CyberMage (Origin, 1995) was designed by David W. Bradley, the genious behind one of the best RPGs of all times, Wizardry 7:Crusaders of the Dark Savant, and as such it has several role-playing elements, even though it is basically an arcade\adventure. As a Cyber-Mage, you have a full arsenal of weapons and spells, all of them fun to use, and the magic gem in your forehead grants you the ability to become stronger by absorbing the "life essence" of your fallen enemies. Every time you kill a living being (mechanical foes don't count), its life energy (or "Mara" as it is called in the game) hovers like a translucent, ghostly figure over the dead body for a few seconds. If you're quick enough to absorb it before it disappears it will give you a random bonus, for example restore a random percentage of your health or mana, or even permanently increase your strength. It is a smart system that works well and helps to make the gameplay more interesting by adding an RPG feeling to the game without complicating things too much. The SVGA graphics are beautiful and the level design is brilliant with large and complex levels, full of secret rooms and hidden rewards that challenge you to find them all (the automap is your best tool to help you navigate the maze-like levels and locate secret areas). The game is also pretty long, it took me around 30-40 hours to complete. The final level is amazing and the end boss battle against Necrom is truly epic! My only complain about the game is that you can't activate the subtitles if you play with speech enabled (this is really stupid!) and sometimes I had quite some difficulty to understand what the NPCs were saying as the voice-overs aren't exactly high-quality. But this is just a minor problem in an otherwise terrific game! CyberMage is one of my favourite action\adventures and it would be an excellent addition to your game collection. The full retail version even comes with a nice comic which explains the backstory to the game. CyberMage is designed for DOS and works fine on modern computers thanks to DOSBox 0.74. Like most CD-ROM games released in the '90s it has no copy-protection system and you can fully install it to you hard drive (it takes up around 150 MB) and play without the CD.Read full review
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