Developed by Tactical Adventures, Solasta: Crown of the Magister is a brand-new tactical RPG built on the DnD SRD 5.1 Ruleset. Technically, Solasta: Crown of the Magister is not a new title as it has been out in early access for a long time however the developer has finally released the 1.0 version of the title marking its full release. Based on the classic dice-rolling RPG formula, Solasta: Crown of the Magister brings a brand-new adventure to the virtual space complete with Steam Workshop support for never-ending dungeon hunting. This is our review of Solasta: Crown of the Magister in which we roll some dice and let our luck decide our fate in the world of Solasta.
Before you begin your adventure in Solasta: Crown of the Magister, you must first create your party of four characters. You can either use the pre-build characters in the game or you can use the brilliant character creator and create your very own personal character for the game. I will highly recommend that you must create all four characters yourself for a more personal experience throughout the game. In the character creator, you have seven tabs to customize your character ranging from choosing their class, ancestry, spells, proficiencies, and identity. Each of these highly affects the character, their fighting style, and their nature.
Solasta: Crown of the Magister is set in the world of Solasta which is filled with treasures, monsters, enemies, NPCs, factions and cities, dungeons, and outposts for you to explore. Your journey begins with the introduction of your characters in a tavern and from there you set out on your journey in the world. Probably my favorite aspect of Solasta: Crown of the Magister is how the developers have created the tutorial for the game. No matter whether you choose a custom or a pre-made character, based on their class, you will have a unique tutorial mission that introduces you to that particular character’s strengths and weaknesses in a controlled environment.
For example, I chose a Wizard, a Rogue, a Fighter, and a Hunter for my party. Since I wanted to try out the character creator, I created all four characters myself. After the game started, all four characters meet insider a tavern and they share stories of their journey where you are taken to that story and you get to experience it as the game teaches you the basics of how to use that character in combat and other various scenarios. I loved how the game actually made each character feel alive and full of life with their backstories. As far as I can remember, this is the best tutorial of any RPG title that I have played so far.
The game explained to me in different scenarios how to use my Hunter, Wizard, Rogue, and the Fighter to their full advantage. Moving on from the tutorial, your initial hours are still the introduction of the game as you get to know people in the world and start collecting some quests to complete. Another great aspect of the game is the map design of the levels. While moving from one city to another is not actually like an open-world game like The Witcher 3 or Skyrim, the levels where you can explore are deeply detailed and there is plenty of activity to make the levels feel full of life.
In towns and cities, you will find plenty of NPCs to interact with. Dialogue is fully narrative, and each party member gets a dialogue option based on their nature that you selected while creating them or what the game chose for pre-made characters. The cutscenes are not fully animated and are presented in the form of narrative novel pages. For traveling around the world of Solasta, you just select a location where you want to go and your party will travel itself, camping when needed and collecting resources, and performing other tasks. You can assign them tasks to complete while they are resting as well.
Sometimes, on these travels, your party might come under attack and at this time, the journey will be interrupted, and you will be taken to a fully-fledged level for the fight instead of the map. Here the combat element of the game kicks in and you can then choose your tactics and defeat the enemies before moving on in your journey. The combat is also one of the good mechanics of Solasta: Crown of the Magister. It is turn-based and based on the roll dice according to the DnD SRD 5.1 ruleset. Every move you make, or your enemies make is first rolled with the dice and the outcome determines the result of the move. The spells and casts fell extremely solid and beefy in the game while the melee combat is just okay.
The game also emphasizes heavily on using the environment to your advantage. You can throw rocks or push pillars to kill your enemies instantly if you get the chance. Sometimes, you can also use elements of surprise to nab a few quick, stealth kills. The inventory management is typical however I do like that you can equip a ranged weapon and a melee weapon on almost all characters at the same time and switch to them easily in the combat instead of heading back to the inventory and changing weapons at all times. You can also equip two different types of spells, one is called Cantrips and they are smaller spells that do not require a spell slot while the other ones are main spells that you can equip in the main spell slots.
During combat, if your characters are hurt, you can recover them with short rests or long rests. Some of the tasks can only be performed in long rests at campsites such as preparing spells, crafting, and other items. Crafting is also based on dice rolls which are dependent on the difficulty of the item and the crafter’s skill level. Nearly, all major actions in the game are based on dice rolls. Succeeding the rolls will ensure that you complete the task easily, failure results in retires and sometimes damage if you fail while disarming a trap. Your party also shares the wealth between all of them so you have to decide your purchases accordingly.
Apart from the main game’s end content and tons of side quests that you can play after beating the main story of the game, there is another feature that will keep you coming back to Solasta: Crown of the Magister for a long time. This is the Dungeon Maker which allows you to play custom dungeons created by many fans of the game. Since the game has been in early access for a long time, there is tons of content available in the Dungeon Maker right at launch for you to explore and by the time you will be done with the main game, this section will be populated with even more maps and dungeons to choose from.
Apart from dungeons, Solasta: Crown of the Magister also supports custom campaigns which means that you can even play fully developed custom campaigns once you are done with the main campaign of the game. The developer Tactical Adventures is planning to add additional campaigns post-launch to the game however until then, you can always rely on the community and check out some custom campaigns. I did not actually play any of the custom maps and custom campaigns at this point however I do have some good, highly ranked ones downloaded in my PC and might jump in them soon.
With all of this said, there are a few things that did bother me still. The very first is that the visual character customization is not at all good in the game. As much as I enjoyed tinkering with their stats and classes, I hated the visual design of the characters. It still needs some more work to make characters look more life-like and fit in the world. The world in the game looks really pretty however up-and-close, the characters do not look very good in the game especially during cutscenes. Facial animations also do not look that good when the characters are speaking so a little bit more work here would be amazing as well. Another thing that the game lacks at this point is classes.
While the starting classes in the game are decent but they are still far from what other DnD RPGs offer. Additional classes such as Half-Orc, Gnomes, Dragonborn, Bard, Sorcerer, and Warlock would have been amazing for the game. New players will not be bothered by the number of classes in the game but if you are a DnD pro, you will miss the option of choosing from a lot more classes and if your favorite class is not in the game, that will be an instant letdown for you. I would really like if the developer would actually add more classes to the game as well if they are planning to add more campaigns to the game later. It will just give players more reasons to play this otherwise brilliant RPG.
Overall, Solasta: Crown of the Magister is a complete package for RPG fans. It is good seeing that developers are still keeping the classic DnD formula alive today in video games. Solasta: Crown of the Magister does not only shine with its solid gameplay and RPG mechanics but also in every other department as well. The 1.0 release is extremely stable, and I do not remember any crashes or lags while playing the game. I have currently spent over 30 hours in the game however there were no glitches, no crashes, or any other game-breaking bugs. I do remember during one instance that the face of one of my custom characters was a little disoriented and some pixels were missing from it but other than that, Solasta: Crown of the Magister is appearing to be in a very stable position for its 1.0 release.
Final Verdict:
Being longing a good DnD based RPG for a long time and despite having its review key for a long time, I deliberately waited for the full release to actually review the game because I was really curious to see how the game turns out when it comes out fully and I was not disappointed. I have been playing Solasta: Crown of the Magister for the past 2 weeks and not a single day when I was bored while I was in the game. The game hooks you right from the very start with its brilliant character development screen to the very last story cutscene and well beyond that. It incorporates the DnD SRD 5.1 Ruleset really well in the game and I am sure that RPG fans of all skill levels will love playing Solasta: Crown of the Magister. The visual design, the sound design and the solid turn-based gameplay, everything is top-notch and great for classic DnD fans and even modern RPG lovers. If you are waiting for Baldur’s Gate 3 and any other decent tabletop RPG, Solasta: Crown of the Magister is here and it will keep you busy for hours with its amazing design.
Final Score: 8.0/10
