What I really needed was a distraction, something to tide me over for a handful of nights before the mid-March release madness started to overcome me. Seemingly reading my energy a mate of mine mentioned that he’d been playing his way through a bunch of incremental games he’d got on sale, getting his small hits of dopamine watching numbers go up. So I set it upon myself to find the best of what this genre had to offer and it seems that many settled on Magic Archery being the best among them. Strange I thought, given that it was free, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t do an amazing job of locking you in to simply watch progress bars go up over the course of an hour.
The premise is simple: an archer wants to master the bow by shooting at targets. In the beginning you’ll be setting out targets for them to shoot at, clicking at regular intervals to ensure that they don’t waste a second before notching the next arrow. As time goes on you’ll unlock new stats to upgrade, quests to pursue and a kind of talent tree that gives you access to the kinds of arrows that can really wreck some havoc. All that is backdropped by a simple pixel art background and the soft thud and tinkling noises of arrows hitting targets.
Like all incrementals the game starts out pretty slow at first with most of your interactions spent with just keeping the thing going via repetitive clicking more than anything else. The game really starts to get going once you’ve unlocked quests and the wider array of stats that you can build as then you’ll be focusing more on what’s the next objective is that you want to achieve. At the start it does kind of matter which ones you choose (I.E. focusing on the experience once seems to help more) but after a while you can pretty much just set and forget it.
The real challenge in Magic Archery, I feel, is likely for those who want to do repeat playthroughs to beat their time. Whilst I managed a respectable 56 minutes and 14 seconds (with a few of those final minutes spent wanting to unlock everything in the magic tree just for fun) there’s a number examples of people getting 40 minute runs without resorting to any kind of insane tactics or exploits. Whilst I haven’t bothered to do that myself the runs that people are describing there seem pretty self evident once you know what the various options are and their impact on your progression.
That’s really all there is to say about it. It’s a well built incremental that, unlike many other similar games I’ve played before, doesn’t want for more of your time than it needs. It follows all the standard tropes but it does them well making it the perfect distraction if you find yourself with a night free and are in need of some entertainment.
Rating: 8.0/10
Magic Archery is available on PC right now for free. Total play time was approximately 1 hour with 100% of the achievements unlocked.
