Magicka is the type of game I have been dreaming about for years. As far as dungeon crawlers go, I have always dreamed of a game based heavily on magic, where the player is free to craft his or her own spells from a basic set of elements.
That basic idea is Magicka in a nutshell. Seriously.
Using a pool of eight basic elements such as Fire, Ice, Healing, Water, Stone, etc., the player taps out combinations (up to five elements long) to create spells to use against his enemies. Magicka maps the eight elements to the QWER and ASDF keys on the keyboard, and frantic touch-typist will have a leg-up on those who have to glance down to peck at their keyboards.
The biggest strength of Magicka is the freedom inherent to the game design. While there is no inventory system, no leveling system, and no in-depth storyline, the spell system alone allows for thousands of combinations right from the first level of the game - it is up to the player to discover what spell combinations work best for each situation in the game.
An example of the spell system: a simple Fire element will create a basic flamethrower-style attack. A Fire element cast on the player will bring death pretty quickly. A Fire element cast as area-of-effect will send flames in an expanding circle from the player. Need more power? Add the Beam element into the mix to send Fire across the screen. Fighting a boss that casts a lot of Fire your way? Blend Fire and Shield to create resistance to Fire-based attacks.
Magicka plays a lot like a Diablo clone (with a wonderful sense of humor to boot), but at a much slower pace. The easiest battles come when enemies attack two or three at a time. Things get harder when the screen fills with dozens of baddies at once; suddenly, Magicka challenges the player to tap out the correct spell combinations fast enough to fend off encroaching enemies.
If nothing else, this is Magicka's first fault as a game: sometimes cranking out the best spell combinations on the keyboard is harder than it should be. Maybe I am a lousy keyboardist, but I frequently tap out the wrong spells on occasion or - even worse - create a screen-shattering combination and then cast it on myself instead of my enemies. Between mish-mashing elements together on eight keyboard keys and slapping the correct mouse button among three possible options, I screw up - a lot. I would have appreciated a kind of spell bank - maybe the ability to assign pre-built spells to the 1 - 9 number keys or such. Clumsy typist everywhere would appreciate it.
I have yet to play Magicka's multiplayer, but the game is built heavily on four-player multiplayer, so I will have to see if it is any easier to play through with three friends.
My biggest gripe with Magicka - hands down - is the uncountable technical flaws with the game. I have yet to start the game up without crashing back to my Windows desktop at least once. Sometimes moving between areas via a loading screen is enough to crash the game and wipe out plenty of progress. Textures come up missing, enemies sometimes get stuck during path-finding, some physics do not work at all - Magicka is a technical mess that I hope the development team patches up. I hear that multiplayer is an even worse mess of glitches and crashes, so I will not be touching that for some time to come.
Despite a my problems with the controls - practice does make perfect, however - and despite many technical flaws, Magicka is a game I absolutely love and recommend. Even in its buggy state, Magicka's $10 price tag is easy to swallow.
B3 out.
