An average dungeon crawler with some very big flaws. There are a lot of better games around.
The game is splitted in two phases: an adventure phases where you will walk in cities and world map speaking people, solving quests, visiting stores, ecc.
And the action part where you will explore several dungeons fighting for your survival.
Adventure part is developed in bitmap, but even the world maps than locations and speakable characters are plagued by a design inspired, but technically very poor. Drawns seem popped out from a cheap online RPG. The quests faced in this mode are also pretty simple though some dialogs will be pretty entertaining.
The real core of the game lies in the great mazes you'll had to visit to complete your missions.
Dungeons are in total 3D and face with a first person visual. The stilus control your eyes, just like some FPS for DS (Moon, Metroid, Dementium, ecc). Dungeon's textures are pretty well colored and drawned though a bit repeatitive (obviously). Unfortunately, frame rate tends to go down during eyes movements, moreover the sensibility of the stilus is pretty low (and cannot be tuned in the options). Graphic is also pretty confusing so much to make difficult see monster drops or ground level items.
In your journey you will face a lot of puzzles and a lot of monsters.
Puzzles are not too complicated and perfectly fitted to the game even considering that some dungeons are huge (and multilevel). Enemies are great in poligonaly models, but awfully animated, slowly and uninspiredly.
Combat is in real time and it works pretty smoothly. You'll had no trouble hitting enemies with your weapons or your spells just hitting the enemies with the stilus on touch screen. The problem is that all is too easy! Enemies simply will not attack you unless you don't stand before them without make any actions. Practically is impossibile in this game to see a game over screen because enemies tend to ignore the player that will be plenty of time to kill them.
Sound is absolutely annoying with boresome musics and anonimous sound effects.
Howewer, except for the boring battles, the wandering can result fun thanks to a good level design of the dungeons and to a great capacity of characters customization.
Good
Good level design; great customizations possibilities; puzzles not frustrating nor too easy; enemy models rocks; automapping effective;
Bad
Adventure part generally poor in every aspects; frame rate bouncing; are enemies sleeping or what?;
awful sounds and musics;
Final comment
For DS there are a lot of games a lot better than Mazes of Fate. Titles like the Etrian Odissey saga, Master of the Monster Lair or the old Deep Labyrinth win totally the match without a sweat.
Howewer if you already played all the game before or are in search of a very easy title you'll can like even this one (maybe).
Final votation: 5