|| REVIEW || Magnia (PC)
Developed By : NoDeadLineGames Published By : NoDeadLineGames
Category : Puzzle, Physics, Indie Release Date : October 21, 2019
A lot of game genres are easily defined, such as shooters : they have guns and you make lots of pew-pew. However the puzzle genre is a lot more widespread, and it's why I love it so much. These games can be straight up puzzles, making you assemble digital jigsaw pieces, or you'll have to solve some brain-scratching riddles, or even others where navigating and using the strength's of a characters platforming abilities is the puzzle itself. And it's this love for puzzle games that has us diving into Magnia.
This game is a simple physics-based puzzle games that has you assembling pieces of toys that a lot of players may recognize from their childhoods. You'll need to put together things like a Tamagotchi, Lego figures, and giant horseshoe magnets just to name a few. In addition to these puzzles, you'll also find yourself playing tower games, building up to a certain height with a series of blocks, balancing weights on scales, and stacking rings on pegs.
On the surface, the game's puzzles aren't all that complex. There are a handful of different difficulty levels that you can choose from, maxing out at an "Insane" choice. My hope for this top difficulty was that the items would be broken into miniscule pieces, since Normal had things breaking into no more than half a dozen pieces. Sadly, this was not the case, but I'll discuss that shortly.
Each level consists of you completing the puzzle laid out before you, and racing against a clock to do so. Initially the item will float before you, and once you start the puzzle officially, it will break into it's pieces. You'll need to grab them with the left click, or spin and rotate them with the right click to get things to line up properly and fit back together. Once you have reassembled the item, you'll be shown your personal best time on the level you just completed, as well as the best time for that level in the world of players.
Along with these items, each level has a bonus hunt of needing to find three golden stars. These stars are hidden just about anywhere you can think of, so you'll need to pick up and maneuver quite a bit of things in the room to find them. Once you do...yay, you found three stars! As far as I could tell these assisted in opening up optional bonus levels through the games map, but nothing else.
Now, I mentioned above that Magnia has a number of different difficulty levels. These...aren't really that impressive. The "challenge" for playing on Insane comes from how the puzzles start. In the lower difficulty, the item you'll be piecing back together sits stationary, but on Insane it spins around very quickly. Once you activate it, the item breaks into pieces which will now go flying and scattering to the extremes of the screen. However, most of them just fly right back and leave you only with a simple challenge of finding the right rotation and lining it back up with everything else.
Conceptually, I thought Magnia was pretty good. The complexity of needing to manipulate free-floating 3-D objects was a nice step up from just having to assemble flat pieces which are already locked into the correct rotation. So while there aren't a lot of pieces to put back together in most cases, needing to find the right spin can be a little tricky.
However, it was the game's performance that left me unsatisfied in the end. The first main issue wasn't exactly with the game itself, rather getting it to capture properly to be able to stream it. This was an interesting issue to fix since the game doesn't offer much for graphical customization other than texture levels. Luckily one of my mod's was able to guide me toward a program that was able to cap the frames and help me. But then after all that struggle, the game just crashed anyways.
Off-stream, these issues didn't persist as long as I kept the game's graphic settings toned down. If it hadn't been plagued with these (albeit somewhat minor) issues, Magnia would have been a very easy game to shout from the mountaintops, especially for lover's of puzzle games. Yet, these issues are hard to ignore after looking at the game's recommended system requirements (not just the minimum) and realizing that my PC was...well over-equipped for this game, and still suffered.
If and when the game gets patched to resolve things, I would be more than happy to revisit this title and give it a second opinion. As of now though, the best I can say is it's fun to play for as long as it let's you keep playing. If you can avoid these issues (or again, if they get patched up and fixed) the game is a lot of fun and easy to sink time into. In the end though, there are puzzle games out there of better quality, and cheaper price tags.
Game Rating : 4/10
Pick up the game HERE on Steam
Game played on PC (Steam) and a code was
graciously provided by the developers.
