Fictorum

Whether you dig what's on tap here depends entirely on your appetite for destruction. One of the biggest selling points of Fictorum is that every structure you run across -- bridges, buildings, towers -- can and usually must be decimated. There's a degree of freedom, since most games only let you go in certain buildings when visiting towns, but boredom can easily set in. To balance the freedom you have, each stage is noticeably linear -- usually as soon as you dive in. It's supposed to be a selling point of how unpredictable and unique each playthrough will be, but the randomly generated levels always have you doing the same things. You're free to loot every building for new gear and blow away guards, but really what you have to do is blast structures that are generating a shield around the portal to the next area. If you feel like it, you can run, blow these up, and move on.

This is meant to let you make your own play strategies as you go. You're a fully established wizard with a wide assortment of spells available to you out of the gate. You can learn more as you go, and unlock runes and "shapes," which add new wrinkles to your spells: multi-shot, high-velocity impact, and so on. But typically, it's better to find what works for you and stick with it instead of spreading yourself too thin. You'll need a certain degree of proficiency with your preferred spells, because the game's difficulty ratchets up quickly, not in how the enemies attack, but in the sheer amount of them. The randomly generated levels can also make for some accidentally impossible encounters: One stage required dispatching a huge horde of soldiers by destroying the bridge they were camped out on, but you also needed to cross that (now destroyed) bridge afterwards. Weird hiccups like this happen, though the bigger problem is the game's bugginess. This results in clunky performance and a whole assortment of issues. If you're OK with that, though, there's some fun to be had in learning spells and watching the world bend to your will. Unfortunately, there's just not much else going on here beyond that.