The first thing that struck me about the game was its humour. Comedy and love are two elements that I’ve always felt games have struggled with. But when a game can successfully deliver comedy, it, as a whole will flourish from it. Portal while technically excellent wouldn’t have been half the game if GLaDOS was simply “The Bad Guy.” From cult references to the excellent “Vlad” (not a vampire), Magicka has humour in abundance and while you may curse quite a lot, you’ll also laugh.
It’s quite a long game too for the price of ten Euros. It took me about ten and a half hours to complete the single-player and there is also the multi-player and various challenges to try. You’re given the eight spells right at the start of the game and without changing anything but your staff and sword those spells are to last you eleven hours and beyond. You do find spell books along the way, unlocking new combinations for special spells such as Thunderstorm and Teleport, but since all of your spells are unlocked at the beginning there is the worry of boredom setting in as you fall into a routine. To be quite honest I did sort of settle into a routine, I had one combination which saw me through most of my killing but not all of it. Arrow-head studios were clearly aware of this problem and threw teleporting dwarves, Ogres with hand-held mortars and other sorts of mythical beasts at me to rock me out of my routine, and it worked! There is no one spell that will see you through every fight and learning what works well in what situation is one of the fundamental joys of Magicka. I’m struggling to remember the last game where I could visibly see myself getting better that didn’t use a levelling system.
But for all its ‘sploady fun Magicka does have its downsides. I still have to get a multiplayer game working properly, which is a shame because from what I’ve seen the game looks like it’ll become even better playing with friends. The single-player has its issues also, the inability to save in between levels and the widely spread checkpoints are the source of much frustration. While I criticised Bioshock for having its respawning system I think Magicka has gone past hard and into frustrating at times. I’m a firm believer that while a game like this shouldn’t be easy, it also shouldn’t have you cursing in frustration as a boulder randomly blasts you into lava setting you back another 10 minutes of progress.
That said, Magicka is a breath of fresh air. As I mentioned before, when I looked at Magicka I immediately thought “Diablo clone” which just shows what sort of mind-frame all these rehashes have put me in. But no, Magicka is genuinely innovative and above all just a lot of fun. Arrowhead studios looked at what Diablo had done and instead of copying it like everyone else, they created their own take on it and subsequently gave us a fantastic combat system we’ve never seen before and I’m genuinely delighted they’re getting success with this title.
