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Magicka
PC (Steam)
Great Power, Great Irresponsibility
4/5 stars
“Magicka” is the inaugural game development effort from Swedish Indie developer, Arrowhead Game Studios, an outfit consisting of – at the time “Magicka” was developed and released – university students. Not only is “Magicka” a PC exclusive game, but it is an incredibly unique concept the likes of which I have never seen before.
Presentation
“Magicka” takes place in a colorful, cartoony world that riffs on Norse mythology a little bit and standard High Fantasy tropes a lot. The game world and characters are fully polygonal and look incredibly vibrant and lively. The spell effects that arise out of “Magicka’s” central gameplay mechanic look nice as well, and generally give the player a good visual indication of the effect’s elemental attributes.
The audio is the strongest point in “Magicka’s” presentation. The soundtrack is quite pleasant, with a number of catchy little tunes. But the true stand-out aspect of the audio is the voiceacting. “Magicka” is a fully voiced game, but the characters don’t speak English. Or Swedish. Instead, they speak a hodgepodge pidgin language that contains equal parts English, Swedish, onomatopoeia, and Internet slang, which strongly invokes the Muppets’ Swedish Chef. The result is that nearly every story segment in the game is hilarious. And I haven’t yet mentioned the exemplary voicework for the player(s)’ boss, Vlad the Vam… err Archmage, whose Swedish/Romanian accent is as brilliant as it is humorous.
“Magicka” would get a perfect score in the presentation department, were it not for the fact that the game is still (4 years after release) riddled with inexplicable bugs and glitches. While it does use Steamworks for its online features, setting up a multi-player game can be annoying and coop players can randomly get dropped at any time, though they can only rejoin if the host returns to the title screen and re-invites them. “Magicka” also doesn’t save story progress for anyone besides the host, nor does the game support Steam Cloud, which means it is very easy to lose progress. In our group, the original host managed to get a corrupted character profile which caused the game to freeze incessantly upon trying to create a coop server and even broke the Steam Overlay. Other random glitches include one of us getting kicked out of the game every time too many beam spells were on-screen at once and one of us losing visual indications of what elements we were casting, which made the game much more difficult for that session… until it flat-out crashed to desktop.
Story
“Magicka” lampoons traditional High Fantasy tropes at every opportunity. The main story campaign opens with the player (and any coop companions) attending a Saving the World Party at the wizard academy, as the academy’s illustrious leader (for as long as anyone can remember), Vlad, has determined that the world is in danger due to a magickal disturbance, and the player’s wizard is the one who will stop it.
Over the course of 12 chapters, the player’s wizard (and any coop friends) travels the breadth of a stylized and goofy Scandinavia (filled with towns with names like “Dunderhaed”) in search of this magickal disturbance and – upon finding the disturbance – a way to actually deal with it. There are plenty of Tolkien references scattered throughout the main story, and the writing and dialog are entertaining in their delightful quirkiness.
“Magicka” is not a terribly long game, clocking in at around 10 hours (not including repetition due to glitches or player character death). Arrowhead did release a number of expansion DLCs to extend the game, but none of these are particularly long, with the longest clocking in at around 3 hours (again, minus glitches and player character death due to difficulty spikes). These DLC missions are even more parodic than the main story, but not nearly as hilarious (though I did appreciate the fact that one of the DLCs that takes place decades after the original game takes the liberty of giving all of the player wizards long, white beards).
Gameplay
“Magicka” is a very unique game due entirely to its spellcasting system. Where most magic-based games saddle player wizards with mana/MP meters of some sort, the wizards of “Magicka” are free to fling spells and portions thereof around with complete abandon. In addition, spellcasting in “Magicka” is entirely free-form, with players picking up to 5 instances of 8 different elements to construct a ‘magick’ before choosing whether to cast it as a focused attack, area attack, weapon augment, or self-targeting effect. In addition to ‘magicks,’ there are a large number of collectable ‘spells’ scattered throughout the game that add special recipes to the player wizard’s arsenal that only work once the ‘spell’ is known.
“Magicka” is a fairly old-school top-down affair. It has two wildly different control schemes depending on whether the player opts to use a controller or a keyboard/mouse setup. When using a keyboard and mouse, “Magicka” forces the player to move their wizard around the screen using the vile method of click-to-move (which I find intolerable). This frees up the keyboard hand to hover over 8 different keys corresponding to the 8 different elements, so the player can type magicks and spells.
The controller method uses standard left-stick analog movement, but replaces the 8-button element typing with a sub-optimal method the game dubs the ‘Spell Stick.’ Under the Spell Stick input method, the player must press the right analog stick in one of the four main directions (up/down/left/right) before gently rolling the stick toward one of the diagonals in order to select an element. I got used to this method quickly enough, but I feel like it would have been better to just have the 4 directions input elements, with a shoulder button acting as a shift key to switch between two 4-element sets. Unfortunately, it is impossible to mix-and-match keyboard inputs and controller inputs while playing “Magicka,” which prevents Valve’s new Steam Controller from saving the day.
In addition to their unlimited magickal powers, the wizards of “Magicka” have access to a loadout of two weapons. By default, these consist of a generic sword and a staff that doesn’t seem to do anything. However, by defeating certain enemies, it’s possible to pick up their weapons and/or staves in order to customize the wizard(s)’ loadout a bit. There are a number of optional robes players can chose to wear when starting the game (with a huge number of them available as DLC) which provide different weapons, staves, and even attributes (such as being healed by an attack element instead of the normal healing element).
The other main trait that makes “Magicka” fairly unique is its use of always-on friendly fire. It is very easy for a wizard to kill themself with a miscast spell… and doubly, triply, or quadruply easier for a team of coop wizards to kill each other. Fortunately, the game has frequent checkpoints and an easy-to-cast Revive spell that allow the chaos to be fun instead of tedious. Indeed, in a multi-player game, enemies don’t seem to get any power scaling, as the danger the wizards pose to each other does enough to ramp up the difficulty for the group.
Unfortunately, “Magicka” is not 100% tedium free. While most of the game feels well-balanced and follows a sane difficulty curve, certain bosses (especially in the super-short DLC missions) present massive difficulty spikes, with one in particular that makes the game feel more like a Bullet Hell SHMUP than the weird not-quite-“Diablo” Action/Adventure it is supposed to be. In these few instances of difficulty spiking, pattern memorization becomes the order of the day, and completely brings the barely-controlled chaos at “Magicka’s” heart to a screeching halt.
Overall
“Magicka” is a hilarious parody of a game that removes all of the limiters that traditionally hold back spellcasters in High Fantasy games, allowing pure chaos and destruction to reign. Unfortunately, it has a large number of unsquashed bugs and a handful of difficulty spikes that could stand to be sanded down and smoothed over. Despite its flaws, though, “Magicka” is a lot of fun, either solo or as a group.
Presentation: 4/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 4/5
DLC: 2/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
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