Magic Barrage - Bitferno

Nothing New This game is literally nothing new. I played it a bit on Kongregate back when. Seeing it was brought to Steam, I thought that meant there were some major changes... NOPE. I think its a huge sign of dishonestly and manipulation towards players/potential players that it is being advertised as such here on Steam. The Good - Easy to learn. Its actually easier to figure out on your own than trying to learn from the tutorials. - Magic Barrage actually does capture the old-school feel, at least graphically. - There's always something to do. - Works great in Firefox. The Bad - Gaming is a business. This in itself isn't a bad thing. So in free-to-play games the player should expect some form of limitations that are removed if they pay some cash. Where I stop "being cool with it" is when (A) the price is far too much for far too little and (B) when these "pay walls" extremely limit the game. Magic Barrage provides both. - Here is where I got rather annoyed... Magic Barrage has a terrible, terrible, awful interface. From registration/login to the actual game's GUI. The registration process will probably keep about 75% of potential players from actually playing. To start, I personally had no luck loging in using the default web-launch. After enough frustration with trying to login I decided to just make a new account, this leads to the second round of frustration. I had absolutely no luck registrating using the default web-launch. I had to copy the URL, open Firefox, then I could register and login and play... not sure if everyone will have these same hurdles, but based on my experience, Magic Barrage doesn't even need to be on Steam to begin with. I did everything through Firefox... I couldn't login via Steam. I couldn't register via Steam. I couldn't play the game via Steam... Now, as for the in-game GUI; very cluttered and vague. About the only things that are apparent are the hotkeys. The screen is so populated with what-not, that even if the player minimizes all the displays they can, its still a cluttered mess. I guess this will remain an issue for the life of the game. The Ugly - What kind of Paladin shoots lasers? The combat graphics still need a tune-up. - When it comes to MMOs, especially MMORPGs of any kind, customization is a key factor. There isn't many customization options available to this day. Even if you pay $500 USD for those "premiums", you will have the same appearance options as the other fool that payed $500 USD. - That freakin' GUI. It deserves repeating.