The Magic Land Review
I stumbled upon The Magic Land on Steam and decided to give it a try — purely out of curiosity. After playing for a couple of hours (on stream, no less), I can confidently say that this game lives up to its reputation — but not in a good way.
If this game had launched 25 years ago, it might have found an audience. It reminded me a little of the first MMO I ever played, Tibia, back in 2003. But in 2023, The Magic Land feels outdated, clunky, and frustrating — and that’s putting it mildly.
From empty servers and awkward movement to laughably bad combat and harsh death penalties, The Magic Land feels more like a punishment than a game. So, is this the worst MMO ever made? Let’s break down the experience and see how it stacks up.
The Magic Land Review - It Can't Be An MMORPG
The term MMORPG stands for Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game – you can’t really call it that when there’s absolutely no one else online in the game WHAT-SO-EVER.
Graphically the game is horrendous, but you can’t judge games just on their graphical prowess when it comes to an MMO, with many of the top MMO games also lacking in the graphical department.
When you attack enemies or try to, the game has full collision and doesn’t appear to auto-run attack/follow even though there is an option for it. You get pushed around and struggle to hit enemies and you even collide with enemy corpses so you can be blocked from walking somewhere if you have a line of corpses on the ground.
The help window seems like a permanent fixture, each time to press something, it pops up again and the game doesn’t remember you’ve already seen it so it pops up endlessly until you find the setting to turn help off completely.
At level 1 you slowly trudge around trying to understand just what the hell you’re supposed to do, picking up quests which are next to impossible to complete, being offered extra benefits from NPC god knows what that even means, being sent on a wild goose around the map collecting stuff while your character struggles to carry more than a couple of carrots thanks to clearly missing leg day at the gym.
Conclusion
After an hour of questing and reaching level 6 I find myself entering a place just south of the main town. The whole area is empty, that is until I run into a couple of mages who can shoot missiles at me off screen and I cant run away because my character has a slower movement speed than a turtle with its legs glued together.
When you die you lose levels, skills and everything in your inventory so basically just wasting your time.
I’m a big fan of all types of MMO games, even old classic style games. But the only good thing about this game is it’s free, and I would go as far as saying they should have probably been paying me to play it.
I have to question what the point is of this game in 2023. It’s currently in early access but seriously who is going to invest their time into a game like this in 2023 and why would you? For nostalgia there are many good old MMO games out there. If you want a game that’s like this then you’d be better off going and playing an actual classic MMORPG game such as Tibia or Runescape even World of Warcraft.
So is this the worst MMO ever? It’s definitely a contender that’s for sure.
