A warlock has broken into the castle and turned everything upside down. All the King’s men have been rendered walking corpses, there are exploding spiders in the basement, and everything is trying to kill you. The King is in danger, but he’s got a plan. And it involves you, the one with the dirty face.
You of the dirty face, are you a bad enough dude to save the king, clear the castle of bad guys, and send the Warlock back to where they came from in a body bag? We sure as heck don’t know since things get a tad weird and quite unnerving and confusing once you get deeper into your adventure. Take up your weapon, check your backpack, and don’t bother bringing facial cream, faithful warrior! Go forth, on your glorious, violent, blood-drenched Magic Rampage!
Welcome to our Magic Rampage beginner’s guide! Magic Rampage is a classic-style side-scrolling platformer in the vein of Megaman or Metal Slug, where you must go through individual levels while leaving a pile of dead baddies behind you. Exploring these levels is a big part of the game, as there are loads of hidden secret areas, sometimes up to 4 in a single level, not to mention the gems tend to be placed in hard-to-reach areas or behind puzzles.
In the end, winning in this game boils down to grinding for some good gear and learning how to dodge properly. In short, getting good! That being said we hope this Magic Rampage beginner’s guide will help you get there by pointing out some of its characteristics and by sending you in the right direction.
EXPLORATION TIPS
Exploration and backtracking are a fairly big part of the game: Some missions may need you to save an NPC’s life to get an achievement or two, secret areas abound and may contain rewards, and you always need to find the 3 gems in a level to make some Gold. You’ll find your eyes constantly checking for suspicious map features, and pushing the limit of your platforming skill to get more loot, or simply to sate your curiosity.
Leave Large Boxes Alone For A While
When you see large wooden boxes, there is a pretty real chance you can use them to reach a secret area. Before cracking them open, check if there are any suspicious platforms, bricks, or anything else above your general vicinity. Push the box to where you think you might reach what might be a secret, put on Jumpman Armor if you must, and jump. If you find no such areas, crack the boxes open and take the loot inside.
Secret Hunting With Jumpman Armor
Each level carries multiple secret areas, and sometimes simply has non-secret loot (particularly Gems!) that is hard to reach. One of the best ways to deal with that is to put on your good armor first and roll over the level, then come back to it with Jumpman Armor once you either have a better weapon or simply feel confident with your skills.
There is also constant swapping between your combat armor and Jumpman armor if you want to explore in just one go if you don’t mind the mild inconvenience of pausing the game a lot to swap gear. Jumpman Armor carries a chunky +28% Jump bonus, far more than the usual 1-5% most gear has. There is also waiting until you unlock the Triple Jump so you won’t need the Jumpman Armor and can go in at full power, but that might take a while.
Look Up!
The easiest way to look for secrets is to check for weird platforms, buttons, coin placement, or anything else, especially on the ceiling, or to go left instead of right when you start a dungeon. In most of the horizontally scrolling levels, there are secrets outside the top part of the screen, akin to the old level 2 secret in Super Mario Brothers but without the world warp shenanigans.
These secrets sometimes have naught but a paltry sum of gold, but sometimes there’s weaponry or the ever-valuable (At least if you aren’t playing in Rampage Mode on your second character) healing potions hiding just past the screen. In the image’s case, it’s the solution to one of the really early bonus room puzzles.
They also get marked as found when you finish a mission after spotting them, provided they count as actual secrets. Later on, you’ll also have to look down, sideways and even check if your projectiles travel through what pretend to be solid blocks for secrets!
Electrical Floor Openers and AOE Attacks Against Damaged Bricks
Some missions have lightning storms that occasionally attack you all throughout the level. Lightning storms tend to shoot green lightning, and are therefore stopped by green platforms. They have a slight AOE and they can damage enemies and destructible objects such as crates and cracked bricks. You may also notice there are some cracked bricks that you can’t hit with your weapons due to awkward placement.
Add all that together, and you’ll figure out to use the lightning to wreck those cracked bricks, which often hide secrets and items. You can also try using AOE attacks to do the same thing if those damaged floors are next to a wall, but it’s relatively unreliable compared to a lightning bolt.
5 Grey Keys and 2 Gold Keys At All Times
Eventually, you will unlock the ability to buy Grey and Gold keys in the Shop, and later levels often have chests in them. Considering Silver keys only cost 1000 gold a piece (950 later on), keep maybe 5 of them on your person at all times, especially once you reach chapters 3 and 4 where the keys start paying for themselves.
Most stuff from those chapters dropped by chests sell for more than 1k gold even if your current loadout makes them obsolete, and the second you find an Upgrade Rune, those keys have paid for themselves 5-7 times over! Upgrade Runes cost around 7-8k gold to buy in the Shop (Though they get cheaper later on along with other basic supplies like Keys and Potions) and are very important for upgrading gear.
Especially since chapter 4 gear unlocks start costing around 500k-1 million gold, in which case you’re gonna need to upgrade your current gear so you can grind not just previous levels and 3-gemming levels, but also Competitive mode for gold since those chests often give you EXP that counts toward the victory condition of the match. You’ll also need those keys for Bonus Levels since they often have doors and chests that need keys to open, which often aren’t provided by the level.
Never, Ever Sell The Jumpman Armor and SuperSonic Ring
Very early into the game, you will get the Jumpman Armor, and once you unlock Accessories, the SuperSonic Ring. Both these pieces of gear are very wimpy for combat: They have no offensive boosts or defensive ability at all beyond protecting you from whatever traps their element protects from, with Jumpman Armor’s Air element shielding you from spike traps.
They make up for this by giving you big fat boosts to your movement. Jumpman Armor gives you a whopping 28% Jump Impulse boost, and the Supersonic Ring boosts your running speed by a giggle-inducing 70%. This allows you to very easily solve many jumping or speed-based puzzles and also helps you find secrets especially early on before you unlock the various mobility and utility-based Skill Tree upgrades.
Later on, you can use them with the aforementioned Skill Tree mobility upgrades to find some of the deviously hidden secrets in the tall, open maps of Chapter 4. The devs making them sellable must be some sort of cruel prank on their part because you should never ever sell these lest you lock yourself out of some secret areas all the way until you unlock triple jumps!
COMBAT TIPS
You’ve got a weapon, and darn straight you’re gonna use it! Combat in Magic Rampage is simple but tight enough to necessitate some tips and has a few quirks in it that, while not immediately apparent as a newbie, will very quickly become second nature to a player after a few runs, especially if you’ve played Megaman and Metal Slug in the past.
Those quirks, like headshots and the simple stealth mechanic, usually serve to get you the upper hand. Good thing too: Killing all enemies in a level is a requirement to get the Star reward for a hitless perfect run.
Aim For The Head!
Thankfully the enemies in this game have fairly large heads because headshots deal nearly double damage crits in Magic Rampage. If you’re having trouble killing certain enemies, a good sword to the head should deal with them handily. This also makes it harder for most non-aiming enemies (ie the ones with attacks that only go left or right in a straight line rather than aiming directly at you) to block the shots with their own weapons.
Enemies Must Cause Deliberate Harm
Don’t be afraid to run up to enemies and touch them: Unless they’re obviously covered in spikes, fire, suspicious-looking force fields, made of corrosive slime, or likely to explode, enemies can only hurt you with deliberate offensive actions such as throwing projectiles, running at you violently, or biting your dirty, dirty face.
They cannot hurt you simply by touching you! This allows you to run up to their face and smack them with a fireball or an axe or whatever else you have, should they be hiding behind static Light Shields and you happen to lack good Light element weaponry. You can even get on top of most basic enemies and use them as platforms, though at your own risk. Of course, getting close can still be dangerous since you will have less time to dodge point-blank attacks, so be careful.
Sneaky Beaky
A bit of patience and stealth in this game can go a long way toward winning fights, especially against more dangerous mooks. Enemies only become aware of you if they face you and you’re in their direct line of sight, unobstructed by obstacles. Once they become aware of you, shown by a (!) icon, they will immediately attack you should you cross their line of sight again, but only for several seconds.
If you exit their line of sight for several seconds, they go back to being unaware, shown by a (?) icon appearing over their head. When that happens, they won’t immediately turn around to attack you if you approach them from behind, allowing you to take a cheap shot at them! Besides, that’s the only way to take down certain enemies: Some foes become invincible if they’re aware of your presence.
Watch Your Stamina
Your stamina bar has 5 shots worth of energy, and it takes a bit of time for the bar to recharge when empty but recharges faster the more shots are in it. Using your special ability takes up 3 shots at once. Keep this in mind when you’re going into a big fight, especially very early in the game when you lack firepower.
If you find yourself running low on stamina in the middle of a fight, retreat or try to get out of your enemy’s line of sight to recharge, then go in again to finish them off. Never enter a big fight with low stamina lest you find yourself unable to make breathing space with your Class Skill.
When The World Slows Down, Watch Out!
Being a mobile game, Magic Rampage is a tad aware of how difficult it is to control a character in a precise platformer using a smartphone screen, especially since it uses a left and right button rather than a digital joystick. The game makes up for this by warning you of danger via sudden bullet time:
The game will slow down like Neo dodging bullets in the Matrix movies whenever something weird or dangerous is about to happen, such as a giant instakill stone slab falling near you, trees summoning clones that carry your own one-shotty over-upgraded weapon and copy your movements, kamikaze spiders about to explode, or the appearance of bosses or when a powerful attack is coming.
Take advantage of this warning by getting out of the way! The game also slows down when you use your Class Skill, so it might help you to pop it if you find yourself in a tight spot and you need to dodge.
Class Skills
Each character class has its own Class Skill, usually summoned by tapping a direction button 3 times then following with the Attack button, or by expending a [MAGIC RUNE] for an instant easy single button cast.
Each class has different class skills, such as Druids summoning mooks, Paladins summoning 2 accurate homing hammers on either side of them, or Mages summoning 3 exploding fireballs with weak homing on either side of them.
Class Skills also slow the game down for a moment as you cast, allowing you to get your bearings in the big fights where you will most often cast them. For summoner-type Class Skills, you usually want to cast them a bit early, and for offensive Class Skills, you’ll want to jump into the enemy’s midst first.
Gold HP Bar? Check For Weaknesses
Sometimes, you will find enemies with gold HP bars, usually in Competitive or Weekly Dungeons, and they also tend to appear at around chapter 5. These foes seem invincible, but they often have weaknesses you need to watch out for.
Typically, you just need to wait for them to commence a certain action that exposes their weakness, sometimes in the case of the giant walking armor suits seen here you need to grab something to break their invulnerability and try not to get seen doing it.
Often, you’ll see enemies glow with circular lights when they’re finally exposed to your strikes or some other visual cue such as the sparkles disappearing from this giant suit of armor after an electric shock. In Competitive, sometimes you may decide to just run from them if you find your opponent struggling and don’t need to take time off to kill these guys.
The Elements
There are several elements in the game. While they each do little to really affect how enemies suffer from your attacks, they tend to allow you to interact with various map elements in a special way, even if it’s just being immune to certain traps.
Fire armor protects you from lava pits and flamethrower traps. It also typically protects you from fire-based attacks, but unlike lava and flamethrower traps, it won’t stop fire projectiles entirely. Fire gear is quite useful around chapters 1 and 2 because it has a ton of lava pits that hide loot, though you will find yourself switching to fire equipment even after since fire traps are still spread sporadically across future levels. Not to mention it boosts Mages in particular because of their fire-based Class skill. You can also become immune to flamethrower traps and lava if your armor stat hits the utterly deranged number of 330.
Earth armor allows you to traverse green light platforms. These platforms become common around chapters 2 and 3, and past that you’ll always keep an eye on them since they lead to secrets and such. Those green platforms also block green lightning, which allows you to solve other puzzles involving bricks you can’t hit with your own attacks.
Light weapons can go through one-way Light Shields from both directions as opposed to just from behind. This allows you to shoot enemies hiding behind those walls without having to rush them and risk losing health or your Perfect Run star.
Dark weapons can go through Spherical Shields deployed by enemy units easily, as they deal double damage against them. This makes them the only primarily combat-oriented element since Light weapons can still be used to solve puzzles involving Light shields and stuff hiding behind them.
Water and Air armor or rings allow you to traverse spikes, with Water gear having the added ability to prevent you from sinking through deep water. You will be very familiar with Air gear early on, as one of the first armors you can get if you backtrack after breaking your first wooden box is the Jumpman Armor: A powerful exploration tool that sacrifices all firepower and defense for a completely insane 28% Jump Impulse bonus, compared to the 1-5% you get even from the highest tiers of armor.
How Weapons Work
Weapons tend to all work in what looks like the same way: You shoot them at things, and things die horribly. That being said, you’ll soon find out that weapons have their quirks beyond just their stats and elemental damage. Most of these descriptions apply early on, but as you go further into the game you’ll notice a lot of the higher-tier weapons break a lot of these rules. Except for Spears, which are already a late-game unlocks anyway.
Swords are straight-shooting weapons with a long projectile and medium weight, allowing them to travel a bit after smacking into lighter attacks. They don’t do too well against spiders and other small foes because of their narrow hitboxes, but they excel in solving accuracy tests like say, shooting buttons through tiny wall gaps. They often come with Defense bonuses.
Daggers are light weapons and can be thrown relatively quickly. Their low weight often means they lose out to other weapons when trying to block attacks, but they will still at least deflect them a reasonable way out of your face given some distance. They tend to have low damage numbers early on, and they typically trade the Armor bonuses Swords and Axes typically have for a tasty 20+% Speed bonus.
Axes are very similar to daggers but they typically have more offensive stats compared to daggers’ more mobility-oriented stats. They’re slower to toss and have wide hitboxes so you can use them to smack spiders around, but they do poorly in accuracy puzzles. Much like Swords, they come with a Defense bonus.
Hammers and Maces are heavy weapons and will generally knock other attacks out of the way, but have a short range and go boom pretty quickly after being tossed. You use them to close the gap to an enemy’s face and smash through whatever projectile attack they try to protect themselves with. They also tend to have high damage and provide more Defense than Swords or Axes (70-80% compared to the usual 50% from bladed medium-sized weapons), so you take less damage from attacks.
Staves are powerful, typically having higher damage than most other weapons of a similar tier and infinite range like daggers and swords. They’re also unpredictable: Whether or not they’re an AOE attack or can deflect projectiles is entirely dependent on each individual staff. Early on they tend not to be able to beat other weapons in a parry, but the later staves can plow through enemy strikes pretty handily if they don’t just explode in the enemy’s face outright.
Spears are long throwing weapons that typically have narrow hitboxes, think of them as swords but heavier and longer, and only really become available fairly late into the game. They have one thing that puts them apart compared to other weapons: All spears can go through shields and enemies, unlike other weapons which specifically need that to be stated for their descriptions. As a consequence, they and other piercing weapons do relatively little damage for their cost, though they still do enough of it to hurt, and they will really help out against dangerous crowds.
GENERAL TIPS
Other than combat and exploration, there are a few things you can do to make your life a lot easier in Magic Rampage, usually having to do with your gold spending and making your character stronger.
Sell The Junk
You only have limited inventory space in your backpack, and extending it has an exorbitant 80000 gold cost the first time you do it, though you do get a nice Dagger of Sand when you do. As a new player, you should sell your obsolete equipment rather than buying the backpack extensions as your main source of earlygame income are achievements: Use those achievements to pay for a small set of expensive yet powerful equipment first, once you get into the later missions that have more reliable triple gem payouts, then you can save for a backpack extension. Unless you’re playing a Rogue or any other dagger-boosting class, then that reward dagger will be quite useful for you.
Banking Kit
Do you keep finding weapons that don’t mesh with your armor and class very well? Or armor that doesn’t boost your favorite life-ceasing tools? You could sell them, but if they’re pretty powerful but not your thing for now, it would be a shame to see them go to waste. That’s what the Bank is for! Once you unlock the Bank, you will be able to deposit gear there for a price, and the other characters you have in your account and save files can withdraw the equipment from it, though they will have to unlock the bank too. Either way, this is a huge boost to future runs.
Scrimp A Bit For The Good Stuff
You would be surprised how fast you earn gold in this game just by trying to get secrets and Gems in later missions, and Achievements from earlier ones. The cheaper weapons also tend to drop naturally from large boxes and even pots if you’re lucky, and chest drops tend to be fixed and repeatable. Knowing this, don’t waste gold on the lower tier gear: Just grind them out from repeating maps, which you will do anyway so you can find secrets or because you want to gun for the no-hit Star.
Instead, save your gold for the really high-tier stuff available to you, basically items in the 15-50k range or better early on, and in the 90-600k range later in the campaign, since those are typically good enough to get you past Chapter 5 if you pour a healthy amount of upgrades into them. Matching your armor with your weapon can really make the most of your gear since offensive bonuses tend to have very high percentages in Magic Rampage.
Of course, if you can save for a whole million Gold a piece for the really top-of-the-line stuff, great! We just suggested the 90-600k range for late missions since they’re typically good enough to murder most common mooks and blow hefty chunks off bosses in the normal story missions in one or two shots if the armors match the weapons and are given enough upgrades. Without burning your thumbs off from non-stop maniacal grinding.
Achievement Hunting
Achievements typically carry with them several thousand gold coins and occasionally a Skill tree point as a reward for getting them, and some of the achievements are easy enough that one could surmise they’re meant for new players to get a head start with a bit of elbow grease and common sense. You can view them via the Prizes and Skins option in the Menu tab.
Some of them can be gotten pretty early and easily, (Especially the ones that only need you to listen to NPCs talk) and can help you get good equipment early. Of particular note, do your best to keep other NPCs from dying horribly: You often get achievements for keeping them alive or leading them to what might be secrets that involve them, or at least to places that trigger them to make conversation with you.
Always Find The Three Gems, And Take Your Time
Other than Achievements and Competitive matches, your main source of gold is completing levels with all 3 gems found. Finding all three gems gets you a massive Gold bonus, usually several thousand gold coins early on and hitting nearly 30k-40k gold once you hit chapters 4 and 5. This means you should take your time with missions to find them all on your first run, and leave the bull-rushing to future runs when you want to nab that yellow Hit-less Run star.
Heck, you might want to take your time even with that anyway since you still have to stop and kill everything in the level. By the way, the triple Gem reward is repeatable, so if you find a mission that pays well and feels particularly easy or fun for you, you can grind it!
A Literal Skill Tree Made Of Wood
The Skill Tree (It is a literal tree with leaves and a wooden body, unlike most games!) is one of the most important things you can get in the game and it’s unlocked pretty early, but the game will not point it out to you until you either get to chapter 2 or press the Menu button. It’s pretty simple: Allocate 5 skill points to a node to unlock it for use, and it will allow you to put skill points in the next node down the line.
There are three lines: The top line is for sheer brute murder power, unlocking things such as the ability to make your shots plow through enemy projectiles without losing momentum or fast shot replenishment, or even making them explode upon death and damage other nearby enemies, who will also explode.
The middle line is the writer’s personal favorite, unlocking a few fairly basic offensive options but also a wealth of exploration tools such as immunity to lava and a triple jump. The final tree unlocks powerful defensive options such as extra armor, a 4th HP heart, and potions with triple healing strength.
Each line also ends in some form of super ability, with the first line unlocking a devastating charge attack, the middle line summoning a clone of yourself to act as a guided missile thrower, and the bottom line summoning a lightning strike whose damage is dependent on your DEF stat rather than your weapon.
While our mobility-crazed damage-obsessed writer bullrushes unlocking the triple jump while cramming his staff full of shiny rune rocks, it may do you better to pick your own path through the tree or even delay unlocking the super attacks to get a build you want that requires all three lines.
THINGS TO DO
There are a couple of things to do in Magic Rampage beyond just finishing the story, and you’ll likely need to do them if you want to survive this game’s main story mode, especially since things get a bit dicey in and around Chapter 4 and 5 even with the various ways the game has gotten easier since its release.
Competitive Runs
Competitive dungeon runs are a form of score attack where you take on a previous player’s performance on a certain map. This is one of the better ways to earn Gold if you’ve already beaten the campaign provided you always pick the hardest opponent.
You get a score based on how fast you reach the end of the dungeon, your number of kills and headshots, how few potions you drink, how few hits you take, and successful uses of your Class Skill. Getting killed midway through immediately kills your Completion Time score by setting it to 4 minutes. For the record, you can usually finish runs in one minute or less even as you stop to attack enemies!
Weekly Dungeon
The Weekly Dungeon is fairly similar to Competitive in that you are graded on your performance in a Dungeon, though these runs are usually more difficult to make up for how you are not graded against other players. Instead, you must reach a minimum viable score to get paid for your run.
Grading criteria are similar, based on completion time which immediately gets scuffed if you die, number of kills, how few potions you drink and hits you take, and effective use of Class Skills.
Backtracking For Gold Stars
One thing to do, especially once you’ve unlocked Keys in the shop, is to backtrack through older levels to get chests, grab achievements, unlock secrets, and especially to complete them with no hits and all enemies dead to get extra Gold.
To make backtracking easier, especially to unlock the Improved Jumpman suit for bragging rights (Honestly, the +10 Defense boost isn’t enough to justify the pain it takes to get it and the Jumpman Armor already does the job fine), we suggest grinding for a weapon that can at least one-shot enemies in earlier zones along with some mobility boosting skill tree upgrades like the Triple Jump.
At the very, very least, you should have your Class Skill unlocked first as that can make up for the lack of a good basic attack to an extent, with patience. You can raw-dog it too the first time in if you’re good of course!
But we’re in the business of figuring out how to do things with minimal pain on your end so of course, we’ll suggest getting a good weapon first and going in knowing what enemies await you and where so you can get the jump on them easily. This also acts as practice for the Weekly Dungeon and Competitive runs, since doing them without taking a single hit nets you extra points!
And this ends our Beginner’s Guide for Magic Rampage. We hope this helps, so go out there and save your King. And don’t hesitate to add your own tips in the comment section below while you’re at it!