“Fireball! Freeze! Magic Missile!” I yelled about 47 times yesterday playing Mage Arena, the voice-powered wizardry game currently shooting up the Steam charts. I convinced some friends to pick up the $3, early access arena shooter based on the strength of the “say spells to cast them” pitch alone, and the verdict is in—Mage Arena is a blast.
It’s also dead simple: Make a lobby of up to eight players, divide into Wizards and Warlocks, and throw down on big maps. By default, the only weapon of your grey-bearded wizard is a spellbook activated by voice. Wanna cast Magic Missile? Flip to page four and speak it into existence. Yelling with a Gandelfian affectation is encouraged, but not strictly required.
Having messed with all sorts of voice recognition gimmicks in games over the years, I’m impressed by how functional Mage Arena is out of the gate. It automatically uses your default Windows microphone and, so far, I’ve had no problem casting fireballs, freeze bolts, and magic missiles on the first try.
I was worried all the constant chatter from players would get annoying, but thanks to proximity chat, distant players are quiet enough that their telltale spell barks are never overbearing, and often useful to know when a fireball’s flying my way.
What elevates Mage Arena beyond its voice gimmick is the spells themselves—overpowered, frightening explosions of mystical might that you’d expect from a level 20 D&D wizard. Fireballs hit like a localized nuke, instantly killing on a direct hit and obliterating the caster if they’re too close. Nailing a Freeze blast is tough, but the reward is turning your friend into a helpless block of ice while you ready a full magic missile barrage.
Then there’s all the fun stuff you can do besides blow each other up, like craft weird swords and staves out of logs and frogs, trade with a goblin village, or raid a crypt full of skeletons for loot. Maps are somewhat random each round—they’re made of octagonal chunks that are randomly shuffled around—and there’s also a small arena map made for 1v1 duels (though that player count is a recommendation, not a limit).
If you’re wondering how Mage Arena handles non-American accents, there are special settings for British and Indian—though the British one is currently disabled because “it did not work for anyone.”
So yeah, Mage Arena’s a bit janky: Solo developer jrjams has issued six patches in just four days, largely aimed at bug fixes and balancing tweaks. On the Mage Arena Discord server, jrjams said Mage Arena is their first game, and they’ve been working on it for around a year and a half.
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The original plan was to launch Mage Arnea at $5, but jrjams lowered it to $3 because they felt bad about the bugs.
“DUE TO A LARGE NUMBER OF BUGS THE GAME HAS TEMPORARILY BEEN DISCOUNTED TO 2.99. IT WILL BE RAISED TO 4.99 ONCE STABLE,” reads the Steam page.
After Steam’s 30% cut and taxes, jrjams estimates they’re making $1 per sale. Considering its 24-hour peak of over 10,000 concurrent players and 1,800 “Overwhelmingly positive” reviews, I imagine they’re happy with how it’s doing.
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