Magic Carpet

Review

by Chris Broesder

Let's start at the beginning. Beautiful "storybook" intro of you (the apprentice) chasing the ultimate beast, a wyvern. When you start playing Magic Carpet, you have to get used to the controls. It's very hard to navigate and shoot beasts, wizards and mana at the same time. Besides this, you have to keep guarding your castle and constantly changing your spells. Luckily, the first few levels aren't that had, so you can practice with all this. You own just 2 spells at the beginning of the game, that's "fireball" and "mana possession" spell. The first is to shoot enemy's and the second to make the mana yours. Just about each level, you get a spell added to your spell list and there's a completely different world to fly around in, so it doesn't get boring doing basically the same thing over and over again.

A very cool thing about this game is the AI. For example, when you shoot at civilians, they will shoot back with their arrows. Though when you cast the "mana possession" spell at their houses, they will help you, and will only shoot at enemy wizards and protect your castle! The beasts roaming around in the worlds are quite smart too.

In the levels at the beginning of the game, the emphasis is on killing enemies, but in later levels, you will have more trouble rivaling the wizards and possessing more mana and destroy their castle, while they will try the same thing with you. The best features are the total freedom and the incredibly original gameplay. It takes weeks and weeks to complete each level this game contains, and doesn't get boring for one minute.

The graphics. Beautiful 3D environment, fluid animation and realistically drawn beasts and wizards. A bit blocky when very close, but still stunningly well. The sound is very good too. Music is very fitting, and adapts to the situation. For example when there's an enemy close to you, the music gets tense and when the enemy shoots at you it gets even worse. Sound effects are just as good. Fitting the situation very well.

Further more, this version is better than the Saturn version. Better graphics, better controls. If for example you want to select a certain spell on the Saturn version, it's hard, because of the delay of the cursor. In the PlayStation version, all is well.