Spellcaster University – A Review

It is hard to put the full experience with Spellcaster University into one box. Starting up, it appears to be a straightforward Management sim, and who has never wanted to manage a magical school that trains wizards against the forces of darkness. Especially if you are a 90s kid. There was enjoyment in this, but also some mixed messages when you begin to pile genres on top of this. Following a trend in indie titles, we get a card mechanic to control the management part of the simulator, and a roguelike to diversify it further. All three of these genres tend to be high on my playlist; had the game also thrown in Metroidvania, it would be as if the game merged my playlist into one experience.

Spellcrafter University sees you take the role of a headmaster for the titular school with the goal of training students to find their way into the world. You do this under a strict timeline presented at the top of the screen that tells you the time ticking away until the Demon Load sets forth upon your school and destroys it, forcing you to flee and start the school again somewhere else. This timeline can be extended based on your actions to grant you more time, but the goal is to complete a set of tasks before the inevitable. These tasks can sometimes be very specific and not actually unlock till shortly into your play, which can be annoying. Sometimes, having already messed up a build, you need to start from the beginning, even before you realize it.

There are six types of cards that you can earn through events or by purchasing with the corresponding points. These can earn you a range of items from new classes and rooms to items that can be placed in rooms to give buffs. When you get a new room, you need to click it into position based on its entrances, so your school is ever expanding, though you can get locked out of using some based on your placement later on in the round. Each field where you build your school has its benefits, including the wealth of its inhabitants and how much of space you have to build in.

Everything in Spellcaster University is represented with cards that you have in your hand represented at the bottom of the screen, though there is really no benefit to representing them this way over any other. There are no turns, so cards can be played first chance as you can, and simply act to represent the things that you can add to the school. This also includes students of multiple different kinds that can be added to your class roster. These card decks can also prove to slow the game down more than I wanted them to. Events don’t always offer cards or points to buy cards, and as the card prices increase with each use it there are points where my forward progression felt like it ground it to a complete standstill. Even times when I had multiple classes feeding one skill, as they all reward you with type points, also hit a standstill while in this waiting period.

Events, for their part, occur rather frequently, and while each area has its own unique ones, the average ones rarely evolve upon themselves and can force you to wade through them on a regular basis. It can also take much of the time in one area to begin reaping the best benefits from the multiple-choice events. Every so often, an event lets you travel to communities for items or to improve your standing with a certain group. These standings with the groups around you play an important part in getting what you want and building up your school the best you can. Since all options are based predominantly on how much they like you, you are limited to minor boosts early on, unless you get the right event to skyrocket your relationship to unlock events with raw benefit rather than the tradeoff of most options.

While these events have their benefits, they also occur often and need to be handled, whether you ignore them or not, all being done on a timer. They create moments where you wade through the same options over and over again, as progression completely stops. There were some interesting moments in this, but a lot of repetitive ones too, that especially later on don’t feel worth the reward to wade through. Duplicate rooms and buffs, which are often what you get, have their worth since you can place multiple rooms or use them to upgrade an existing one. I never really saw a noticeable increase in what you earn; either way, you can build either way.

The goal is to train wizards who give you bonuses, as well as stand a chance against the demon lord, This proves to be the hardest thing to get right. There is a percentage of what a student might end up being after a semester, and all have benefits, but only a few increase your prestige, which helps your school attract more students. Almost every stage will have a targeted goal of graduating students of a certain type, which requires, in a lot of cases, forgoing every other build type in order to build the class structure that doesn’t allow they to become anything else. In one stage, I managed this, this was how I handled it. Flip side, if you think the game stalls to halt doing whatever you want, to achieve completion, you will need to willingly exacerbate this.

The reason you want to complete these tasks is the roguelike mechanic that sees the collapse of your school as only a minor setback. Each area, once the time completes, tallies up what you have completed and rewards you with a buff on a new stage based on how many stars you earned, making the game slightly easier, but never so much that you don’t have to work directly towards these goals for the next go around. You will also receive a curse on each stage as well so you never feel like you are much further ahead than you were the last time. When a school falls, there is an annoying point where you need to graduate your remaining students, which, at my best point, was like 100. You can do it automatically, which I recommend, as nothing they offer carries over to the next school. An Adventurer’s guild member graduate gives the player 200 gold on a normal day, but getting 30 on the final day sees nothing equivalent added to your next region coffer, which is a bummer given you, as the player, don’t change roles between them.

Verdict

Spellcaster University has a lot of good ideas on display, which honestly might be its biggest issue. A management sim, wrapped with a card game, structured like a rogue-like, is a lot of concepts that need to work together, and they often don’t. The management sim is the best part of this, ass who has never wanted to run a magical school, but the card mechanic and the rogue-like at times feel needed, and honestly, a hampering to the core management mechanic at the center.

Elements like the constant events are interesting, but become incredibly repetitive and tedious as the game continues, and continue to pile up. My favorite element was getting to form relationships with the groups around your school, but even that could turn into into slow burn, repeating a low-yield relationship boost over and over again until you are finally able to take part in a wider range of them. Tasks, the core crux of the matter, often feel like they limit how you can actually build, too, creating a far slower grind to wade through. Too often, the grind gets in the way of the actual fun, which is a shame given the promise is there, in the fine print.

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