Magicka - Team killing made fun!

[Sercease]

Do you love secretly killing your friends in games, want a new twist on an RPG, want to laugh your @$$ off for hours on end? Then Magicka is for you!

Cost / System: PC only game available on Steam for $10.

Mutiplayer: Up to 4 player co-op play available online or Lan (Strongly recommend playing with friends)

Premise: One to Four wizards head on a journey to save the world from some impending doom, end of days, horrible boss, etc. There is an Adventure mode consisting of 13 levels and a challenge mode where you compete for online supremacy via high scores.

Gameplay Basics: Magicka is an overhead view, mouse click, RPG with a twist (think diablo). The game has a short tutorial at the start which will give you the basic buttons and then send you on your way for carnage and mayhem to ensue. Everything is based around three major concepts:

• The first is that you are given 8 raw elements to play with (and a few "secret" ones but I will leave that to you to discover).
• The second is you have 4 different ways to cast them, you can cast as a projectile, cast as an AoE, cast on yourself, or imbue your weapon.
• The third is that you are left with over 4000 possible spell combination's and no real help on figuring them out. You will pick up "magic books" throughout the game which give you special combinations for some crazy spells but beyond that you are left to your own creative ability.

Conclusion: The best thing about this game is that there is no mana and no limit to the amount of times you die (unless your playing alone). You can cast as many spells as you like as fast as you like and in a ridiculous amount of variations. And when you kill your teammate (which will inevitably happen over and over in numerous hilarious ways) with two buttons you can revive them to standing beside you again. If you do manage to kill all your teammates and then yourself you will be booted back to the last checkpoint but this doesn't happen very often. Most of the time your left standing in a charred battlefield with one teammate in pieces and another a burning char of ashes but you survived when you accidentally nuked everything on the screen by accidentally mixing two elements that are opposites. The best way to experience the game is definitely online with some friends and you all start fresh, while you try to conjure up your elemental deathrays the accidental (and sometimes intentional) TK'ing will leave you laughing for hours. I don't foresee a ton of replay value or longevity in the game but for $10 it is more than worth every dollar and could quite easily chew up multiple nights of play time.

P.S. Would love to hear some of the ridiculous ways you managed to kill yourself/teammate/everything on the screen or what others think of the game.

Couple of ours:

• Wizard#1 cast a rain storm (getting anyone on the screen wet) and then wizard#2 proceeded to shoot a lightning bolt by accident that arced its way through everybody on the screen for ridiculous damage killing anything and everything on site. I don't recommend mixing lightning with water, lol.
• I also highly recommend against crossing beams, although they combine to make a uber beam, somebody is going to think "Triple Power!" and shot his beam into yours and if your unlucky enough mix two opposite elements causing massive feedback and a giant explosion, or just miss your beams altogether and send a beam of destruction through you instead. Can't count the number of times we did that.
• We were crossing a river at one point (shooting frost to freeze the water) and one of us got in the way and got frozen, simple enough, just shoot fire at them to de-thaw. Sounds great in theory but we forgot about the fact we were standing on a frozen river and the fire will not only de-thaw our popsicle friend but melt the ice were standing on. We all plunged to our deaths as the ice gave way and apparently wizards can't swim.
• I was standing in the middle of the screen with a mate behind me, there were a bunch of mobs coming towards us so the logical thing would be to put down a shield. The friend standing behind me was in the process of charging up a massive fire/earth beam of death and just as I dropped the shield in front of me (kind of an arc shape in front) he released his beam and it caught the inside of the shield reflecting it perfectly into my face turning me into a flaming wizard and projecting me backwards off the screen to my death. We also managed to pull off this stunt with an AOE shield. Again mate is charging a beam up and just before he releases I dropped a AOE shield around us (big dome) and the beam proceeded to ricochet around inside the shield killing us both.

[unholytestament]

I must play this game...

[Yooya]

I kill myself all the time in this game fun-infuriating.

[moaradin]

The game looks great. I'll have to pick it up later. People are already calling it indie game of the year.

[Specops]

Magicka is one of the best indie games I've bought. Just the amount of elemental customization is astounding.

[Grable]

Also, watch this:



This video convinced me to buy the game. Damn, such a good game for 10€? It is a SIN not to buy it.