Official Score
Overall - 80%
80%
Overall I love this game. It's a great piece of my growing Steam Collection which I will continue to play in the future. Taking into account the cost and development team size of this game, I give it a 9/10. It's hard not to love a game which gives you total freedom over what spells you cast and gives you a few laughs as well.
Wondering around the new games section of Steam not so long ago I found this game sitting at the top. The price was $10, and it looked like a great RPG game – which I had been looking for, so I gave it a click and immediately felt let down. I ignored the game for a while, and it wasn’t until later when I was extremely bored that I decided I would take another look at it. The demo wasn’t even 300MB, so I downloaded it and fired it up immediately. From the Steam store page, it looked to be some sort of Arcade RPG that had a basic spell system and a few basic weapons. But I now realize Magicka is much more than that. It’s a strong contender of one of my favorite Arcade games of all time. It’s funny, it has good visuals, the spell system is perfect and co-op gaming is a blast. Well, it is now. On my day one with this game, it was buggy. Really buggy. I couldn’t last more than maybe two minutes in co-op without it getting messed up and we would have to restart the whole game. My saves would constantly be deleted and anybody that would play online would be disconnected, and we would both be in our own games.
Thankfully, those glitches are long gone, and the game is much more stable now. So far I have played seven hours of Challenge mode with friends, and I love it. Trying to suffice against wave after wave of differing enemies is a lot of fun, and it’s always better with a friend. You have to watch out, though, for the beams flying across the screen. Arcane damage is very high, and they can put out very large beams which last a long time. If you are caught in a (not so) friendly beam which has a mix of Arcane, Ice and Lightning, you will not survive. The spell system is great however, and very unique. You are given eight elements to mess around with, each with their own properties. Ice will freeze over and liquid, creating a walkable surface for you to travel across, fire will melt ice and create steam if paired with water and so on. My favorite spell is adding two Water and two Ice and then adding three Arcane to create a huge amount of shards with a lot of damage each.
This game has a great sense of humor, you will frequently find yourself laughing (silently) at jokes and chuckling at the dialogue. I recall a side quest (the only one in the game) which wasn’t really a side quest, a woman asks you to help her in her basement because there are rats, when suddenly a huge group of goblins come along to raid her home. After killing all of the goblins you talk to her again and she explains how the rats no longer seem like a problem, and she would be happy to pay you anyway – but there is no inventory system in the game so she will just keep them. After waffles on about an exclamation mark hovering above her head, which has been following her around recently.
Overall I love this game. It’s a great piece of my growing Steam Collection which I will continue to play in the future. Taking into account the cost and development team size of this game, I give it a 9/10. It’s hard not to love a game which gives you total freedom over what spells you cast and gives you a few laughs as well.
Written by Watermelnkidd – Magicka Review
Rated by GamersHeroes
