Tales of Maj’Eyal – Review

Hello there! I am a new reviewer on the site, going by handle Miyokari. With this, I am going to start my debut with Tales of Maj’Eyal.

Tales of Maj’Eyal is a turn-based RPG made by Nicolas Casalini (Also called, Darkgod). The game is based on his previous games, Tales of Middle-Earth. What is interesting about the game, is that Tales of Maj’Eyal is being developed for the last 6 years and the development won’t stop anytime soon. So, after the little backstory is done, we will dwell into the game itself!

Character Creation

We get rather interesting character creation in the game, where we pick our race then the class. Many races and classes are originally locked until we perform various tasks in the game. In the screenshot I provided, I had some of them already unlocked. I won’t spoil much, but to unlock Archmage, for example, we need to do a quest for wizard apprentice.

When we will make our character, we get a rather interesting skill tree according to our class. We get a lot of customization options that in the end lets us reduce the RNG in the game.

Gameplay

The Gameplay itself is, as mentioned earlier a turn-based game. The movement itself happens on a grid, so we cannot step on enemy tile and they cannot step on ours until we kill them. We get access to many abilities that get cooldown, for example, one of my spells “Quake” has 20 turn cooldown. The turn order is always, first the player then the enemy.

Tales of Maj’Eyal have quite a bit of RNG, which can be reduced. The items we have, skills, levels, and experience we gain as players will help us reduce this RNG. What I should also mention about Tales, is that the game is a roguelike, so every time we die we will have to start from over.

The game has different difficulty levels, some of them give us extra lives, so before we die for good we can resurrect several times. There is also exploration mode, where we get infinite lives and roguelike mode where we have only one life.

The inventory system is as well a big part of the game, as of any RPGs. At first, we get access to rather weak items, until we start finding artifacts, some legendary items, and other helpful items.

Sound

The sound in the game builds the atmosphere in the game and fits the general tone in the game. The sound of attacking weapons and spells is well done. I wasn’t annoyed while listening to the game sounds and I like thematic music in games that fits the atmosphere.

Story

At the beginning of the game, we don’t really get much access to the story. The game works more on the principle of scattering notes around the world, having to talk with NPCs and do other stuff to figure out the story. At first, it looks uninteresting, but after playing the game initially I got attracted to it thanks to finding more notes. They made the locations in the game rather interesting.

Final Conclusion

In my opinion Tales of Maj’Eyal is one of the best Roguelikes around here. With interesting mechanics in the game like unlocking new races and classes. Some of the hidden professions will require us to play the game several times, but in my opinion, it is a lot of fun. The game is also donation-ware, so you can go directly to their site and download it (https://te4.org/). If you like the game, you are free to support the dev!

The game also is getting Expansions, that add new stories, classes, and races.

If you have experience with Tales of Maj’Eyal, please let us know in the comments! Maybe you love something more than I did in the game, or you dislike some of the stuff that I did like.