Super Cane Magic Zero Review

It is not often that I question the mental state of game developers or publishers. But with Super Cane Magic Zero, I cannot help but think: “What in all that is holy and gaming were these guys high on?!”

Super Cane Magic Zero is developed by Studio Evil and is presented as an action RPG game that you can play with up to four players. There is a land where a wizard named Cake is famous for being able to conjure up cakes. He has a dog. Cake dies one day. Dog becomes so sad that he somehow develops magical powers. Now, whenever he barks, magical things happen like a volcano turns into a popsicle or magical creatures get created. It is super weird and tries a little too hard to be edgy and funny. Sure, at first I laughed a bit but eventually I just got tired of all the sudden “twists” or “gotchas” the game was throwing at me.

The game started off in an area that acted as a mini-tutorial. To be honest, it was clever to use pictures as well as texts to teach me how to use the controls. The controls though, I have to say, are really hard to get used to. I was in a way reminded of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past with the way the game was setting off to be played. I soon discovered that while some aspects of it were similar, it was extremely its own game and had a great number of flaws.

To start off, my character did not run very fast and I even had to make sure it was facing the right direction. There was no button to hold down to make the character run. Instead, so long as I was moving in one direction for a period of time, the character will start running. However, the run speed honestly was not very fast. This proved to be a little annoying when I was fighting enemies or trying to get to places on the other side of the map.

The combat in this game was also a bit lackluster. At first, it was highly entertaining throwing things around, especially at my roommate who kindly played with me to test the multiplayer aspect of the game. I could equip weapons and armor but never seemed to use any I picked up. Instead, I found myself just picking up and throwing them at the enemies. Speaking of throwing, the right thumbstick was defaulted to have my character scream at the top of its lungs. Yes, at first, my roommate and I burst out laughing but after the 100th scream, it was honestly getting on our nerves. Again, another case of trying too hard to be funny but ended up failing.

The inventory page is a mess. There really was not a good way to effectively organize it. Sometimes, I wanted to equip something and instead of equipping the item, the game would move it to a “quick slot”. I do not know what the purpose of it was but it was 100% useless to me. Perhaps it was a way for me to quickly change weapons but again, I barely used the weapons in the game anyways. In fact, in order to open anything in the game, I had to pick it up and throw it. This got truly tedious especially when items all clump together.

Another negative experience I had were the loading screens. It honestly took way too long to load anything in Super Cane Magic Zero. Not only that, the game again tries really hard to be funny. It sometimes succeeded and it sometimes didn’t. I got hit with messages like “If you’re watching this on YouTube, hit LIKE now!” For some people, this could be hilarious but after seeing this 10 times and for two minutes each, the humor got lost on me.

The two things that Super Cane Magic Zero did do well were the music and the art. I absolutely loved its soundtrack. It fits well with the craziness that was going on and the art style. The art was honestly very chaotic with its silliness but still very well drawn. If I am honest, it was not my kind of taste but I can still appreciate just how well designed everything looked.

All in all, I thought that while Super Cane Magic Zero was fun for the first hour or so, it honestly was not fun after that. I can see little kids enjoying this game immensely. The art style is cute and the music is great. But the controls drove me nuts and the “oh look how funny we are” attempts were seriously getting on my nerves towards the end.