http://www.hookedgamers.com/images/1492/magicka/previews/header_745_magicka.jpg
This game deserves its own thread, I think. Is anybody else playing it? The combat system is addictive as fuck. Basically you have fire, frost, water, lightning, earth, arcane, life, and shield, bound to your WASD (and surrounding) keys. You move your character by holding down left mouse click, like Torchlight or Diablo.
You can cast any spell either on yourself, as a missile, or as an area of effect. Depending on the school of magic, the effects are different, for instance if you cast a shield on yourself it only applies to you where as if you cast an AOE shield, it casts a bubble over the area. If you combine earth and shield, and cast it as area of effect, it creates a wall of rock around you (great for buying yourself some time against melee creatures). You can also combine compatible schools, such as fire and water (to make steam), or arcane and frost (to make an ice beam). Incompatible schools reset the spell.
There is no global cooldown and no mana bar. The only limitations to what spells you can cast are your creativity, memory, and ability to type in certain spells quickly. The game requires quick problem-solving and motor skills. If a monster comes out casting a mixture of arcane and fire, one way to deal with it is to cast an arcane/fire resist shield on yourself, so you need to be able to recognize the spells it is cast, and be able to hammer the key combination you need (which in this case is E, F, A, middle-mouse-button) before you get blowed up.
You can also play with up to three other people. The game actually gets harder with more people instead of easier, since every spell in the game applies to friends and enemies the same way. It gets chaotic! One really fun thing to do with friends is to cross arcane streams, which creates a super powerful mega-beam that kills things quickly - but if one player has combined a school with arcane that is incompatible with the another player's stream, the results can be gory (and hilarious).
The only downside of this game is that there tend to be a fair amount of multiplayer connectivity issues. I believe this is mostly due to people's router configurations, but due to the way the game is structured, a disconnection can be very frustrating. Players can't simply rejoin a game in progress; the people playing have to either finish the level or start the level over again in order to re-invite the person who was disconnected. The game is $10 on Steam, and has been patched a billion times since release, so I'm hoping they fix this soon.
Anyway, I love this game to death. Not only for the reasons described above, but the game somehow manages to be funny, cute, and incredibly violent at the same time. The wizard guys are super cute - I would probably buy a figurine for my desk if I found one (and I am not normally into the toy thing at all).
― rockapads, Thursday, 24 February 2011 18:06 (fifteen years ago)