Announced yesterday after a pretty short beta period, the magical arena fighting game Gift of Parthax is now officially available for Linux. Along with putting the Linux build out in public, their latest release also fixes a few bugs.

The developer sent over a key and I've been testing it, the Linux version seems to be working really quite nicely. If you liked the idea of Wizard of Legend, but found it a little too fast for your tastes then Gift of Parthax might be a better fit although it's single-player only.

Gameplay is a mix of a staging area where you can mess about with your magic, buy new runes and potions and then there's the arena fights with around 25 arena battles in total.

While I like the basic gameplay, the camera angles have been annoying me quite a bit. As you walk around the arena, the camera automatically follows you and zooms in/out whenever it feels like it. Often, it zooms in way too far and so you don't really get a good view of what's going on. If they tweaked it to not zoom in so far, it would feel quite a bit better.

The spell system is quite interesting, giving you the ability to enhance each basic spell with special runes to add additional effects. For a projectile spell as an example, you could make it speed up, split into more pieces, seek the nearest enemy and so on. Although the homing spell doesn't really work as advertised, it hardly did a thing in my play-through. It takes a while though due to the pace of the game being a little slow to get the money needed for the runes you want. Although, you can replay previous battles if you need to practice new spell/run combinations or gain some easier money.

There's also a few different endings, based on some moral choices you make during boss fights.

Find it on Humble Store and Steam.