We were almost worried for a moment: there hadn’t been a £0.79 release on the Xbox for some months. We were concerned that the business practice had stopped being lucrative, that these shrivelled up raisins weren’t worth producing any more. But sing Hallelujah to the skies, as Little Mage Adventure is here.
It’s the same deal as it has always been. For south of an English pound, you get a game with no achievements and, at the very, very most, an hour’s worth of entertainment. There’s no multiplayer, highscores or even developing game mechanics. These are naked as the day they were born.
Little Mage Adventure is an action-platformer that, if we are being charitable, resembles Super Mario but with the option of calling on a Mega Man-style blaster. That blaster’s finite, so you’ll need to keep an eye out for little purple pick-ups to ensure it’s topped up. You can walk, jump, bottom-bounce the enemy and there the roster ends.
Levels are short affairs that would take you about twenty seconds to run through if there weren’t obstacles in the way. And since the obstacles don’t put up much of a fight, you can get pretty close to that twenty seconds. Your aim is to reach a tiny red signpost-thing that represents the end, and then you’re moving onto the next of thirty levels.
The same cast of enemies return, repeatedly, from level one to thirty, and no new ones are introduced. They soon become old friends. The only one to worry about is a flying demon-horned dude who bobs as it approaches, clipping the odd life heart off you. But the others are variations on ‘stand and look menacing’ and ‘move slowly and look menacing’. These are only really a problem when they’re squatting on the edge of a platform that you need to reach.
With this slacker cast as your opponents, the only remaining challenge comes from the levels, and they wake up at about level twenty-five. Up to that point, there are gaps to jump, but not many of them, and we may have died once or twice because our fingers had fallen asleep. On death, you’re reset to the start of the level, which is really the only punishment Little Mage Adventure could have offered, but as a level only takes twenty seconds, it’s not exactly a slap across the wrists.
The latter levels start plopping in platforms that are one square wide, and suddenly we were paying attention, snapping upright like a sleeping guard that got found out. But these levels are done almost before they started (a minorly different audio signature plays at the end of the game, as if in apology). We shrugged and instantly forgot that Little Mage Adventure existed.
If we were forced, debate class-style, to form an argument for Little Mage Adventure, it would go something like this: look, it’s clearly not even trying, but it works, and it’s cheap. Think of it like an elocution exercise that an actor does before they go on stage. It’s a little workout for the fingers before you play something bigger and better. You won’t think, you won’t be able to recall it, but your little digits will have been given a crack.
And you know what? We wouldn’t believe a word of it when we said it. Because let’s face it, Little Mage Adventure needed to turn up with just 79p of value to their name. Instead, it arrives completely nude with a sheepish look on its face.
Which, of course, is roughly the average for these sub-£1 titles, but that doesn’t really excuse things. With only a smidge more effort or imagination, a new enemy could have been included; a new obstacle perhaps. Hell, we’d have taken a sliding ice level, just to sprinkle some spice on top. But this really is one small, barely adequate level, viewed from a different viewpoint each time.
Keep that £1 coin in your pocket. You might feel something like curiosity bubbling up – what does one of these 79p games feel like to play? – but suppress it if you can. There’s not much mystique to it. Little Mage Adventure has got all the challenge and satisfaction of putting the bins out, but thirty times over.
You can buy Little Mage Adventure from the Xbox Store
