Cover artwork is a Brom painting.

Mageslayer is an old game, released in 1997. Yes, the same year as Hexen II and Quake II. It is a curio, as it uses a proprietary Raven Vampire engine. It's a full-3D engine with sprites for actors. Mageslayer features coloured lighting, fairly large (by the standards of Quake/Hexen II engines) levels and a lot of fancy moving brushes (many of them traps).

In a way it can be seen as an overhead development of Hexen and Heretic - it certainly plays a lot like Heretic. So, to sum it up, Mageslayer is somewhat like overhead Heretic (and/or Hexen). Unlike the Hexen series though (which were more of an RPG crossbreed), its puzzles are more mechanical.

Mageslayer is rather addictive, in the style of late 80s/early 90s 2D scrollers. Truth be told, Tyrian never did much for the author of this little review, but Mageslayer is different. It has an immersive fantasy setting, a fancy soundtrack, and, well, it's just unlike anything else out there while being something like one of those games from childhood.

Vampire is a 2D/3D hybrid engine. Somewhat like Doom, it uses sprites for most anything (explosions, creatures, etc.), but the architecture (and some entities) are real 3D, which is unlike Doom. The combination is best of both styles, as sprites are drawings (no edgey 3D models here), while 3D architecture allows stuff like multiple storeys, grilles and see-through ramps set above ground floors, all populated with monsters.

The engine is more advanced than you'd think, sporting effects like coloured lighting and radiosity and shadows (shown in the screenshot).



It also supports view tilting, as shown above. Tilting allows snooping ahead, often outside monsters' range of awareness.

There are four classes, roughly corresponding to mage, cleric, fighter, rogue, albeit with twists.

The Earthlord is a typical heavy dwarven tank, armed with a warhammer that throws magical doubles of itself. Nothing too special here, just a somewhat slow and clumsy tank with lots of firepower; the game defaults to this as the first class (and therefore a suggestion for a newbie player). He's not all melee either, and starts with the ranged warhammer spell as well as being capable of whacking enemies in melee with the physical warhammer itself.

This, by the way, is an interesting detail of Mageslayer: all characters have a melee ability, capable of punching/clawing with a hand (or is it paw, for the Arch-Demon?).

The Archdemon is the cleric subverted. He's the 2nd best fighter, fairly tough, with medium speed (a bit on the slower side) and nice firepower. He's actually the best-balanced choice of the lot, he doesn't shoot as quickly as the Inquisitor, but his later fire-based spells are all quite effective (some even shoot backwards and forward simultaneously, giving an effective cleanup coverage). His melee claw strike is quite powerful, capable of offing even medium-class enemies with a couple hits. His last weapon though (flame belch) is a mana drainer.

The Inquisitor is the squishy type. She (yes, she's female, another touch of irony) is the local mage subverted - her first spell is called the "Holy Missile" by analogy with the cliche Magic Missile. She has the worst lot of hitpoints of all four, but she's the fastest shooter and the quickest runner, having the best dexterity/agility.

The Warlock is the local pseudo-rogue, he strikes with acid-based, medium-speed projectiles. He has a fancy jump animation, flipping over in flight, suggesting that he can jump over enemies' heads. Warlock was the original player class, before the other three were added, and looks a lot like Corvus from Heretic.



The classes are a bit weird in that in reality the balance can be the other way around, that is, the "weakest" Inquisitor is actually the easiest class to play with, as she can run and leap out of harm's way. The Warlock is also fairly agile (less so, but he's still one of the two dextrous types). His 2nd weapon (the mainstay after the first episode) is also very useful, spawning acid missiles in a semi-circle. The dwarf is the hardest character to play with, he's so clumsy, he gets hit all the time by large mobs, in spite of all the hitpoints and toughness. He does have a curious 2nd weapon, which petrifies enemies, allowing him to then shatter them with the melee hammer strike, but the snag is, it's a mana drainer and it works better in one-on-one situations, being rather awkward against big mobs. So the supposedly "melee" Earthlord ends up chewing through mana faster than the "artillery" Inquisitor. The same happens with the Arch-demon, who loses scores of hitpoints from mobbing and has a curious bug (his 2nd weapon has a spawn point in front of the claw, so whenever enemies are too close, they aren't hit by the flames). The two beefy classes also have a harder time avoiding mechanical traps. So the "tank" characters aren't that easy to play.

There're other bugs, of course. The game was originally designed to run in 8-bit colour; it will run under Windows 2000/XP (NT 5.x) with the "256 colours" compatibility flag on its shortcut, but it sometimes likes to conk out on level change (this might be due to running the game with a custom soundtrack CD rather than the original data/music CD with videoclips on it). Sounds sometimes get stuck on repeat - like a sliding door sound looping forever. Stuck-up loops are removed on reload, but it is a fishy bug for version 1.1.

The soundtrack available for download here is a new, 2013 version of the original MIDI files, mixed as a test for the Solar Battery sampler. The original is 96/24 FLAC, and there's also a CD image which can be downloaded and burned or loaded for a custom soundtrack (the game will still demand its own CD, but that can be fixed by copying it to an image and then mounting that - or mounting the soundtrack CD image, or both). Kevin Schilder did not have anything to do with the remixed soundtrack, other than composing the MIDI scores, of course.

The original CD soundtrack is a lot darker and bleaker than the new mixes, which are more of an arcade-style/ambient affair. Either way, Mageslayer gains an ambience of its own - it's a tad more arcade-style with the new CD, or more of a fantasy, half-desperate adventure with the original CD soundtrack.

Mageslayer is a lot of fun, in spite of being overshadowed by the fancier shooter games developed by Raven. It just has this old 80s arcade "monster bash" feel, combined with fantasy ambience and a fitting soundtrack. This game's been undeservedly forgotten and faded into obscurity.

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