Dice Mage has a cool core idea, you're a mage fighting using dice. Based on equipped gear, the numbers of your rolled throws do different things and if you roll higher than your enemy, you deal damage to them. If you don't roll high enough, you can pay some mana to re-roll. There are a few minigames and some gear to buy and equip to customize your character. It's a neat little game but too thin, with not enough meat around that cool core idea.
The goal of each stage is to defeat the boss, then to move on to the next stage. When you're defeated, you restart to stage one - which is a bit weird, since you keep all items and gems, so it's not like you're restarting the whole game - and you lose your stats. By defeating enemies and opening chests, you get random stat bonuses such as attack, defense, mana and life, and sometimes you get stat you wouldn't really need. You also have a few gear slots in which you equip various items that either change what your dice rolls do, or give you stat bonuses and trigger effects if you do specific things, like not re-rolling before an attack.
To attack, you roll die, then if your number is higher than the opponent's you attack them. Some dice values also do special things for you and them, like draining their health or making an attack deal critical damage. If your result is too low, you can pay an increasing amount of mana to re-roll, with a bonus to your die added in. After playing for a few hours I'm still unsure on how attack and defense correlate, but it's not too bad. Enemies have special skills too, sometimes they grow stronger when you reroll, things like that.
The minigames are okay, there's a chest one where you roll and get stat bonuses if you don't roll too low - and in minigames you spend crystals, the premium currency that is distributed fairly generously, in order to get more rolls. There's also a game where you can try to get specific numbers to win items - but without information on the items, it's not very tempting to try and get the toughest ones, and there's a shop where you buy items using crystals. The shop - and other item-related screens - all have the issue that you can't see what you have equipped at all, and you can only visit them once, so it's pretty tough to make good purchasing decisions.
Dice Mage is neat, but there's not much to do beside fight an endless stream of vaguely similar enemies. You're not always progressing forward since death brings you back to the first stage and the stat/item progression is a bit too random for my tastes. After getting to stage four for the sixth time and dying there, I had decided that was enough for me.
