Sorcery! 3 Review: Hardcore Droid

Hardcore Droid – Sorcery! 3 continues the trend in mobile gaming of combining videogames and choose-your-own-adventure novels, and while it takes few risks, it is an awfully big adventure. While there have been a good chunk of choose-your-own-adventure games in recent years, few have created a world as engaging, expansive, and changeable as Sorcery! 3. Sorcery! 3 eschews tension-ratcheting gameplay and detailed animation in favor of world-building and choice complexity. This makes the game immersive, but it also makes it less of a game. In fact, it could almost be a browser-based text adventure rather than a mobile game. The elements that make it more than a massive branching novel are often unpolished and cumbersome. It does have gameplay, however, but there are no controls to master, no level-ups, and few skills to speak of. Conflict is solved, instead, by cunning, intuition, and memory. The right choice could leave you with a new, powerful spell, but the wrong one could leave you robbed, injured, or even outright dead. It is sometimes hard to know which decision is the right one, but that’s part of the fun.