The Spell Brigade – PS5 Review

The Spell Brigade is yet another Survivors-like, but one that has the twist of being focused on co-op play, which is a little unusual for this genre, and it’s from Bolt Blaster Games, a Belgium-based studio.

The game sees you, and up to three other players, being under siege from numerous beasties. Thankfully, you’re all wizards, and so you’ve got a selection of magic attacks to try to hold them off with.

Look, you’ve played something like this before; there are a ton of this sort of game on PSN now, so you’re probably familiar with these types of mechanics. You run around with the left stick, and your wizard auto-aims and shoots without any assistance from the player.

You don’t have any kind of dash move or anything like that, so you could pretty much play this one-thumbed. And that’s fine. We love the genre (Brotato is our favourite game), so no issues there.

Defeated enemies drop mana gems, and you need to collect these as they’ll help you to level up. And, of course, when you do level up, you’ll be offered a choice of perks. Extra damage, defence, speed. You know the sort of thing.

After a few levels, you’ll be offered a new spell. These are a mix of projectiles and explosives that will improve your offence. Survive long enough, and you’ll end up with four of them. However, on every post-run stats screen we’ve seen, the wizard’s main spell tends to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to damage numbers.

If you level up a spell seven times, you’ll be able to infuse it with an element damage type, and, later, at level 14, you can add another, which creates infusions. So you could have ice and lightning working together or fire and acid. That sort of thing. And it’s all fine, but a bit underwhelming.

You see, you never really feel all that powerful. Your spells never seem all that good. They’ve not got the impact, visually or in terms of damage, that you see in other games in this genre. Getting an epic or legendary damage upgrade isn’t something you’ll feel. Progress is incremental. Sure, it’s enough to survive a run, but it’s never all that rewarding.

Even when you get the more powerful augments, which are awarded for completing in-game events (these are like little mini-games or challenges within the main runs), they’re never exactly gamechangers. They’re okay. Nice to have. But there’s never a time when it makes a huge difference, and, because of that, the whole dopamine factory thing that Vampire Survivors managed isn’t a factor here at all.

But anyway, you keep going, doing challenges, syphoning up mana and levelling up and then you’ll face off with one of the game’s three bosses. These are a bit of a mixed bag. One boss is too easy, one is generally tolerable, and one is a prick. They can take a while to finish off, though, and, of course, later levels will make them harder. As ever with this genre, you’ll need to brute force your stats through grinding to get success later on.

After a run, you’ll be able to spend gold on permanent upgrades. Even here, things are a little bit disappointing. A good run might earn you 500 gold, and that might pay for a couple of early upgrades, but later on, it won’t even get you one. It’s really slow progress. Runs can take 25-30 minutes, so to emerge from that with a handful of change and bugger all else is pretty annoying. And it speaks to the real issue with this game, which is that it’s just a massive, slow grind.

It takes ages to upgrade something and then when you do you barely feel the difference. Maxing out your damage makes the first couple of levels a bit easier, but you’ll still hit a wall at the third stage and will need to start saving up for other upgrades. It’s just a bit tedious.  There’s also a list of in-game challenges (some of which are directly linked to trophies) and while that gives you something to focus on, they don’t always work and can sometimes fail to recognise when you’ve completed them.

Also, we’re not really sure about the co-op thing. There’s just not much to it. Maybe if characters interacted or could somehow augment each other’s attacks, there’d be some sort of point to it. But really, you’re just encouraged to stay apart (to avoid friendly fire, which can, thankfully, be turned off without penalty) apart from during the challenge events.

The presentation isn’t really up to much either. The visuals aren’t very impressive and can strain the eyes (especially on levels with environmental hazards). The music’s okay, but you’ll probably want to turn it off.

This genre only got popular because of how well the best games in it managed the upgrades, but The Spell Brigade turns all that into a chore. It’s slow, unrewarding, and it doesn’t particularly respect your time. And if it doesn’t respect us, we can’t really respect it.