Magicka

 By: Robert Murphy

Hey everybody, while searching through the Steam online store the other day I was introduced to a fun little game called Magicka. It is a role play style game where you play an already aspired magician in his/hers kingdom but now is needed to defend the land from creatures attacking everyone. Players have a mastery of a number of different elemental magic such water, fire, lighting and earth but casting these basic spells is only half the fun. Magicka allows players to combine and chain magic in a vast number of different ways leaving you to do guess work in creating powerful moves and abilities that explode enemies all over the walls.

Much of what makes the game so fun is the mountain of experimentation that comes along with the spell casting and it’s really quite easy to chain and use different abilities too. Each element is assigned to a key such as (F) is Fire and (Q) is Water and you can chain the same or different elements up to five and obviously having the same element queued will be a stronger attack but its more fun to try chaining different elements rather than just one. Once you have your spells queued up you can choose whether or not to self cast, area cast or forward cast your spell and they’re all pretty self explanatory on what they do. Self cast allows you to cast the ability on yourself such as to heal yourself, Area cast is best used if you’re surrounded or if you want to do a cause an area of damage around you and then Forward cast sends your attack forward in the direction you’re facing which is probably best on just one or two enemies. It will take some getting use to like any game with different controls but once you start playing you’ll be throwing ice spikes and causing lighting storms in no time.

Now moving on to the campaign which consists of traveling through chapters and fighting through a variety of different monsters and creatures by yourself or with your friends but this is about it. The story really isn’t much of anything to write home about but there is a high level of nerdy dialogue from things like Star Wars, Star Trek and more which I thought was a funny little perk to the game. But these funny moments are often broken and fractured with frame rate issues, I cant tell you how many times a conversation would end but id be stuck on the screen while an A.I.’s lips stopped moving. This wasn’t the only problem though, enemies sometimes had the nasty habit of getting stuck in the environments or you yourself might glitch into them as well. If you could get through a long enough session without any problems it would be a miracle and would have made Magicka so much better.

The game does come with an online experience for you to try out for the story mode and an arena mode where you can fight and test your skill and power of the spells you learned, if you can get into a match that is. Unfortunately online suffers from more issues than the regular game does with issue in finding and getting into matches and monstrous levels of lag to contend with as well. Another issue is communication in the game which is almost impossible especially seeing as friendly fire is on and you can easily end up killing a teammate. Bottom line is that it’s probably best to avoid online for the game all together.

 Magicka was an extremely fun concept and when I didn’t have any problems to deal with while I was playing it proved to be very enjoyable. It takes some time for you to get the scheme of things when you’re playing because the game involves some reflex work and maneuvering while you fight against harder and harder enemies and bosses. Also the vast experimentation of using your magic and combining to make even more powerful ones is very enjoyable to do. The game though needs a lot of patch work if it wants any hope of improvement and not causing players to get fed up with the issue that can come up while you play. It’s also horribly maddening and fun in the best way to get your friends together (on a local grouping obviously) and see the pure chaos of lighting bolts and aura shots flying all over the place.

Good:

- A fun magic casting system

- A vast array of ways to cast magic and magic spells to figure out and unleash

- Fun cartoony world that fits the nerdy humor and maddening game play

- If you can get your friends in on the action you’ll be sure to have a great time

Bad:

- Needs some more patch work to fix its issues

- Online is broken and is best to be avoided

- Forgettable campaign

Scully Rating: 7.0 out of 10