Mines and Magic is a tower defence auto-battler with a resource economy-focused game style. It was developed and produced by Zolden Games and initially released in 2018, but before that, it was a game mode in Starcraft II. Apparently. I never played it.

Mines and Magic is currently in early access to be fully released on the 24th of March 2024, so any issues I mention in this preview are not digs at the game, but observations from a gamer’s perspective. Once the full game is released, I can be more critical, but for now, it will be things I have found that may need to be looked at.

There is no real story as such – you just jump into the campaign, but before that, you can learn about the game by playing through the tutorial, although this is currently unplayable. As you follow the tutorial, you will get to a point where you need to purchase a Mage, however, you will be one Magic Orb short of being able to get it, and ultimately, halting the tutorial. With this being the case, I recommend reading through the how-to-play guide before jumping into the campaign.

The goal is to purchase units using resources gathered after constructing mines on them while defeating the waves of enemies trying to destroy your castle. It’s a simple but enjoyable concept.
There is currently a 1V1 multiplayer mode, but with every attempt I made to test it out, I haven’t been able to find a match. I can see that people have been playing, so hopefully when more people try Mines and Magic, I will get a chance to try it, and maybe it’ll be in time to try the larger scale 2V2 and 4V4 modes they’re working on.

The resource struggle starts immediately after the first level and it feels so unbalanced. The first two waves are easy, so one orc minion will be plenty. This allows you to save up a bit and use your drill laser to break rocks around your base and uncover vital resources. Unfortunately, I found nine times out of ten, the resources won’t be under those rocks and the resources will be scarce or of one type. Luckily, you can restart the level until the resource layout is manageable or more accessible, which I found to waste a lot of time. You should always start with one of each resource type around your base or most at least.

It can cost a lot of materials to search for more, and ultimately, it can cost you the game, so I found this to be rather annoying. There’s also the issue where if you don’t do something of use every set-up phase, you might as well restart, and the enemies all have annoying abilities that you have to manage. Without a good start and steady progress, you will fail.

Don’t get me wrong. It is a fun game, but when everything costs so much, and all of your units, magic, and upgrades use the same resources, especially gold, it’s easy to play an hour into a level before being wiped in a single wave, all because you weren’t making enough to get more units, or you spent all of your gold upgrading your resource mines.

Finishing a level will reward you with resources for what is effectively your player stash. You can use these to upgrade various abilities in the menu while browsing the level-select map, purchasing buffs and magic cards to take into the next level, permanent buffs for your units and mines, or upgrade the completed level resource.

Each completed level has a resource available, be it food or gold, and you can use your stash resources to upgrade them as though they were one of your mines, and the next time you complete a level, you will receive extra of whatever resource that level generated, and the amount will depend on how much you upgraded it. You can also buy the second player character which is like the Elven Archers and Wyverns, a different set of units you can use, to mix things up.

I haven’t heard any music while I’ve been playing, though I guess I could say the sounds of metal axes clanging and the shattering of defeated glass creatures could be the soundtrack, but there isn’t much more I can say other than the effects sound good.

Visually it kind of reminds me of Warcraft III. Using a similar style of animation, it is vibrant and colourful, though fairly basic and cartoony. Character models just look good, and that’s all that’s really needed, but this also means they can feel repetitive, even though they have different abilities. The animations used to portray magical abilities are there, but they were a little underwhelming. I’d love to see something a little flashier that draws your attention to the character.

This is a fun game that has quite a bit of potential. It still needs some tweaks here and there, and the new content that they want to release should probably go through a few more polishing passes before being released, but it is definitely on the right track. Eventually, as long as they take in some of the things that the gamers find or have issues with, this will be a solid game that offers hours of entertainment.

Written by: Adam Brasher