Introduction
Mahou Arms pits a small paramilitary group of magical girls against an alien invasion who have almost subjugated the human race. You have to hack and slash your way through hordes of aliens in this anime-inspired game for the PC. Just be careful or the aliens will hack and slash their way through your clothes instead!
As well as the hack and slash combat, there is meant to be a base-building aspect. The Patreon has also mention dating-sim elements. Neither of these features has been implemented yet.
This is an early access game and Mahou Arms should be noted to be very early access. If you are reading this after time has passed, the state of the game may have changed. At the time of writing, it is quite short on content which is why this is only impressions. There are only two full missions and a short training mission included at the moment. There is also only one character of the three planned.
Sexual Content
Just how much lewd content Mahou Arms contains depends on how you decide to purchase it. If you purchase it on Denpasoft it contains 3D sex scenes where you control the character to a small extent and avatars with clothes ripped off as damage is taken until essentially topless. If purchased on Steam, the sex scenes are omitted and the clothes only become slightly frayed. In either version, panty shots are near-constant when she runs and fights.
There is a downloadable launcher to allow players with the Steam version to access the uncensored mode, but I personally had initial technical issues getting it to work. After the issues seemed to disappear, I then found it not to be the most obvious piece of software to use. There were no relevant labels in some places and it took some guesswork to operate.
Story
There isn’t too much to talk about here yet as we only have missions 01 and 03 included as story content currently. You are currently playing as Amelia Conway, who successfully makes a landing on Earth. Her first mission is to make a forward base and the overall goal is to fight off the alien invaders.
As we make our way through the game, we see some of the story being told through comic book scenes and some via in-game dialogue.
Gameplay
This is the section where I can talk about it a bit more. Mahou Arms is an absolute blast with its light and quick melee combat. You can spend your time dodging around and getting in attacks quickly. Reaction speed is important!
Before mentioning battle further, I’ll note that you can run around between different areas of the level. Most of the time this was running between different areas and occasionally getting blocked in with enemies which had to be defeated to continue. There were also some slightly hidden areas, such as pathways out of sight with items to pick up. You are equipped with a scanner that can show item locations, which helps locate these places.
When enemies do appear, you can switch between two battle modes. Both of these make Amelia change her appearance and can be switched between at will. Melee and ranged mode are your choices. I have to admit that I mostly stuck to melee mode though, as I found it far more fun. Ranged mode worked well enough, but I tended to use it mostly to keep up the combo meter when the next enemy was far away. One thing I didn’t like so much was that it locked down your view and the way your character faced more.
Mahou Arms never felt unfair, which I’ve not always found to be the case in hack and slash games. I always felt like if I got hit by an attack, I could have dodged it if I was playing better. There are visual and audio cues in most cases, so even if the enemy is out of view you stand a good chance of noticing and dodging. I’ve completed sections without being hit, but when I have been hit it’s usually been when I noticed something too late to move.
With that said, the game can feel too easy at times too. If I didn’t pay attention, it was easy to lose significant amounts of health, but as long as I’m doing relatively well at keeping track of my surroundings I barely took any damage. This was the same from the easiest to the most difficult of the five difficulty modes, which didn’t feel to be particularly different. I actually had to purposely let myself get hit enough to test out the clothes ripping mechanic so I could write about it. Yes, that’s my excuse. Building up combo ranking was far too easy too, with most of my time spent in SSS.
Other than the lack of difficulty, the only real issue I had with gameplay in Mahou Arms was the camera angles. Occasionally these blocked off my view when near walls. Fortunately, this did not happen often and never really caused problems.
Overall, I had great fun throwing enemies through the battleground while dodging multiple attacks. While the number of attacks is fairly limited, it felt like there was more amount of focus on paying attention to the battleground and placement than normal for the genre as a trade-off. The enemies sometimes felt like they had too much health, but this added to the fun of dodging the ranged enemies while working on taking them down. Improvements can be made, but I enjoyed this aspect.
If you prefer to see rather than reading about it, you can see an example of the gameplay on this video of my playthrough of the first level.
Graphics and Audio
Mahou Arms has some wonderfully stylish comic art in its story scenes. It’s incredibly high quality and I’d be happy to read through an entire story in this format. The gameplay graphics look great too. It’s certainly not polished up to a AAA standard, but the style makes up for it.
The sound is fairly limited and I’d like to see more variety as the game develops. I did enjoy the background music though. It’s just that it would be good to see more of it used in different situations.
Verdict
Overall I think this is a very promising game and could become great. I do think that someone paying the full price should know what they are getting themselves into though. This is about an hour of content if playing through once, which someone expecting a full game would not be happy about. Many Early Access games release with a full game, but missing features. This is not the case here.
This is genuinely a lot of fun and I would love to see the developer succeed. If you believe that they will make this into what it could be and want to support development, this could be the time to pick it up as it is set at a cheaper price than the final version. If you want to buy a game with more content, it is better to wait.
My official verdict is;
MAHOU ARMS HAS PROMISE.
If you decide to purchase this, I would recommend carefully deciding on the uncensored Denpasoft version or the censored Steam version.
If you enjoy anime-themed hack and slash games, why not check out our review of Sakura Wars? It is a recently released dating simulator with hack and slash combat.
Many thanks to Sekai Project for the review copy.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
