The storyline is straight from the pages of generic fantasy: the old king is dying and has decided to appoint a new king for when he is gone. A contest has been organised in which the greatest mages in all the land will battle with each other for the rulership of the kingdom. The winner becomes king; the losers die.

I read the introduction and groaned a bit. While I've always had a soft spot for generic fantasy with sword fighting and spell casting, I've never really felt it worked that well in a text adventure, at least not without expending a considerable amount of effort on developing a decent combat system. And when you do that sort of thing, the text adventure side of the game tends to be forgotten in the midst of hit points, attack rolls and the like. In a way, some of these fears were well founded for Magocracy has very poor item descriptions. Examining a bed doesn't actually give you a description of the bed in question but just tells you that there is nothing on the bed. Yes, maybe, but what does it look like? The same thing happens with quite a lot of the other items in the game which is never a good thing, although at least here I guess it's kind of understandable. This isn't a game about exploring your immediate environment, or puzzle solving, or even interacting with other characters (unless in the sense of trying to kill them); it's a game about murdering a lot of other people. And at that sort of thing, it's pretty good.

I died quite often to begin with as my initially feeble attempts to kill my enemies were thwarted time and again. I think I stumbled with some guess the verb issues in that I assumed that to cast a spell I would need to type "cast [name of spell]" whereas in fact just the name of the spell was required. Strangely, considering that the intention of the game is to kill my rivals and thus demonstrate my magical might, I don't have any actual killing spells. I have ones that send my enemies to sleep and summon allies but nothing that can outright be used to damage someone. Weird. But once I figured out the casting of spells and found myself a weapon, I engaged on a merry little killing spree.

As far as massacring the other characters is concerned, the game is enjoyable, mindless, bloodthirsty fun. There were a lot of things that could have done with improving upon: the poor item descriptions for a start, and it would also have been nice to have some killing spells. There was also an annoying flaw when I had managed to render one of my enemies unconscious and yet was unable to attack him because I didn't have a weapon and wasn't skilled in hand to hand combat! Surely even an unarmed man not very skilled in hand to hand combat wouldn't have too much trouble getting the better of some poor chap lying unconscious on the floor!

A nice hints file accompanies the game and I referred to it from time to time, although Magocracy isn't a hard game to make progress with. Most of my enemies didn't take much killing and despite the fact that the introduction hints that they were far more powerful than I am, only Loge the Sorcerer gave me any problems. A few I was able to cast a sleeping spell upon then bash them with my cleaver until they succumbed. (Of course, this is a generic fantasy setting and hitting an unconscious person with a cleaver doesn't necessarily kill them outright, but merely wounds them.) It might not have been the most heroic way of winning a fight but it certainly got the job done.

So initial impressions aside, this was a fairly decent game. The writing was certainly above standard for the genre and it made a welcome change to the previous half a dozen games I played in that I actually enjoyed it.

6 out of 10