Here’s a Magic Brick Wars first impressions! Halfbrick’s first game in 3 years will officially launch on 15 November 2019, but it’s already playable. Borne from the efforts of an internal game jam, what is this game like?

As mentioned, it’s a real-time strategy game. Players will be on opposite ends, aiming to destroy their opponent’s castle. The titular magic bricks are used to block the paths of your opponent’s units. You can rotate them too. Friendly units can walk through them with no issue. Spawning in things take time. Bricks have various elemental traps with differing effects that you can use to buy that bit more time for you to throw in units.

Marked bricks, like the snowflake ones below, are the trap bricks. Some have area of effects too, so keep an eye out. Items can spawn in the middle of the battlefield which you can try sending units in that column to collect.

Units require mana at the bottom of your screen to summon, likewise for spells. After completing a match, you’ll get chests at varying qualities. These will contain bricks, units and spells. You’ll be wanting many multiples of them to upgrade them with coins. This is the deck-building element, where you can arrange your loadout and test them out too. You can acquire more things from the Mine, which requires stamina to dig out. As you level up, you will unlock more items you can get from chests.

As you might expect, there are daily and weekly challenges. Players can acquire a Premium Pass, much like a battle pass for the season. Clear them to get rewards as usual. You can invite your friends to play Magic Brick Wars with you, and in doing so, obtain Friend Rewards. In the Socials tab, people may challenge you to Friendly Battles (which do not count towards challenges) or to face off against a friend. Guilds are also available. Communicate with your opponents with the pre-set chat lines.

While you can store up to 4 chests, you cannot open more than one and must wait out the timer or pay premium currency to open them. There will be daily deals in the shop you can buy with coins, otherwise a lot of it requires diamonds/premium currency.

Strategy-wise, it can be quite fun as you rush to place blocks in the way. However, the deluge of possible microtransactions might be off-putting, considering you’d need to play a lot to unlock things, but you can only get them one chest at a time. If you’re a fan of casual strategy, then you could give Magic Brick Wars a shot.

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Magic Brick Wars

Developer: Halfbrick Studios

Release Date: 2019-11-15

Android, iOS

A new real-time, tactical strategy game from the studio that brought you Fruit Ninja!