Price: Free Rating: 7/10 Category: Games
In Nevosoft’s Magic Academy 2, players take on the role of Irene, the heroine of the original Magical Academy and now a promising young magic graduate, hoping to submit a letter of recommendation and serve on the magical Council.
However, there’s trouble for the councilors, since the an important book, the Treatise of Light and Darkness has gone missing. Someone in a council robe was seen vanishing into a portal with this book! So Irene realizes this is the plothook, I mean, she volunteers to help find the book and set the council at peace.
The story of interesting characters in a magical world progresses in Chapters, made up of Tasks. These Tasks are hidden object screens or magic-themed puzzles, and each task progresses the story. The beginnings of each Chapter in Magic Academy 2 provide a bit of a recap for players who haven’t been playing in one sitting.
Hidden object screens in Nevosoft’s Magic Academy 2 are lovely, but can be difficult to distinguish items and to manipulate on a small screen. Really hard. Players can use the usual iPhone-style pinch to zoom into the screen, allowing them to see more detail, but it felt more like a workaround than a feature. I imagine these screens would work much better as a PC game. Activatibles sparkle, thanks to Irene’s magical search powers, but after a couple screens, tapping around for something that might activate isn’t so great. The art itself is great, like an interactive fantasy print or novel cover.
Minigame puzzles are also beautiful, but the instructions on the puzzles are fairly vague, unfortunately. So, on the HO screens, the player is reduced to tapping around for something that might be activated, and on the puzzles, I thought Magic Academy 2 missed the opportunity to add to the cool magical narrative.
And that’s really what Magic Academy 2 offers. With standard HO screens and matching puzzles, what’s great in Magic Academy 2 is the fantasy world of wizards and magic. The player is invited into a world where magic is standard, introduced to a simple problem with far-reaching implications in this world.
Magic Academy 2 is also available for iPhone and iPad