I particularly liked the mechanic of the Elementals, a common highest-level summon: their attack power is equal to your mana pool in the corresponding element. If the campaign took me longer to complete, I could keep writing about one interesting twist per session and not run out of material for some time. I’m trying out the remaining specialties in tournament mode (challenging a series of computer-controlled opponents without a plot) to see what they add, but other than that, I’m feeling like I’m pretty much done with this game. Now that I’ve completed the Campaign mode once, I can start over with any of them.īut you know something? I’m probably not going to spend much time with these new options, or with the various other game modes. But these are not the only specializations in the game: apparently the Steam bundle that I bought included some DLC defining a few more that I hadn’t seen at all, such as Sorcery and Demonology. The others in that list (as well as a sixth, Chaos) were things I had encountered in enemies - Control seemed a particularly fearful thing to me, because its focus is on depowering the opponent and preventing you from doing stuff.

Illusion had been my own character’s normal specialization, and seemed to be the only one I could choose on my first play-through (probably because I hadn’t yet found the place to enter my registration key and the game was playing in demo mode). Being a Spectromancer means you don’t have the normal fire/water/earth/air elemental spells at all, but instead get five specializations: death, holy, mechanical, illusion, and control. It provides some nice twists on gameplay at the end, though, such as when the victory condition is to hoard mana, or when you face an opponent who can only cast fire spells but gets five fire mana per turn instead of only one, or when you suddenly have to play a couple of matches as a Spectromancer.

The campaign is pretty short: as I’ve observed about other CCG-derived computer games, it’s probably best regarded as a tutorial for two-player dueling. In other words, it’s basically the Mega Man formula, although not nearly as pronounced here as there. You ultimately have to defeat everything on the map to finish it, but the ordering can make a difference to how easy this is. At any given point, you have several available choices of who to fight next, under differing conditions and for differing rewards: some grant new spells, some extra hit points or additional starting mana, some give stranger advantages. Spectromancer‘s single-player campaign consists of a series of maps with assorted enemies on them.

Spectromancer act 2