Magicka - Review
Originally published March 2016I love me some quality spell-casting in fantasy games! Whenever I play the fantasy games like Skyrim, Dragon's Dogma, or Dark Souls, I'm immediately drawn to the magic. However, most games fail to make the magic as interesting or exciting to manipulate as I expect. Of the games I just mentioned, Skyrim was the only one that had magic that was mechanically fun to use and more on the experimental side. Still, even Skyrim was not designed around magic as its core system. I want a game that really asks the player to get creative with their spells. I want a game to make me feel like a mad scientist as I mix elements together to create a powerful weapon. Oh, look, a game that did just that! Magicka!
It uses magic and its concepts in ways that are rarely seen in video games and forces the player to get creative with their combinations of elements and spell types. As Magicka progresses, it gets more and more difficult, requiring a better knowledge of various spells to succeed. If you know me and my masochistic taste for difficult games, then it should be no surprise that I enjoyed my time with Magicka.
Image: Paradox
Story
You play as an unnamed, faceless wizard apprentice attending a magic university under the tutelage of Vlad, a powerful spell-caster who is totally not a vampire. One day, you're asked to leave Hogwarts to face some goblins who are terrorizing nearby villagers. The character is quickly swept up in a great conflict involving numerous pop-culture references and familiar scenarios that are played up with comedy and circumstance.
When I say pop-culture references, I mean there are a lot of references. Magicka has more video game and movie references than any of the Scary Movie films. They certainly made me chuckle more than most of those movies too, since most of the jokes in Magicka were genuinely clever. It uses references frequently, with some subtle and some not-so-subtle ones to achieve its humor. I will say, not all the references are extremely clever or go beyond that of a parody movie. Some are just as overt and simple as a name drop or a phrase from a film. For example, if an orc general is named Khan then someone has to scream out his name because: Star Trek.
Image: Paradox
Still, it's actually a game that I found to be pretty damn funny, due in no small part to the clever, self-aware writing. The running gags and little side-jokes are solid gold, such as Vlad denying his vampirism, as well as his incompetence, or the fact that the wizards are silent when they encounter a big enemy whom they could avoid fighting if they'd just speak up half of the time. The clever writing helps connect the pop-culture jokes and keep you giggling for one reason or another. It would often make up for the moments when a reference was lost or felt a little cheap.
As for the plot of the game, I couldn't tell you, even though I've played through a majority of it twice. Something about an ancient evil, demons trying to take over, and then time paradoxes? It's not that I didn't care, it was just that I was often more focused on what jokes they were making and what sort of reference was coming my way next. When playing through the story, the best thing to focus on is the goofy writing and the humor anyway.
Gameplay
As a wizard in the world of Magicka, you come equipped with a staff and a melee weapon. You can find new ones along your adventure that have different properties and can be quite effective if used properly. However, running up to an enemy and whacking it, or using whatever spell is imbued in the staff, is not the way you're expected to play.
As I said before, the game wants you to get creative with the magic system. It gives you the tools to actively craft your own spells in battle. There are 8 elements to choose from, each with its own special properties and behavior. You can, of course, combine them in a particular order before unleashing them, but certain combinations behave differently. Elements like fire and frost cancel each other out, but if you stack fire, stone, and arcane, you get a more explosive combo. You can also mix water with either fire or frost to get different properties and attacks.
Learning the combination of spells that interact well with one another, as well as the ones that cancel each other is crucial. Just as important is learning the behavior of the elements in how you can cast the spell. Magicka allows you to cast the elemental spell combo in several ways:
Cast it in an area effect around the wizard
Cast it in a direction ahead of the wizard
Imbue the melee weapon with the spell
Cast it directly on the wizard
It's important to learn at some point whether it makes more sense to cast a spell in an area effect, or directly out. It's also important to note if an element should be changed to alter the path and behavior of the spell. For instance, the archane element is a basic damage spell that can boost the damage output of other elements like fire and lightning and has a profound effect on how those spells behave when cast. You can do a simple lightning/fire/archane area effect spell around the wizard for a single attack for any surrounding enemies. Or you can use the properties of spells with the archane element to your advantage and shoot it out in front. If just using fire, the spell acts like a blowtorch, but if archane is added, it shoots out in an endless beam, which hits the target multiple times at once.
Image: Paradox
Typically, you don't want to cast a spell on the wizard without the shield element attached, which usually provides armor of sorts. Occasionally, you might find yourself on fire and some water would be a good idea, or just a simple healing spell would be nice. However, there are even times when casting a healing spell on yourself is a bad idea. Learning when to cast these spells around, ahead, or on the wizard or the weapon is something you have to learn pretty quickly, or you'll be stuck in the early levels of the game.
Unlike most games with magic as a part of the gameplay, Magicka has nothing to prevent you from casting spells all the time. There's no MP bar or any gauge. You can cast as many spells as you want, as frequently as you want. However, since most of the enemies have their own elemental strengths and weaknesses, you typically want to employ a strategy instead of just blasting out fire nonstop. There's a lot of strategy to this game that made me feel like I was using both sides of my brain in order to win. I had to remember spell combinations, spell orders, and spell properties in numerous situations in order to make it through. In some ways, with the way that I had to select spells before casting them with the analog stick (since I used a controller), the muscle memory I developed with some of the common spells, and the fact that I could only win if I got better at Magicka instead of waiting for it to help me, I felt like was playing a fighting game.
Image: Paradox
There is one last way you can cast spells in Magicka that I haven't mentioned. As you progress through the game, you can find books in the environment that hold special spell combinations. While you can certainly craft your own offensive and defensive spells by combining elements at random, the spells discovered through the books do much more. This includes: summoning zombies, causing a blizzard, conjuring tornadoes, slowing down time, invisibility, etc. Once you find a book with the formula, all you need is to know the elements and the correct order to queue them up. Since there's no gauge or restriction on your magic used in the game, once you memorize the pattern, there's nothing stopping you from spamming the powerful spell out over and over again. Some do more harm than good, but it can still be pretty empowering to summon a lightning storm that kills you and everyone on-screen.
You may want to be careful about casting those types of spells all the time though, especially when playing with other people. Magicka has the option of playing with up to three other people at a time while going through the campaign, as well as some challenge and battle modes. You can team up to complete the campaign together, but there's a small catch. Much like Spelunky and other punishing party games, there is friendly fire. With a lot of area-attack spells being very effective at eliminating enemies and friends, I can't picture anything other than pure chaos on the screen and butthurt friends on the couch. You all have the same powers and abilities and there's no leveling up in Magicka either, so the only thing that can get better is the player, which eliminates numerous defensive arguments for why you accidentally blew your friend up. If you manage to orchestrate a strategy, you might do okay, but otherwise, expect your friendships to be tested.
Image: Paradox
Magicka gets really difficult by the end, too. In the last few levels, I spent a fair amount of my time summoning minions as distractions so that I could live long enough to kill my enemies. Since I was playing the campaign by myself, I didn't have the luxury of having another player nearby to revive me if I died. It's clear that the game expects you to play with others with how the dialogue constantly references multiple wizards, instead of one, and how aggressive and overpowered the enemies become by the end. However, with anything more than 2 players on-screen at once, I doubt the game gets much easier.
Presentation
Despite being an isometric view, dual-joystick shooter game, Magicka has a pretty solid presentation. I honestly haven't played many dual-joystick shooters lately, but what I have played usually lacked a fair amount of detail or flair to its presentation. Magicka, however, is very colorful and vibrant, and the places you visit dynamically show off the color scheme. Much like the common planets of Star Wars, you go through the same basic areas like forest, ice, and lava, among others. Each of these places is quite pretty and there is certainly an attention to detail for their design, especially to make room for any subtle references in the background.
As for what's happening in the foreground, the characters often have a fairly simple design with a lot of use of primary colors and angular shapes. Their designs are probably simplified for the sake of being able to put so many characters on the screen at a time. Still, It still chugs on the frame rate a little bit when that happens, but there's nothing more satisfying than unleashing an explosive spell and watching dozens of goblins explode at once around you, suddenly boosting the frame rate back up.
Image: Paradox
The spells themselves are awesome to look at. Since it's important to know the elements you're casting on enemies, due to the fact that enemies have their own elemental strengths and weaknesses, the developers tried to make your spells give clear signs of what you were using. When you make an archane/lightning beam, it already looks pretty cool. Add fire to the mix, and suddenly the spell looks like it's being shot out of the laser cannon of a spaceship, or the hands of a Dragon Ball Z character. Even the special tome spells can have some pretty neat effects, like the black hole that warps the area around it and slowly pulls everything in.
Finally, the sound design for Magicka. The music is ultimately a little forgettable, outside of the main theme you hear on the first screen. The most memorable thing about the sound is the goofy noises the characters make. The characters all speak with a goofy spoof version of a Scandinavian-type language that appeals to my childish humor. Their "speech" is very reminiscent of the Swedish Chef from the Muppets. I may be a little biased because I always liked that particular character, but I found this voice acting funny from beginning to end and never got bored of it. When I read what they were actually saying, it only got funnier as they spurted out nonsensical words.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Magicka is a goofy, engaging, surprisingly entertaining fantasy dual-stick shooter. Its use of magic is clever and empowering to make its players feel like true masters of the archane arts. Its writing is clever and funny, even with the occasional heavy-handed pop-culture reference. If you're a fan of difficult games that require their players to get creative with unorthodox strategies to achieve their victories, a fan of playing as a powerful wizard with an endless supply of magic, or just a fan of Swedish Chef from the Muppets, you'll probably enjoy Magicka to some degree.