Recent reviews by Scirano

A once great game that gets progressively worse. Developers will consistently add new features that are widely hated because it doesn't fit their vision of the game. I would suggest they split those changes off to make a new game that fits what they wanted, now that this one is "complete" instead of in forever early access, but if they could undo all the crap before that it would be great.

Yes, your grace is an interactive graphic novel. It plays as a resource management game with choices that are supposed to effect the long term progress of your game, and in the actual game play aspect they do. However, story events are essentially set in stone and your choices seem to only effect how they play out, and not the actual outcome, at least initially.
After having been not impressed with the couple hours I played I decided to look up spoilers and you actually can impact the story, however these choices seem to be end loaded in key events, rather than a gradual build up to that outcome depending on your choices throughout the game. There is the possibility I am wrong since I read about the results third hand, but the game didn't hook me enough to make it there myself.

For people who are bigger fans of VN's its would still be worth a play through, just think of it as a novel instead of a choose your own adventure. It can still be an interesting story with great artwork.

Edit: After spending more time with 'Caster of Magic' this remake further my disappointment. I just can't see how they missed so many QoL opportunities, and this really just seems like a new coat of paint on an old product, and they picked a bad color.
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I was really excited when I heard Master of Magic was remade. I spent hundreds of hours on the original and it was one of the most appealing concepts for a strategy I had seen. This re-make though just feels like it fell short of recreating the "magic" of the first one.

I launched the game hoping to see a re-imagining of the cheesy opening cut scene but was just plopped straight to the title screen.
It is great with the options given for a new game, as compared to them being toggles in the original, and there is a little bit of a tutorial for basic navigation of the UI, but if they were hoping to appeal to a new audience they should have had more information available about the combat and statistics.

There are a few quality of life options and features, over the original, but I also think this is the biggest shortcoming. A few examples. Scouting, they mention that the magic spirit is a good scout, but its still as micromanagy to send it around as the original. Or if your playing nature magic and cast earth lore, its even less intuitive of the area of the spell for trying to line it up to hit the most new tiles.

The map it cluttered. As far as visual improvements go they did a good job, the assets themselves look nice, but the visual design is lacking. In a way it feels hard to tell whats going on, if a resource is in a hex, it doesn't pop out like it would on the pixelated map. Oh those rocks are a mine. The deer are wild game, that makes sense. the birds are... ambiance apparently? And I guess a tile next to my first base was a river, even though it looked like forest.
I do like the spell effect visuals I've seen so far, but from reading other reviews it sounds like stronger spells don't necessarily get their power represented visually.

I think the sound is probably one of the weakest points, the BGM is uninspiring and bland and the event sounds don't stand out at all if they are there. In the original certain jingles would always signify certain events, something of a school was summoned, a random event happened, a certain enchantment was cast. And for this I honestly couldn't tell you even they even have any other than for summoning, which wasn't great.
Some sounds also get annoying and repetitive. Sprites and magic spirit, I'm looking at you.

If I ever have the urge to play MoM again I'll probably play this one more, but as of now I haven't seen enough from this one to make me want to sink a lot of time in it, but It might just make me want to play Caster of Magic instead.

The controls take some getting used to but its a solid survival game with an actual focus on survival and the reputation system might make you think harder about how you want to go about completing a task.

A pure dopamine game. Easily 8 hours of bliss while you are unlocking new things and feeling the hype, plus a few more enjoyable hours while you finish out the achievements.

This is the worst version of one of the best final fantasy games. If you want to support the developers, buy this, dont install it, and emulate the original guilt free.

A creative sandbox game with multiple playstyles and a great progression system.

TL;DR As a story, it's okay. As a game, it's terrible.

Despite the recent mocking update I did play through the game on the original difficulty. As far as I can tell the reason the developers want that mode to be played is to emphasize the hopelessness of each of the situations, they want you to be able to just barely win, to not keep everyone alive, to force you to make hard choices. The problem I had is the lack of impact on gameplay all of this had. With the first preview picture as an example. If I kill Donald at the campfire, I want that to have some sort of consequence on the missions I play afterwards, not just the story cutscenes.

The game feels like the developers wrote a story, but they weren't able to evoke any emotion with the reader so they made it into a crappy game that punishes you with trial&error and RNG.

The game itself is sorta fun, but it feels very short and incomplete. If the developer follows in the footsteps of a game like Terraria and releases big content updates I can see it being worth it in the future. For now wait until it is priced at like $5 or less.