Click Mage Review
Click Mage is an incremental game with too much manual effort.
In Click Mage, you play as an apprentice to the titular Click Mage, who has been accidentally teleported to a remote island. To find a way home, you must build a magical portal. This involves gathering resources to create tools for harvesting even more resources. As you might guess, you need to construct machines that allow you to build other machines and continue the cycle. It’s a solid premise for a clicker game.
As the game’s title suggests, harvesting resources involves clicking on them—click on the tree stump, the rock, the iron deposit, and so on. By spending resources at an enigmatic obelisk, you can enhance the power of your clicks, enabling you to harvest more resources at faster speeds. Certain recipes necessitate the construction of a machine to process the raw materials. Using these machines is intuitive; select the desired output, input the ingredients, and add fuel, then off it goes until ingredients or fuel run out.
Click Mage is fairly short to complete, and it’s got that addictiveness that is a hallmark of its genre. Unfortunately, it got tedious quickly despite my compulsion to complete it. The game desperately needs some degree of automation. Everything exists in a physical space on the island, so you’ve got to scroll around the map, manually moving resources from one place to another. There’s also no upgrade to harvest materials automatically. The closest we get to automatic collection is holding the mouse button down instead of clicking. You even have to pick up the items you harvest manually. There should have at least been an upgrade that transports these things to a central location for you automatically.
If you enjoy incremental games, Click Mage is a decent one to check out, and it’s fairly priced at $4.99 on Steam. However, if you’re looking for an entry point into the genre, there are similarly priced games that I would recommend over this one. The excellent Orb of Creation features a degree of automation and far more variety.
Click Mage is available now on Steam for PC.
Overall Score: 5/10
Played on: Steam Deck
