Buy Lichdom: Battlemage

The only thing this game really has going for itself is the graphics. The settings and landscapes are beautiful. But it stops right there. Nearly everything else about this game just makes is terrible.

Cons:

-Almost zero story. Some dude murders your wife and you want revenge. Dialogue that isnt pointless might give some insight into back story but its slow and slim.

-Combat is completely repetative (for both the enemies and yourself). Its the same 5 enemies thru out the entire game. They do the same attacks everytime... It gets boring fast. The boss fights always throw something unexpected at you tho, so expect them to take a few tries to defeat.

-Miserable inventory. So bad they give you a smart inventory that does almost everything for you and Ive almost completely relied on it because inventory and crafting new spells is just a mess.

-The game has trouble playing on some systems. I had to reinstall the game after experiencing the most trippy graphical failures Ive ever witnessed. The game worked after the second install with no further problems but Ive read that some people experience far worse.


Overall the game just isnt worth playing in my opinion. Too repetative. Too Linear. Even obnoxious at points. Oh and you know an action game is really f'ed when there is no jump key.

OK, that was a lot of fun. Just finished the game, and now I'm wondering/hoping for more. I'd like a DLC, or even a sequel. I'll admit the game was hard at first, and I even put the game down for several months. I've found that it was important to learn the crafting system, and make a good set of spells that allowed me to control the battle field and deal tons of damage. When I found that rythem, the enjoyment for me went through the roof, and I couldn't put the game down until I completed it.

The game was visually stunning, finding myself looking all around, and not just for all of the hidden areas. The voice acting was great, but what would you expect from the line-up they had, other than the best.
In the late game when I had a couple of synergy spells, like meteor and super nova the throw at the enemy dealing 10s of thousands of damage. I was having the time of my life.

This game did have a bit of a Skyrim feel for me, because all you see are your hands, and the game looked beautiful. It also had a bit of a Dark Souls feel, since you're dropped into this world, and you have to run around looking for clues, and read the journal entries for the lore. Also, if you want to beat this game, it's not going to hold your hand, you're going to have to just get good at the game. It also helps a lot to figure out the crafting of synergies.

OMG this game is AMAZING!! I have had it for quite a while, and admittedly it took a better graphics card to enjoy it to a fuller potential...but WOW it's good. It does have its drawbacks...the spell crafting is a bit difficult and the combat can get a little monotonous at times, but still it is a TON of fun to play and the graphics are amazing. Even with the drawbacks, there is no asterisk needed beside my recommendation...the benefits far outweigh any negatives. Highly recommend Lichdom:Battlemage!!!!!!

This game must've gotten some improvements since launch, as I have no idea what all the negative reviews are about.

This game is essentially what I wanted my mage playthrough of Dark Messiah of M&M to be. Whereas that game had some underwhelming spells and stupid animations that triggered when switching spells, this game lets you rock and roll between your three chosen abilities rapidly and encourages mixing and matching with bonus damage/status effects. To draw further comparisons to Dark Messiah, the story so far isn't great, but interesting enough to keep me going. I've been doing a lot of optional challenges that are fairly technical, so I can appreciate that a lot of people who thought this game was monotonous maybe did only follow the linear trail through the levels. Major props to this game for having an 'easy' inventory as well as advanced customization options to full tweak how you want to play.

Also worth noting that the game is very beautiful and good sound design so far.

I picked this up from Bundle Stars for $1 and so far it has been well worth it. I think this game has often been on sale for $5 and it'd still be worth checking out for that price. $40 regular is probably a bit steep, though.

For a game that I had 0 hype for and wasn't even on my radar, it's shocking how let down I was by Lichdom. The concept really grabbed me. I love wizards and the idea of a game that could really let you cut loose and let you wreck havoc with its entire focus put on making you feel like a mighty wizard among mortals seemed like exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, you'll quickly find that the game's definition of "badass wizard" is extremely narrow, and even worse, they really don't deliver.

The game brags having thousands of spells, and while that may be technically true, it rings hollow. Spells are crafted by combining elements that you unlock through the story and spell modifiers that drop as loot, so you have potentially infinite combinations on paper. The result however is that you have 3 spell types with a million permutations that only change a few decimal points are on the numbers that pop up. Elements are meaningless, just pick what particle effect you want on your projectiles. If you were expecting some real magic, like summoning dogs, lighting them on fire and throwing them at your enemies, you will be sorely disappointed.

The gameplay is where things really grind down though. The levels are just corridors a mile long with the only interaction being busting up the game's equivalent of decorative vases. The enemies are mindless and predictable, and so is fighting them. You walk into a clearing, combat music plays, a bunch of skeletons pop up out of the ground, walk backwards and throw ice/fire/lighting balls at them until dead. As said before you only have 3 real spells. A basic fireball in whatever flavor of particle effect have on, an AOE attack/bomb in whatever flavor particle effect you have on, and a block that does damage if you time it right. In whatever flavor particle effect you have on. The enemies have little variation either. Melee guy that runs up and slaps you, ranged guy that throws ♥♥♥♥ at you, and sometimes theres a ghost that floats around and freezes you. Expect to see groups of about 8 of them pop up every 15 feet, about 30 times a level. No puzzles, no talking and investigating, just walking from one fight to another. The game promises dungeons and quests made specifically for a wizard, unhindered by needing to allow warriors or barbarians through, and all I could think while playing it was how much more satisfying it would be bashing skeletons to pieces with a hammer than dealing with the game's slow clunky combat casting.

The gameplay honestly just feels like skyrim's magic. Hold down button to charge fireball/aoe, point at enemy. Except in Skyrim you could dual wield magic. And you could summon creatures. And you could cast enchantments on yourself. And you could summon magic weapons and slash and smash enemies if you wanted. And there were more than 3 kinds of spells. And And And. The list goes on. When a game focused soley and entirely on one thing can't even do that thing better than a game that really only includes that thing in an ancilliary manner, you've got a real problem. Skyrim is NOT the best game to experience being a wizard, yet Lichdom has chosen to emulate its combat system more closely than any other game I can think of, puts its entire focus on that one aspect, and frankly only improves on it by a degree of maybe like, what %5? If that? But guess what, skyrim isn't 40 bucks, and it's got an entire everything else going for it.

Lichdom has some things going for it, it looks good and It's got a good working loot system. It's not painful to play or anything, but it isn't great, and above all else, it's not what it promises to be. It doesn't make you feel like you're an almighty wizard any more than sweepng the driveway will make you feel like a bulldozer.

Tldr: lichdom falls short of everything promised. Weak magic, repetitive gameplay, tiny scope. If you want to feel like a real unstoppable wizard, play morrowind and craft fireballs the size of cities. If you want frantic action with an interesting spell casting system and cathartic blow stuff up fun, play magicka and trap your friends in bubbles full of landmines and zombies.

Usually when I write up a game, I start with all the good points and then transition to the bad stuff. I feel like this makes for a more positive reading experience overall, and should make my impression of it whole and clear by the end. I'm not going to do that this time, because the first thing you need to know about Lichdom is that it is too damn long. Now, this is not "the new Shadow Warrior is too damn long" or "the Hobbit trilogy was too damn long" or "presidential primary season is too damn long". This is an entirely new paradigm of too damn long, and you really need to understand this before even considering this game. My first playthrough took 22 hours. That's certainly long for an FPS, and short for some other genres with a little overlap here, but those 22 hours were stretched over eight levels. That's it! Furthermore, those eight levels play more like five, because three of them are continuations of the previous level. There's a lost city level, two ice levels, two desert levels, two swamp levels, and a proper city level. With each of those lasting 2-3 hours, you're going to be wandering through huge stretches of glacier and sand and muck.

But what really makes this game feel like it takes forever is the level design itself. Lichdom is constructed in the vein of an arena shooter, much like Shadow Warrior or Bulletstorm. Hallways lead to conspicuous arenas where you fight whatever spawns in, after which you take another hallway to another arena and so on and so forth. There are no puzzles, no doors, no interactables, almost no alternate paths, and very little reason to explore off the main trail. There are some side fights and usually one or two secret dungeons that can get you valuable piles of spell components, but in terms of gameplay you're just getting harder versions of the fights you're doing normally. So yes, the cardinal sin of this game is that it is 20+ hours of the same damn thing. What you get in the first two hours is what you're going to get times ten, with arguably even less variety as you progress.

Still with me? Good, because if you can get past that admittedly enormous flaw, there's a pretty great game in here. The whole reason to play Lichdom is to make good on the whole BADASS MAGE thing, and the magic system delivers. Instead of guns or swords, you fight solely with magic that you can customize to an impressive degree. Over the course of the game you unlock eight sigils, which are elements like fire and ice but also more curious concepts like corruption and delirium, and you can have three equipped and ready to use at any given time. Each sigil has three spells attached to it for you to use. There's a targeted spell that can be built as a homing missile, a bomb you lob, or a channeled beam. There's an AoE spell that can be an explosion, a pool, or a trap that must be triggered. And there's a nova that has conditions for triggering it depending on your shield (more on shields later). On top of that, you can determine the EFFECT of each spell, either direct damage, a status effect, or a damage multiplier, which also varies in its function by sigil. Fire spells can knock down and burn over time, lightning spells can stun and chain across enemies, delirium spells can mind control and make enemies flee, and so on.

And honestly, that's just the basics. Spells can critically hit for additional effects, or be charged before casting for a guaranteed crit. Charged spells can do a special crits charmingly named "apocalypticals" which give you a bonus effect based on the inflicting sigil. You can craft special synergy spells that use two sigils instead of one and have awesome room-clearing effects like collapsing black holes or summoning exploding zombies or conjuring a hurricane. You also build a shield spell for yourself that represents your hit points and determines additional abilities like teleporting and blocking. Spells are crafted out of Diablo-style loot drops from enemies and chests, color-coded by rarity (white-green-blue-purple-orange-red, of course). These components can be combined up to higher grades, disassembled for specific parts, or gambled away for a chance at rare components. If this sounds overwhelming, there's a Smart Inventory option that will upgrade your spells and combine up your components for you. Honestly though, if you're not in it to ♥♥♥♥♥ out over your spells, you're missing a huge part of the game. You've got a ton of control over your arsenal, and experimentation is incredibly fun with the enormous range of effects and combinations your can produce.

As hard as I slagged the level design, I have to say they are pleasing to progress through. The CryEngine makes for some gorgeous scenery, and a lot of love went into rendering the battlegrounds and cesspools you traverse. The levels themselves can be pretty creative, even if their layout is not. The third level is particularly impressive once you figure out what it is. While there is a lot of detail, it's worth mentioning that there are no destructables or physics objects. This felt particularly disappointing while slinging around devastating spells, even if the spell effects themselves are meaty and satisfying. There's a pretty good variety of enemies as well, or at least there would be for a shorter game. About half are introduced early on and the rest are slowly sprinkled in so there is some variety to the battles, even if you're going to be fighting every possible combination of foe at least twice.

The story is nothing special, classic fantasy revenge story, but the voice acting is pretty great. You get to play as Troy Baker or Jennifer Hale, and whichever one you don't pick becomes your NPC traveling buddy. And let me tell you, they are some clever, snippy jackasses. The other characters mostly talk like Tolkien characters but these two love cursing and quipping at each other and everything in a perfectly charming way. Your mentor figure is Clancy Brown (swarthy Lex Luthor from the Superman cartoons!), and the villains and side characters all turn in quality performances as well. I will say that the plot does something dumb in the swamp levels that cuts into the voice acting fun quite a bit, but by that point you're probably just trying to power through to the end. There are some pretty good and challenging boss battles, and the New Game Plus mode if you manage to beat the game is great for dicking around and tricking out your mage; it's a big series of challenge portals with different randomized fights and scaling difficulty.

So there you go, a writeup almost as long and meandering as the game itself. I've certainly gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it, chiefly because the spellcrafting and combat are excellent and the presentation is fantastic. But even I was getting sick of the game by the ten-hour mark, and that wasn't even halfway. I really pushed myself to finish it, and I'm glad I did, and I still kinda want to play it now and then. It's just important to know what you're getting into, and prepare for a lot of monotony if you want to get to the meat of the game. Pick it up on sale like I did ($5 is a steal for a game of this quality, at least!) and give the first level a try, and if you're cool with that for another 20 hours, enjoy depopulating a faraway kingdom with fire and locusts and zombies and time rifts. Forever.

Game was a ton more fun in beta. Then they went and changed a ton of minor (but very important mechanics in the game, like how often you get upgrades. Which was decent in beta, now with release its almost never). They also did a major overhall on the ability to dodge enemies (unlimited unless you limited yourself but got other boosts, now it is 3 dodges max, with a long long cooldown). I had 10 hours in the beta and loved the game, just played an hour of official release and I just cant bother. Their whole thing about making mages seem strong was completely destroyed with the official release, and like many games (as a mage) with every encounter I am spending atleast 2/3 of my time running away and less than 1/3 attacking. Which frankly makes me feel against like any old squishy mage, and you might as well just throw in a mana bar that regenerates over time because its comes out to the same thing, if you dont spend most of your time running way you just straight up die before you can cast enough spells to kill anything beyond the weakest of the weak enemies. I seriously cant believe how much they destroyed their main selling point when they went from beta to release.

This game is exactly what it says on the box. You are a mage. You have great power. You have no responsibility.

I have one huge gripe with this game and it's that nothing is explained, which makes the crafting system a ♥♥♥♥♥.

I had spells with 10 different variables listed on them. After playing through the game thrice I only understand HALF of them.

I'm not even kidding.

Luckily, you don't have to understand the chemistry of flammable materials in order to pull a trigger and the spells work just fine even if you don't know wtf you're even doing.

Just find a combo that gets the job done, and stick with it.

For example, after skimming tutorials on crafting I made a build that allowed me to debuff my enemies, freeze them in place, set them on fire, explode them into bloody chunks, STOP TIME FOR 5 SECONDS, and then kill all their friends.

This pleases me.

On my second playthrough I made a build which involved infecting my enemies with the eggs of stinging insects, waiting for the eggs to 'mature' and then killing the first enemy, which freed the insects to attack the second enemy, which then spawned more insects to attack the next enemy...and so on.

This self-perpetuating insect cascade scoured the board clear of anything that irked me.

And if anything survived I electrocuted it to death.

And don't get me started on the kamikaze ghoul you can summon who breathlessly chuckles at you while he searches for enemies to blow himself up against.

"Huehuehuehue. Huehuehuehueueueuueuueueue!" - Dat Ghoul

11/10

I admire this concept. I was excited by it when I first read the description of Lichdom somewhere on the Internet. World certainly lacked a game where you could really feel like a mage, casting endless spells and wreaking mayhem around yourself.

You even feel wrong while playing it, because until now, in any other game, this kind of gameplay has only been available through cheating. You are basically immortal (in case of "death" you actually just despawn and spawn back at the nearest checkpoint), you have an abyss of magical energy that never exhausts, and you can just keep throwing orbs of fire at your enemy until it dies. Overall, it's all you could only dream of if you ever chose to be a mage in an RPG. Do you remember how you had to sleep in order to restore your mana after killing every_single_enemy in Morrowind? Feels like nightmare now.

Lichdom makes use of the old principle of making magic that you could find in certain games in the past. You need to 'craft' spells by means of combining certain elements: the basic source (like fire), shaper (like projectile) and effect caused (like damage). Shapers and effects have several levels of strength and can be upgraded to improve them. The crafting system is tricky: a lot depends upon your ability to analyze the spell components, understand the way they work, and pick up those that would make the spell the most efficient. Thus, your work on the spells should be scrupulous and meticulous. Certain people fail to understand that, and it's rather funny to see them complaining that enemies are too strong, spells are too weak, and they can't just come through the whole game with one set of spells they created at the very beginning.

Speaking of which, you can have 3 sets of spells at hand, each set consisting of a single-target spell, a multiple-target spell and a protective spell. Personally I could use more creativity and variability in both crafting and management of spells: you can't combine two different kinds of shapers or effects, for example, or have two single-target spells in one set. Still, I think it's fine the way it is.

People criticize Lichdom for making promises about thousands of possible spells that come out to be not entirely true. There's a bit of marketing manipulation in that, indeed; it would have been more technically correct to speak of hundreds than of thousands. The arithmetics is as follows: 3 types of spells - 3 ways to attune them - 7 main types of shaping - 8 basic sources; that's 504 in total. Also, unique and extra-strong synergy spells can exist between the basic sources, adding another 49. The rest of spell variability resides upon random modifications that come up with certain shapers and effects: damage boosts, projectile speed increasers, critical hit chance multipliers etc.

I have also seen a number of reviewers who believed that basic sources ("sigils" by in-game terminology) are all the same and only change the color of projectiles you cast. That's basically a bitter mistake of people who saw the first three sigils and decided that they've seen them all. I feel pity for them, because they will never know that you can hang your opponents in the air and smash them into the ground, summon an army of creatures to assist you, slow the time down, control the minds of your enemies, create black holes that tear them apart, cast meteor showers or whirlwinds of fire and ice etc. Also, each sigil is suited for a certain purpose, so by means of careful and skilled attunement you can create incredibly powerful spells. What do you think of killing the main endgame boss with all his monstrous health in a couple of minutes?

CryEngine obviously is not designed for open-world games, so this game has a strong resemblance to a first-person shooter where you just follow a wide but still limited passageway. I would have preferred a greater freedom of exploration and probably some other things that might make Lichdom more Skyrimey as well; but maybe it's not that bad, because you have enough trouble dealing with all those shapers and augments to care about grabbing loot or running around with a map.

There's also been a lot of criticism for repetitive gameplay. As one person had said, "you just travel from one pack of enemies to another". The trick is that Lichdom is a shooter (as I've just said), and any shooter can be called repetitive. Games of that genre are played for the action and for the process of killing enemies standing in your way. Take Crysis 2 or 3, that are built upon the same engine, as an example. Can't you say that it's travelling from one bunch of CELL soldiers or cephalopods to another? Meh, you can even call Half-Life repetitive: "oh come on, kill some headcrabs - solve a puzzle, kill some zombies - solve a puzzle, repeat ad nauseam".

I won't be saying anything about graphics here, because again, it's CryEngine. You know what I mean.

You can choose whether you'll play with a male or a female, but there are no editing options for the character. That's not a big problem, because the game doesn't have a third-person view, so you won't really get a lot of chances to enjoy their exterior. I enjoy the female character's voice instead; it's quite nice, and it reminds me of Commander Shepard.

I've said about things I liked and things I'm fine with, now I'll say what troubles me.

The game is still slightly buggy. It's not critical, it won't crash, freeze, or make you lose your progress, but there might be minor issues like character starting to move automatically in one direction with no way to stop it except for exiting to game menu and loading the game again, or birds hanging in mid-air after they were supposed to fly away. It's a new release, though, and probably these things will be dealt with in future.

It also seems to me that spells and their effects are not that action-like. It's a common trouble in many games, and it partially exists in Lichdom too. What happens if a fireball impacts an enemy and explodes? Yes, your guess was right: the enemy continues to run at you without even losing a step. This is a fireball, after all; it should knock the enemy off its feet and bump it into the nearby wall. If you decide to use a lightning projectile, be ready that your character will cast a slowly flying orb of electricity instead of a flashing lightning bolt. I'd like to see a swifter and more explosive gameplay. Maybe it's a matter of personal taste, though.

So,
the primary positive feature of Lichdom is its concept to unshackle the mage,
and the primary negative feature of it is that I do not actually feel badass. I feel cool, but not badass.

In general, I like this game, and I support it. To me, its virtues outweigh its drawbacks. If you like the idea behind it as much as I do, if you ever dreamed of limitless magical power, then don't hesitate and get it - it won't disappoint you.

No, this is not Skyrim. It is more of a hallway shooter with f***ing awesome spells. There is no open world or anything like that. It's more like a Serious Sam, or Painkiller with magic and a great spell crafting system, which is fine with me, I love that kind of a game. Sometimes you just want to run around and kill things in all sorts of fun, creative ways. Perfect for late night gaming sessions. It's also $20 less than your typical "big deal" full release, or even much less than that if you got it when it was early access, like I did. I already have my deep RPG's, more than I can even play. It's nice to just have something like this to sit back with a beer, pump up the headphones, relax and enjoy at the end of a long day. Bottom line, it is just a fun time.