Grimoire: Manastorm is a fun spellcasting Unreal Tournament

So I was looking around on the free to play game section on Steam and I found this game called Grimoire: Manastorm. This is an fps (first person shooter) game made by Omniconnection where you play as wizards and cast spells to kill your enemies. Pretty great idea already. Replace guns with a bunch of spellcasters and you have a super fun experience. The game is in early access on Steam.

From my initial experience and only having played the game for maybe twenty minutes I can say this is one of the most fun free to plays I've tried out on Steam. I haven't had this much fun on a free to play on Steam since Nosgoth was out.

The game's free version only comes with the fire and earth spellcasters. The fire mage is freakin' amazing. They give you one of the coolest mages ever for free which is pretty awesome. When you burn people as a fire mage it is so satisfying watching their hp drop. It makes me feel like the pyro from Team Fortress. I love it.

The other class you get free is the earth mage. His regular attack speed is super fast but weaker than the fire mage but he can heal himself I noticed. You can cast a spell that creates a tree and when you stand near it your hp recovers at a moderate speed. He's definitely a support mage. This game has supports like in Team Fortress or Overwatch.

The game features abilities like a moba (like Heroes of the Storm) and all the different mages' abilities can be countered so its possible to survive any situation theoretically and given the proper skill and effort. One thing to note is that you can teleport too. This makes the game crazy fast a la Unreal Tournament and Quake, great games to be inspired by. It brings the Skyrim (the first person view of the mage with the fireball or manacrystals in their hands look exactly like Skyrim) style mage into the twitch shooter environment. Its the best idea I've seen in a game in a super long time. The fact that this game puts together ideas and is inspired by so many other games is probably what makes it so fun. Add to that the unique idea of shooting spells instead of guns. How clever and unique.

The one thing that could be better is the graphics. However, you don't need high end graphics in a twitch shooter. As long as the environments are creative enough and fun to play on everything's cool. I'm going to keep playing this game. I'm interested in seeing how big the community becomes for it and how long the player base will keep on it. I think the game has a lot of potential especially if they create more interesting spellcasters.