A surprisingly fun paper.io clone based on hexagons. Unfortunately, it’s held back by pay-button bloat, a lack of meaningful updates, a very lazy implementation, and bots that are way too easy to kill.

So, this is the first Roblox review I’m writing as part of Diamonds in the Dirt. I feel like this should be the example review that should be used to help potential readers - if there are any - understand what these reviews on my blog will look like going forward. As such, I chose this game to be an example of what reviews will look like.

There are five scores. GameScore measures how fun the game is and how much you may want to replay it if you beat the game. ViewScore measures how coherent the user experience is and how much effort went into the construction of that UX, such as environment design and UI complexity. TechScore measures how novel the experience is and how hard it would be to create the game. TimeScore measures how much the game cares for your time and how easy it would be to jump on your phone in an airport and pay it a short amount of attention between waiting for callouts naming your terminal. PassScore is named after gamepasses and measures how much the experience cares about you, vs how much money you’re willing to spend.

Each of those five scores has its own scale. Minimum score is 0/10, maximum score is 10/10. Higher is better. One half-star is worth 2 points, and every point earned contributes to an overall percentage score from 0% to 100%, which is a rough scale of how heavily I’d recommend the game to someone.

GameScore

6.5 out of 10 stars

Capture For Magic has some pretty good replay value, but it isn’t designed to hold your attention, and the glaring flaws in this game shine brightly because of it.

You spawn in with a small hexagon shaped area; this is your land. When you walk off of that land, you will soft-capture every hexagon you walk on. Walking back onto territory you own will hard-capture the tiles, turning them to your color. If you walked in a loop that closed some tiles in and ended on your own territory, those looped tiles will also be hard-captured and be converted to your color.

You can not only capture people’s territory, but also kill them. This is where the PvP elements come in and add a layer of strategy… if it weren’t for the problem with ping.

You kill players based on if any one of four conditions are true:

• The opposing player is standing on land of my color without soft-capturing, and you have just captured at least one tile.
• The opposing player (and any continuous region of land they are standing on) is completely enclosed in a loop of tiles you have just completed (without breaks).
• The opposing player has created a trail of soft-capture tiles by walking, and I just stepped on that trail.
• You land a spell on an opposing player that has the ability to kill people, and they can’t escape before the killing effect activates.

The game’s array of spells make those conditions your survival guide, and you’d do well to heed them (and the strategies hiding behind them.) For example, you can be killed if you’re standing on a patch of land that the opponent loops around you… but, if your patch of land is on the edge of the map, then the opponent can never completely loop you in and thus can’t kill you just by owning all the land surrounding you.

This are made more complicated by the game’s spell system. You start with a free fire spell that throws a fireball, and can unlock more by first unlocking the magic kind with a wheel spin, then paying for the exact spell you want with a bunch of coins. Each spell does something cool or useful, although some of those spells are more useful then others. You’d do very well to try to find a guide on the spells first (like the one I just linked) that details what the spells do, because the descriptions (at least in English) are written by a translation AI and do a very, very poor job of telling you what the spell actually does.

If you can manage to survive all of those concerns, then your next goal is to win the round. You do so by converting a lot of tiles. And I do mean a lot, as the map setup gives you 10,981 tiles to capture.

A countdown of 20 seconds to win will start if you own 80% (8,785) of the available tiles, and you instantly win a round if you reach 95% (10,432) owned tiles.

There are some things that hold it back though: There’s exactly one map. The only things that ever change on this map are which tiles are owned by whom. In addition to that, the game has no anticheat and no jumping, so you can occasionally find speedhackers who create their own version of the game’s speed-enhancing spells. And finally, the bots have zero ping and zero prediction, so you absolutely will have some unfair deaths caused by bots.

ViewScore

4 out of 10 stars

The view isn’t marvelous. The map itself is made out of tiles that are either a player’s color or completely black. The walls are 0.9 transparency surfaces that make it harder to touch the edges reliably. That being said, it goes out of its way to make the land ownership visible, and it does at least try to indicate when a spell is about to land and affect areas. So there’s some redeeming points, but overall nothing to talk about. There’s no map decoration besides a generic “flat untextured grassy field with cliff walls”. Let’s move on.

TechScore

4.5 out of 10 stars

The game suffers greatly here, too: The UX involves many different progression systems:

• Come back daily for gem shards!
• Complete quests to receive XP!
• Spend that XP to level up and get Coins and a small number of gems shards!
• Spend coins to buy magic spells or game cosmetics!
• Spend shards to spin for magic!
• When you’re level 25, hit the rebirth button for a small coin reward and to do it all again!

None of it reads as rather uniquely special to the game and I suspect these parts of the US were fed through an AI like DeepSeek. The parts of the game that are ‘live’ are simple mechanics copied from other games like paper.io (mentioned in the game’s description) and could feasibly be recreated from an AI as well.

TimeScore

5 out of 10 stars

Rounds are at most 30 minutes, but you absolutely can end a round in at most 4 minutes if you are greedy, quick, and have exactly the right combination of spells. 30 minutes is a very long time if you can’t manage that or you find playuers putting up a good fight, but A) there are other ways to win and B) there are other ways to progress. In particular, there are some invisible rewards involved: Killing a player gives you a couple gems & a few coins. That action is also a repeatable quest which gives XP for more rewards. So it’s possible to play this game in an airport, but I wouldn’t hedge my bet on “winning a round” vs. “potentially missing a call to board the plane”.

PassScore

2 out of 10 stars

Oh, gosh, the buy buttons are absolutely everywhere. For starters, we have no less then five purchase buttons visible on screen at all times, we have reminders to buy currency if you’re out, we have at least one magic type that is only buyable through robux, and we have six buttons in the deathscreen, one of which is the ability to buy a two hour vote-ban for the person that killed you.

It’s absolutely possible to win this game without spending a single dime, and the most powerful mechanics in the game are available for free if you’re willing to grind, but be careful where you tap the screen, because it’s full of buttons at pretty much any given point in time.