Magicka

"BLEIGH!!" is my new go-to word for times when I'm feeling: frustrated, fed up, excited, hungry, tired, happy, and cold. You will understand once you start playing this game.

I remember when Magicka was first released- I watched the trailer, immediately recognized that this would be an amazingly funny game, and then failed to ever play it due to still being under the shackles of a certain MMO that shall not be named. Sadly that happened with many a game, a sad truth that I am duly trying to make up for. Recently there was some talk of Magicka at my place of work, so with the game up on my radar again, and with more free time, Kuma and I decided to give it a go. It didn't hurt that we picked this up on a Steam sale, but I'd still have bought it full price.

My only initial expectation of this game was that it would be funny, which is does deliver upon. What I didn't expect was that Magicka would be such a difficult game to master (no, I have not even mastered it yet). I learned of such difficulties rather quickly, in fact, in the first part of the tutorial when I had to choose the BANANA! option because I smartly chose the "TRON" robe which means Life doesn't heal me... great. To elaborate, when choosing your Magi, you choose a certain outfit which could have special properties to it, or maybe you just choose it for the look. I went with what I like to call the "TRON" robe (it even comes with a disk you throw). PROs and CONs about the "TRON" robe:

PROS

• Lightning/Electricity heals you.
• When wet, lightning works as an excellent heal with little to no effort.
• When fellow Magi call spells like Thunderstorm, or anything with lightning, its pretty much win for me and death for everyone else. (Can also cast spells like this just to kill your friends and be a jerk, sorry Cash, maybe next time don't be Full Metal.)
• Thank you baddies for casting lightning on me... now wait there while I SMOTE YOU.

CONS

• Life does not heal you, or do anything at all to you.
• When in a rainstorm and your friend dies, you have a few options: 1. Somehow kill all the bad guys in the rain 2. Wait out the storm remove wetness then kill bad guys and rez friends 3. Run until you can run no more 4. Die like a failure pile (I often chose this option- not willingly).
• When you cast Thunderstorm to be a jerk thus killing your friends and then dying horribly to bad guys.
• When you don't realize your wet and are desperately trying to rez a fellow Magi, and instead you die like a fool because really all you were doing was casting life to no effect. I mean really... it doesn't even heal you.

So maybe in reading those little PROS and CONS you now have a feeling that this game has a lot of death in it. Easy to kill yourself in a fiery/arcane/steam ball? YUP. Easy to run in front of your friend right as they unleash a fully charged Spiked ball of ice and explode all over the screen? YUP. Ask me... what was the most challenging this about this game? NOT KILLING YOURSELF AND ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS. Good gracious. It was a slaughter house. Seriously, the bad guys could have just stood there laughing while we magick'd ourselves to death.

Let me explain the basics of how Magicka magic actually works- you have 8 schools of magic, which you can combine in hundreds to thousands of combinations to create spells. Many of the spells are the same, but depending on what you do, these can be directional, AOE, or conal. Half of the fun to this game is messing with different spell combos to see what you can do. Which of course also resulted in many a death of myself and Kuma. As Kuma also notes, collecting magic books provides you with some very specific spells. With those spells you can scroll through with your mousewheel and the combination will show up beneath your character, so you do have a little assistance remembering those spells.

Now, take into consideration if you will playing in this scenario- surrounded by some Necros who are summoning some Zombies. You're trying to save your ass while thinking what spells are they weak to? OH probably fire, or life maybe?. Let me just queue up... shit, Kuma is dead, somehow exploded himself with those arcane earth fire shield things... now I need to rez, SHIT, now its raining... can't rez him... need fire to douse the rain so I can rez... OHMYGOD ZOMBIES ARE ALL OVER ME, must... break... freeeee..... and dead. Though to be fair there really is no penalty for dying. In co-op mode you do lose any neat weapons that you might have had. But as long as you didn't die in lava or water or get tossed off screen, you can usually just pick them up again. Dying will happen in this game, embrace it, go with it, see who can kill the other person in the best possible way. Despite being frustrating at times because of the whole killing each other like fools, the story.... oh ho... the story.

I looooved it. The first thing you'll notice is the voice acting. Its sounds like some kind of Swedish/English gibberish. (Watch the video and you'll understand.) Vlad (not a vampire) sends you off on a quest to see what is causing all of these monsters to start cropping up. Clearly there is some dark force out there that must be found and stopped. You'll soon learn that Magi aren't the best communicators, and are often misunderstood to be evil and up to no good whatsoever. Most of the areas are closed off, but Kuma and I are explorers, and if you take the time to look there are secret areas to be found which have special weapons or magick books. Which leads to me say that there are a TON of Easter Eggs in this game. It is worth examining everything that you can, even if it might mean death. There are so many movie references, unlike Pokemon, you will not catch them all, at least on the first play through. I know that we'll be playing this game a bit more in the weeks to come. Hopefully we can drag some friends along, maybe not kill them all the time so that they'll continue to play with us.

Try this game. But please note, we played this co-op of course, and I have heard that single player is actually much more difficult since they don't scale down the amount of bad guys or the difficulty of them. Hit check points as often as you can, oh, and pro tip- if you just saved and lose an awesome weapon due to.. shenanigans, just kill yourself and you'll come back with the weapons you had before you died.

I almost forgot, there are two more things. This game does allow you to remap your spell keys. The mouse controls certain attacks and movement. Otherwise you use assigned keys to map your spells. I left my mouse the same but mapped my keys to the numpad. There were some disadvantages to doing this. One was that if I was in a frantic moment, I might hit num lock by mistake and then render myself useless until I realize (when I'm dead usually) that my numlock was off. Also, you can chat in this game, hitting enter does enter you into chat, so sometimes I'd hit that and be mashing numbers into chat instead of casting. Which usually resulted in death and myself using many cuss words. For connecting to each other in the game- if you're playing in Steam you can just host and invite your friends via Steam which was rather easy. Otherwise you can just host the adventure and give people a password so that they can join your hosted game. The host box would often default to Versus mode for us, so you have to make sure to manually change that every time you host a game (if you are doing something other than Versus).

Anyway, I'm done. I'm going to go play some more Magicka! You should too!