, such as the companion who can turn any item you're not using into a permanent stat boost. Plus, the vast majority of threats you encounter are melee attackers while you use an entirely ranged form of offense. So you can literally just strafe around hordes of foes without taking any damage.
Things are so easy you can pretty much autopilot your way through every battle by holding down the R1 button and circling. Your basic attack is a rapid-firing spray of magic that doesn't use mana and makes leveling up kind of pointless. Why invest your skill points in new abilities when the best spell you can get is given to you from the very beginning and doesn't run on a cooldown timer like rest do after all? It also doesn't help that some of them are rather bafflingly implemented. Like how your defensive knock-back included to help prevent you from getting hurt on those rare occasions when you get cornered counter-intuitively takes away some of your health whenever you use it.
Unfortunately, the writing doesn't fare much better. It's evident that this is the area that got the least amount of attention during the development cycle. The lore is weak, the story is often nonsensical, and there's no character or world-building going on at any point. The conflict never makes it out of the set-up phase that would occur in the prologue of any other RPG so nothing really significant happens by the time the credits roll. It also tries to give players the illusion of choice through dialog choices, but conversations always turn out the same way no matter what you pick and there's fairly regularly only one option to choose from anyways. The lines themselves also make your character an unlikable jerk by default. Why the devs decided to make nearly every interaction with another person end with you announcing you're going to murder them I have no idea.
Despite all of its flaws, or perhaps as a result of them, I can see Magus having a bit of a cult following as unlike a lot of bad games it isn't frustrating to play. In fact, it's short and breezy making it effortless for the right audience to have a quick laugh at it's expense. Personally though, I found it to be too boring to even ironically enjoy as I ran around its maze-like levels of identical corridors blasting any brainless knight or monster foolish enough to get in my way. That's because it lacks the charm and hidden depth that makes titles like Two Worlds or Deadfall Adventures endearing regardless of their faults.
You can tell Aksys and Black Tower pushed this out incomplete though it was due to not having the sufficient resources to fully realize their vision with the hopes that it would break even and just maybe somehow perform well enough that they could try again with the sequel set up in the cliffhanger ending. Obviously that didn't happen. Instead what we got is a weird, largely overlooked footnote in the PS3's library that will one day be completely forgotten. Which as sad as that may be is a fate I can't say the game is not deserving of given that it is legitimately terrible.
4/10