Sling spells, hurl hexes and curve curses in Ignis: Duels of Wizards, a distillation of the MOBA formula, which allows players to steer their spells in tight 1vs1 duels.
Ignis: Duels of Wizards, from Moonlit, is a magic dueling game where each player takes on the role of a powerful mage. Spells don’t just include your normal projectile affair, no, they include other abilities ranging from summoning allies to settling up blockades. The reason for this grossly intense duelling comes from the idea behind the game, that purifying and simplifying of the MOBA formula.
Moonlit’s pitch for Ignis: Duels of Wizards revolves around the joy which comes from a face-off between two players when they meet alone in a lane in a MOBA. With no minions to speak of, and no nearly jungler allies to jump to their aid, it becomes a high intensity moment of skill. Recreating this moment into a single screen battle, by creating a play area split into halves, and giving each of the characters equally strong, yet heavily varied, abilities was the goal.
Ignis: Duels of Wizards is fast, ridiculously fast. But, once you have got used to curling your spells around the map it becomes extremely fun to play. In addition to this you can change abilities mid-duels — adding passive, attacking or defensive abilities. This adds a massive amount of variety to the gameplay and means that a round can turn around very quickly.
I played through some of Ignis earlier on in the year, while judging the Pocket Gamer Connects PC Indie Pitch. While the density of text was a little overwhelming (considering the amount of time there was to play) I enjoyed the gameplay, and am looking forward to hearing more about it as it approaches release.
Ignis: Duels of Wizards is in development for PC and consoles. There will be a demo available soon on its Steam page.
