Melee combat is not an option here, and it never feels needed. Further exposition reveals itself in the purple 'echoes' enacting scenes from the past, but it tends to get lost among the banter and superior performances of voice actors Jennifer Hale and Troy Baker.īut provided your system can handle it, these concerns never entirely undermine Lichdom: Battlemage's primary goal of taking the archetypical mage class and realize its full potential by unshackling it from the mana bars and cooldowns that normally confine it. Choose the male, and the roles are reversed. Choose the female, for instance, and the male alternative becomes a sidekick that flits in and out of reality and informs you of what lies ahead. Developer Xaviant here gives us a flimsy tale of revenge against some ruffians known as the Cult of Malthus, but the hows and whys of the simple fiction are never so meaningful as the playful relationship between the two playable characters. My early troubles were appropriate for a first-person roleplaying game that follows the exploits of a mage that only learns his or her craft after a grizzled wizard slaps some magic cuffs their wrists seconds after the opening cutscene. Lichdom: Battlemage thrives on these moments, and they soothe the burns inflicted by the poorer aspects of its design.

I adjusted my strategies and, at last, I was victorious. But then I took a step back, studied the tooltips, and made new spells accordingly. All of the strategies and spell combinations I'd spent the last couple of hours perfecting on weaker enemies now proved no more powerful than feathers against a freight train, and I'd steeled myself for the possibility that I'd never see the second stage. Had I been playing Lichdom: Battlemage with a gamepad, I'm sure I would have flung it across the room during the first boss fight.

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