Urban Mage is a quick fix score attack game that sees your mouse become the hand of a bedevilled mage. You have precisely 90 seconds to wreck havoc on a suburban neighbourhood. What will you destroy and how many humans can you kill in a combo? Urban Mage wants you to be the master of chaos.
Viewing the town from a birds eye perspective, you’ll see a hand hovering around that you control. Click on a human and you’ll literally splat them. Click on a car and it’ll swivel on the spot. Lights explode. Pools eject swimmers and so on. The map has over 700 clickable things (although trees and bushes feel like 200 of these) and not everything is clickable out of the box. As you become more powerful by clicking on things quickly, you’ll wrack up a combo and score multiplier that turns the screen evil red, thus seemingly unlocking more things to interactive with. Some other things are hidden away or require a bit of timing to trigger, like cars bashing humans, electrocuting them with lights or torching them on the BBQ. In the exploration mode, you can wonder off and find all these things and Urban Mage turns into an odd hidden object / death playground hybrid.
Sadly, when it comes to the score attack 90 second mode, its all about mouse mashing. I’m in the top 15 on the random leaderboard and top 20 on the main challenge mode. I just mashed the mouse whilst slinging myself around the single map with the right mouse button so I didn’t get caught in a dead end. Seemingly everyone else is doing this too so if there’s meant to be some hidden skills for highscores or chained reactions no one is finding it. Instead it’s a frantic 90 second clickathon with blood and then its all over. Sometimes you can trigger static tornadoes or portals but very little seems to happen because of actual tactics. As a result, I burned out quite quickly on the premise. One map, little variation (even random mode seems nearly identical) and with not much skill seemingly needed, its a funny game for 10 minutes and then its all done and dusted.
I think I’ll come back to Urban Mage for sparse score attack leaderboards with friends periodically but that’s about it. I like the idea but its shallow gameplay means its best played in very short bursts to make it feel fresh for the brief time you play it.
Review copy provided by developer.
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