Magic Carpet 2: The Netherworlds

aka: Magic Carpet 2, Magic Carpet 2: Niederwelten
Moby ID: 790
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

The evil demon lord Vissuluth has taken control of the realms of the Netherworld. Once prosperous lands have been infested with monsters and several evil wizards, Vissuluth's side-kicks, are up to no good either. Fortunately the magician Kafkar knows a promising young apprentice who may stand up to Vissuluth. You're that apprentice!

Magic Carpet 2: The Netherworlds is the sequel to Magic Carpet and uses a new 3D engine to produce better looking graphics. New spells and monsters are also included. It's an action game with some elements from other genres thrown into the mix. The biggest part of the gameplay is FPS action. You fly around on your magic carpet, clearing levels by killing monsters and battling other wizards. Instead of guns, you use offensive spells like fireball, meteor, lightning, tornado etc.

Every monster you kill leaves behind a certain amount of mana which you can possess and store in your castle. You need this mana to cast spells and if you store it in your castle other wizards can't steal it (in some levels you need to defend your castle from attacks by monsters and rival wizards). With enough mana you can upgrade your castle which allows you to cast more powerful spells. During the course of the game you'll get all kinds of new spells and improve the ones you already have.

Like many other games by Bullfrog Magic Carpet 2 is also a bit of a god game. Many realms are inhabited by neutral citizens; you can help them by destroying monsters that attack them or destroy their cities yourself. You can also completely transform each game world with spells like volcano, earthquake and gravity well.

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Credits (DOS version)

67 People (61 developers, 6 thanks) · View all

Project Leader
Engine Programming
Lead Programming
Programming
Lead Artist
Graphics and Art
Introductory Sequence
Scripting
Level Design
Sound & Music
Voice Overs
Technical Support
PR
Playguide
Playguide Design
Testing
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 86% (based on 18 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 38 ratings with 4 reviews)

Mixed feelings about a magic carpet ride

The Good
Magic Carpet 2 is an original game and I like the concept of the game. It differentiates itself from other games with both its setting and its gameplay. The game's first-person shooter action (with all sorts of magical spells instead of guns) is complemented with some small city-building, resource management and God game elements. Moreover, as the title implies, the player doesn't go about the levels on foot but flies around on a magic carpet. There really isn't that much like it, except for the prequel that Bullfrog released in 1994 of course. I haven't played the first Magic Carpet game so I won't compare Magic Carpet 2 with that one.

Usually one of the first things a player will do when entering a level is building a castle. You do this by casting your castle spell (this requires you to have a small amount of mana, the only resource in the game). Your castle acts as your mana storage. Whenever you kill a creature with one of your offensive spells a golden mana ball will appear, the amount of mana depends on the toughness of the monster. With your possession spell you can claim the mana as your own. Then a balloon will pick up the mana and store it in your castle so other wizards can't steal your mana.

You'll need this mana to cast all kinds of spells. Collecting more mana allows you to cast stronger & better spells. Once you've got enough mana you can upgrade your castle by casting the castle spell some more. A stronger castle can hold more mana and can defend itself a bit against attacks by monsters and other wizards. Any stage 3 or higher castle has archers who try to take out attackers. Your castle also acts as your spawn point. You can't die completely ("banished from the realm") as long as you have a castle, this implies that you have to defend your castle from attacks by monster and the A.I. wizards. All of the things mentioned above set the gameplay apart from the standard FPS fare.

Great graphics engine. I liked the graphics both from a technical standpoint as well as from an artistic standpoint. Compared to modern games the draw distance is rather small and there's quite a bit of fog to cover it up, but compared to other FPS games of that period, like Mechwarrior 2, Doom II or Rise of the Triad it looked very good. Perhaps because of the small draw distance, the 3D engine is relatively fast (especially in the low-res mode, although with modern CPU's likely also in high-res mode). Another thing I liked was that pressing <tt>Enter</tt> brings up a real-time map on the left half of the screen. The right part of the screen is reserved for the regular view. The map gives you a lot of info (you can see all monsters move, see your balloons pick up mana etc) and almost everything you do instantly alters the map.

The best thing about the graphics engine is the ability to completely transform each game world with your magical spells. You start the game as a young apprentice who can do little more than shoot fireballs but as you progress through the levels you gain more abilities and by the end of the game you'll be summoning earthquakes (this spell allows you to dig tunnels through solid rock, very useful in the cave levels), tornadoes, thunderstorms and much more. The volcano spell was my favorite, with it you can transform a flat plane into a mountainous region filled with fire and smoke. It just looks awesome and really gives you the impression that you are a powerful wizard.

Monsters and spells are well designed and fit in with the magical/Persian theme of the game (though there are also some cliche monsters like the spider and the skeleton). Menu's and levels look mysterious and because several levels feature secret areas I always fully explored them. The nice music and sound effects help to enhance the mysterious atmosphere, I just wish there were some extra tracks cause the music does become repetitive after a while. The A.I. (of the enemy wizards) is decent. It's not very creative and doesn't use a lot of different spells, but it does flee from you when wounded and will steal your mana when your balloons have not yet picked it up. Sometimes the A.I. wizards gang up on you but they also fight amongst each other. All the different kinds of monsters are pretty stupid however.

The Bad
The controls of Magic Carpet 2 are a bit odd. By default you use the 8 & 2 keys on your keypad to move forwards & backwards, if you want to fly at a higher or lower altitude you'll have to use the mouse. For example, moving the mouse away from you makes the nose of your carpet point upwards (this is also how you aim). If you now press the 8-key you'll glide upwards (and forwards) a little bit. You can't move solely along the vertical axis like you can with a chopper. As a result of this, you don't really get the feeling you're flying on a magic carpet, as you kind of glide a few feet above whatever surface happens to be underneath you. It feels odd to suddenly make an increase in altitude when for example a house is on your path. Several levels also feature large walls that block your path cause you can't fly over them, which I found rather silly. However, including extra up & down keys would probably have made the control scheme too complex and the game too difficult (think Descent). So for the sake of gameplay it's probably better this way.

What did annoy me was that you can't assign shortcut keys for spells. In almost any FPS game the keys 1 through 0 on your keyboard correspond with the different weapons you can use. However, in MC2 you pick a spell by clicking on an icon in a menu that appears after pressing <tt>Ctrl</tt>. This is takes way too much time when the action gets hectic. Fortunately you can assign multiple spells to either the left or the right mouse-button and then select a particular spell by holding down the <tt>Left-Shift</tt>-key and either the left or the right mouse-button until you've found the desired spell. This is an improvement over the method mentioned earlier but can still take too much time when you have 5 or 6 spells assigned to one mouse-button. Thus it would have been nice if you could have used for example <tt>Left-Shift + 1</tt> to directly select a particular spell for use with your left mouse-button and <tt>Right-Shift + 1</tt> to directly select another spell for use with your right mouse-button etc.

  • I really enjoyed the first few levels, but after a while the gameplay becomes rather repetitive. Almost every level requires you to kill all monsters, collect their mana so you can upgrade your castle. Then when you're strong enough, you must banish the others wizards from this realm just like banished them from the previous level (okay, maybe that's a bit exaggerated, but I probably did defeat the wizard Nyphur somewhere around ten times).
  • Magic Carpet 2 includes some cave levels, something the original Magic Carpet did not have. Of course a change of scenery is nice and I must say these levels look and sound appropriately spooky & mysterious (the lava looks very nice) but overall I don't think they are a great success. Often the tunnels are too narrow to cast your castle spell multiple times (so you can't expand your castle beyond for example stage 5 while you do have the mana for stage 6) and maneuvering through them on your carpet can be a bit tricky as well. Sometimes your locked inside a small, dark chamber with skeletons that drain your mana and steal your spells. This is pretty frustrating as it is hard to target these skeletons when they're so close to you. In my opinion the wide open spaces of the outdoor levels just worked better than the narrow confinements of the cave levels.
  • During the single-player game you collect a lot of cool spells. However there isn't any use for several of them. For instance there is a spell that morphs you into three different kinds of monsters. I never encountered a situation in which this spell was useful. Idem ditto for the fake mana spell, the tremor spell, the gravity well spell, the magic mine spell, the alliance spell that temporarily turns monsters into allies, the spell that let's you summon armies of monsters etc. The tornado spell looks cool but is to weak to be useful. Earlier I mentioned that the gameplay was too repetitive, I wish Bullfrog had designed some levels/missions in which you had to use some of the spells mentioned above. I bet if this game was released today it would have had some stealth missions in which you had to morph into another creature to get past the enemy.
  • Magic Carpet 2 lacks a good storyline. The game starts off well with a very nice intro movie and the detailed world map hints at a lot of interesting locations. However when you actually start to play the game, the only story elements you will encounter are some short text messages (accompanied by decent voice acting) from your master Kafkar. The game lacks interesting dialogues and there is not one memorable character in the game. There are no cut-scenes (other than the intro) and the enemy wizards don't have any personality or a single line of text. The locations in which you battle may sound and look like they came straight out of a Robert Howard or Clark Ashton Smith story, you never get to know much about these locations. Occasionally Kafkar has one or two lines of text referring to the city, island or cave where your battle takes place but most of the times this is not the case. Some of the cities are inhabited by ordinary people, but you can't interact with them. Bullfrog should have spend some more time on "furnishing" the gameworld.


The Bottom Line
Magic Carpet 2 is an original game with excellent production values and a great 3D engine. From a technical perspective this is an amazing game. The game features several elements I have not seen in other games and some of the spells you can use are just plain awesome (no weapon from any other FPS I've ever played comes close to the volcano spell). However mainly because of the repetitive gameplay and the lack of a compelling storyline Magic Carpet 2 just isn't one of my favorite games.

DOS · by Roedie (5239) · 2006

If I ever composed a list of underrated games, Magic Carpet 2 would definitely be in the Top 5

The Good
Magic Carpet 2 is another example of the “hybrid god sim” genre that the legendary UK designer Peter Molyneux worked on for Bullfrog in early to mid 1995, shortly before he left the company to found Lionhead Productions. Despite being an ahead of its time, both technically and artistically, and receiving favourable reviews, MC2 went almost unnoticed by gamers. Now, it is extremely difficult to find. I came to own my copy by virtue of my dad, who gave it to me a few weeks ago. He received it as a free software sample while he was working as editor for the now-defunct Australian Electronics magazine.

MC2 is visually impressive, even today. It supports an SVGA 480x640 resolution or just plain VGA. Despite the resolution, the fully morphable landscape, gouraud shading, intelligent light sources, reflections and a number of other small nuances in the graphics make it almost as fun to watch as it is to play.

As far as storylines go, we’ve just got the generic “hero-vs-evil-baddie” plot. After the first war, the tattered realms are just beginning to regain some semblance of order when Vissuluth appears. Exploiting a natural loophole between the world and the “otherworld” (as we’re told in the manual), he invades with a host of demonic creatures. Soon the very fabric of reality begins to warp and meld, and the creatures of the very land are corrupted. You, one of the few wizards who survived the first war, are called by the spirit of your slain master Kafka to spearhead the assault against Vissuluth. You fly from realm to realm, equipped with the titular carpet and a arsenal of spells to use, blasting to smithereens monsters and giant insects and rival wizards and other stuff I won’t enlarge upon until the final showdown with Vissuluth himself. It might not sound like the most original of plots, but after playing through the first couple of levels you soon find yourself becoming as involved in the story as if had it contained three-thousand word narratives.

At a glance, MC2 looks like a standard first-person-shooter. However, on closer inspection it is a lot more than that. There are adventure parts, and even traces of city building and economic management. All the realms you journey into are populated by people, who are neither friend nor foe. These people reproduce, and over time the population grows. They build and expand cities, and after a while they even recruit little armies to drive away Vissuluth’s creatures which frequently attack them. If you are nice to them, they will aid you in your quest. But if you fire offensive spells at them, they start attacking you. If you have the time and breathing space (which you won’t, in most levels), you could sit back and observe the human population, and watch them grow like a colony of sea monkeys.

The spells avaliable are varied, to say the least. There are over 20 of them. They range from the standard fireball, to the devastating meteor, to the life-saving teleport, to the indispensable heal. Some of them are spectacular to watch, such as the volcano spell, which creates an enormous lava-spewing mountain on the spot.

“Mana” is the critical lynchpin in MC2. It is energy, the more mana you have, the more spells you’ll be able to use, and the more health you’ll get. Mana is represented by little golden balls. At the start of the game, you have a “possession” spell. You can cast this spell on mana, and it will come under your control. But other wizards can simply come along and capture it off you with a possession spell of their own. So, you must build a fortress to store your captured mana. Fortresses are extremely important, they allow you to store an unlimited supply of mana where it can’t be captured by enemies. Over time, you can enlarge it, and even equip it with troops to defend it against enemy wizards.

Speaking of enemy wizards, they are another unique factor in magic carpet. There are seven of them: Nyphur, Rahn, Jark, Belix, Elyssa, Yragore, and Prish. They are like you. They need mana, they use spells, they can build a castle to hoard mana in. And you need to beat them all to progress to the next level. This is the true beauty of MC2 – the competition. Fighting against rival wizards, while staying on good terms with the people, and collecting mana. Not every problem can be solved by blazing away with the trusty fireball spell. MC2 achieves a depth of gameplay that is rare indeed in the FPS genre.. It is really more strategy than shooter.

The Bad
The game is too easy. I was able to knock the 25 levels over in about three days. The various monsters you face are generally as dumb as a bag of hammers, and even the wizards don’t pose a massive threat once you get a fortress and a decent supply of mana. Usually the opening moments of the game are the most tense, as you don’t have a fortress and must fend for yourself against hordes of monsters. But once you get a fortress (and troops to defend it), it is almost impossible to really die, even if the enemy wizards gang up against you –- as they often do.

MC2 also suffers from repetition. Some of the levels have unique mission objectives, such as “collect X amount of mana”, or “build your fortress up to X level”, or “eliminate all monsters of X type”, but usually the developers have resorted to the standard “kill all enemies”. While it is fun the first few times, having to do it again and again and again, with no conceivable reward but to do more of the same on the next level is not what I’d call overly exciting. This problem is compounded by the fact that eliminating enemy wizards is so difficult. To completely banish them from the realm, you must a) destroy their castle, and b) kill them before they get the chance to build a new one. The trouble is, they build a new castle almost instantly, and the process repeats itself ad infinitum until they run out of mana.

One of the differences between MC1 and MC2 is that in MC2 some missions happen underground, in caverns. With a few exceptions, these cavern missions are dismal failures. The lighting is terrible, it is way too dark and I had to crank up the contrast on my monitor to see properly. The tunnels are so narrow that I was constantly crashing, losing my orientation, and going completely the wrong way. Another problem is that the game’s engine often does funny stuff with narrow confines. Sometimes I’d get attacked by monsters that could, apparently, shoot through solid walls. Also, finding enough flat ground to construct a fortress is a pain, and my balloon (which is a thing that automatically harvests your captured mana and then stores it in the fortress) kept on getting trapped in between stalactites and therefore rendered useless. I soon found myself groaning whenever I had to play through a cavern mission.

The game doesn’t perform terribly well on modern OSes. Even while running in Win95 compatibility mode, I suffered from frequent crashes and lockups. Sometimes the game would slow down to be almost unplayable, with an extremely choppy framerate. Which is actually a bit of a laugh when considering the system requirements. I experienced similar problems both with my Windows ME and Windows 98 machines.

The Bottom Line
Despite all of its merits, MC2 was the first Bullfrog game to commercially fail. I can only wonder why.

DOS · by Maw (832) · 2004

Amazing. Amazing amazing amazing amazing amazing.

The Good
This game is one of the best I ever played, no surprise coming from a young and original development team at Bullfrog. It has the best 3D engine I've seen to that date (only surpassed by Quake, which came quite a bit later and was completely different): fast, smooth, great-looking and even works in SVGA if your computer is fast enough. Simply amazing graphics, great controls, great sound effects and music and most importantly: GREAT GAMEPLAY! I still remember searching the caverns and fighting much stronger wizards until I was finally strong enough to defeat them. The spellcasting system is innovative and well-thought out, the levels are cool, the setting is neat, everything - this is without a doubt one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played, and with half a dozen secret levels and typical Bullfrog style, how can you go wrong?

The Bad
Too easy. Otherwise it's perfect.

The Bottom Line
One of the best games ever created. Go play it now, you're missing out.

DOS · by Tomer Gabel (4539) · 2000

[ View all 4 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Selecting upgraded spells adhawkins Jul 18, 2012

Trivia

German version

Translations how they should not be. On the back of the German cover the advertisement want to state that Magic Carpet 2 is still an action game and that the action is faster than before. Unfortunately the word "action" was also translated and now the advertisement state something about faster activity and activity parts within the game. Strange, they have managed to keep the word "action" within the first sentence of the advertisement.

Intel

Magic Carpet 2 features several references to the Intel Pentium processor. In several of the regular levels you can find an entrance to bonus Demon Lord levels. While these Demon Lord are being loaded, briefly a screen with the Intel Inside logo and the message "Pentium processor detected, configuring for optimal performance" is shown. The funny thing is, you also get to see this message when your PC is equipped with an AMD processor.

Music

One of the advanced command line parameters for executing this game from CDROM is: NETHERW -MUSIC2 which allows the gamer to listen to alternative music from the original Magic Carpet.

Awards

  • PC Player (Germany)
    • Issue 01/1996 - Best 3D Action Game in 1995
  • Power Play
    • Issue 02/1996 – Best ActionGame in 1995

Information also contributed by jaXen and Roedie

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Teg.

Windows, Macintosh added by Sciere.

Additional contributors: Terok Nor, Roger Wilco, Roedie, formercontrib, Patrick Bregger.

Game added January 24, 2000. Last modified January 29, 2024.