Magic Survival (Android): Simplistic mobile survival success story, a Review

Last Updated on: 8th January 2022, 04:18 pm

Magic Survival is a simple but surprising magic-themed survival game that excels in a single session or multiple short sessions of gameplay, depending on how long you can manage to survive, of course.

I don’t know about anyone else, but Survival style games kind of put me on guard, too many over-ambitious Steam titles claiming that identity I suppose, but Magic Survival takes the concept of a survival game and distils it down to the basics for this simple but solid mobile game.

Magic Survival, the review

What is Magic Survival?

Magic Survival is a simple mobile survival style game, as you might be able to guess from the name. It’s expected to be available with our friends over at GameExp here in the near future, and can be grabbed on the Google Play store here right away.

The developer of the game, LEME, has provided a brief video of some gameplay here, for those who’d like to get a very short glance at what we’re going to talk about before we dive right in.

Now, if you’re still with me, let’s get into how this plays, shall we?

A snippet of gameplay

Magic survival starts quite simply, you hit play, select the only open class available at first, and hit confirm on the first level, Array Zone. You appear in a nice, clear open area, just chilling in the middle of the screen.

And then a small black scribble-looking blob starts moving towards you.

Your character shoots it on their own, of course. You’re not crazy, that thing was clearly angry at you, charging like that. But then there’s three more of them, followed by another six…

A mere 15 seconds later, you’re fleeing away from a veritable wall of these black squiggly monsters. All trying to get close enough to you to do whatever it is they attack you with. Biting? Clawing? Maybe they want to be the only drawn object in the world and attack you with an eraser, it’s not entirely clear.

What is clear is your vision will go red when they do hit you, and that’s pretty universally known as a bad thing.

This is a pretty accurate summary for the game in honesty. You’re met with a simple bit of information, and you must react to it. It’s a very basic core loop, but it works well. There’s danger, so you must avoid it. Your vision flashes red, so you should get away from what causes it.

There’s a shiny thing on the ground? Oh, you know you’ve gotta pick that up.

And as you might expect, picking that up gets you rewards, or at least progress towards earning rewards. Given enough of them, you’ll earn a level up with new ability choices. Now given the giant horde chasing you at all times, movement speed sounds useful, doesn’t it?

But what happens if we pick up a few more, will we get other options? You betcha. How’s fire breath sound?

Pretty damn useful for dealing with the horde chasing you, yeah. There’s only a slight problem. Fire breath fires where you face, so you have to move around to adjust your facing and then use it. Now, you might be able to see what killed me here in this image, precisely one large blob evades the edge of the flame, and tapped me for the last sliver of my health for playing aggressively.

So where do you go from here? You hit a death screen, of course, with a summary of how you performed. Here’s an example from a better run.

Speaking of that better run, here are just a few shots of the gameplay from it. You can start seeing how crazy the game starts to get in the third image.

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Any issues to be aware of?

The core gameplay, just like another mobile game, Clusterduck, that I reviewed recently, is well defined and works great. Due to this simplicity, it’s pretty immune to bugs by nature. Arguably that can be a double-edged sword because your gameplay won’t vary a huge amount between games, but relying on a solid gameplay loop is an excellent way to minimize bugs, and it works well here.

There really aren’t many issues to be concerned about, though I’d point to both the premium pricing in the game, which I’ll cover later in detail, and the text on some screens seemingly suffering from a bad translation for that question.

By and large, the game doesn’t need to rely on text, the gameplay is simple, short and relies well on that established core loop.

But the text where it does appear is not overly stellar. In the Artifact found screen shown previously, for example, the second part of the description isn’t overly clear. Similarly, the death screen loses a bit of the ominous appeal it would otherwise have when the text says

Magic beyond the law of physics

However it couldn’t change the fate of all creature,

only to surrender to the mortality

Magic Survival, Death Screen, – LEME

It’s close to being good. But it’s just not quite there. “Magic beyond the laws of physics” sounds like a great way to make your character sound terrifyingly strong, but when its followed by “it couldn’t change the fate of all creature” or even just because it was missing the s in laws, its undermined heavily and doesn’t land right.

Premium Features

The shop is available in the main menu and offers a few options. The chief of which is a remove ads purchase for $3.99, which seems a tad steep unless you very much enjoy the game. With that said, ads throughout the game are quite rare – typically only encountered when the player selects revive on the death screen, so the dev isn’t trying to force you into it, and the game is fairly ad-free without it.

Typical gameplay itself is notably free from banner ads and the like, as well. This is a point in favour of the devs, but at the same time, it does mean the value of the remove ads one-time buy is lower, as there is simply less to gain from buying it.

Other options available for purchase include Lab notes, that mention doubling rewards for $2.49, a Sample, which offers +5000 points for $1.99, and a Cell Atlas, which offers +25k points for $7.99. The shop screen does suffer from the text issues again however, as it’s not entirely clear what points this is referring to, or what rewards are doubled.

Magic Survival review – Summary

Magic survival is, at its core, an excellent mobile game. The gameplay itself is a great depiction of how to make a function, simple and enjoyable survival game on a mobile system, and there’s really nothing to complain about in that part.

The only real issues occur when we deal with things that aren’t strictly gameplay-related – the flavour text, ability explanations, store pricing and explanations for what those purchases do. Many of these things are just a bit off, or just not explained enough, and it does undermine an otherwise excellent product. If the developers can pour a bit of time into polishing the translation and presentation of the game they already have here, I imagine it’ll pay off very well for them.

All in all, I’d suggest that anyone looking for a mobile game that can be played in sessions lasting anywhere from a few minutes to an hour pick this up – just be warned that it will eat up your time if you let it.

READ MORE: Clusterduck Review: an unusual game about collecting mutant ducks

Anything else I need to know?

That’s pretty much it, the conclusion of my review here is that Magic Survival is a great little game and its certainly worth the look given that it’s free and basically ad-free by default, with the only ads I encountered being on death for a revive (that I opted into) or after a game ended anyway.

This game should definitely go on your list of games to get around to trying if you’re not opposed to the odd mobile game now and again.

With all of that said, that’s really about it for this review of Magic Survival you can find more mobile-focused content here on The Click, and if you’re particularly enjoying my writing, you can find more by me available here.