Magicka - Why haven't you bought this already?

[Fatespinner]

http://www.magickagame.com/

Seriously. How can you be on these boards and not see this as one of the most fantastic games of all time? And for only $10? It's a steal. Everyone should own this game. It's amazing.

Combine the action-adventure style of Gauntlet with the mana-pooling/element-mixing themes of Magic: The Gathering, then douse the whole thing in Monty Python and you have Magicka.

[Tarlane]

I have this game, haven't gotten too far in it yet but its very fun. One of those games that has an ease of use(use fire-get fire, use a lot of fire-get more fire) but then you start looking at combining different elements to create specific effects or taking into account situational play(I'm wet so I can't use lightning, but I can steam it away with fire...) and it shows off the underlying complications of the system.

Fatespinner mentioned Monty Python above and I've heard Prachett talked about in terms of the humor of this game, but thats the one spot that I thought it fell a little short. Its obviously trying to be light hearted and campy, poking fun at cliches and fantasy expectations(I admit that a guy named Vlad constantly reminding you he is not, in fact, a vampire was pretty amusing to me.) Most of the humor seems to be trying way too hard though. It doesn't take away from the actual game at all, I just have seen a few mentions in reviews about the game being funny and it always seemed better at making me wince than laugh.

One last note is that you might want to check the system requirements for this game. For being fairly standard graphically, it actually uses a lot of real shadows and grass effects that can cause a bunch of lag on lower end systems, and not all of it can be shut off in options. It sounds like something they are aware of and are patching in fixes for(hopefully with additional graphic options) but if you are borderline on the system requirements you may wish to be careful for the time being.

[Xabulba]

Waiting for them to fix the multi-player first.

[Tarlane]

I just wanted to toss this up here, this was a review from a couple weeks ago that I thought covered various points of the game nicely.

Link

[Daniel Moyer]

I bought it, played once or twice so far. It reminds me of a very old Commadore 64 game called Warlock, basically Gauntlet with Elementalist Druids.

My discoveries...

I've found THEE Magic Sword, as in Zelda, shoots arcane bolts. Very handy when you get swarmed. Found Excalibur early on as well, but it gets rapidly replaced.

I've come to realize a Staff of Life will likely be my only staff EVER and can be particularly annoying as it's aura also regenerates enemies melee attacking you. It regens your health at a rediculous rate, letting you blast til the cows come home rather than running in circles trying to kite monsters.

I probably won't due well in multiplayer as I'm a big fan of... FIRE/FIRE/ARCANE/ARCANE/ARCANE *right click, hold & sweep* I call it "big freakin' laser beam of death", LOL. The few NPCs that try to help you, tend to explode WHEN you hit them with it as well. ELECTRICITY and ICE also work well for different effects, but the FIRE/ARCANE wrecks trolls.

using ICE anywhere from 3-5 times and holding shift for an area effect it pretty awesome and freezes a much larger body of water so you don't slide in and drown as easily.

[Fatespinner]

Xabulba wrote:

Waiting for them to fix the multi-player first.

What's wrong with it? I know that the public servers are kinda crazy, but you can setup a virtual LAN with Hamachi and play with friends as though they were right in your own home. That's the way to do it, anyway. Not playing with random strangers.

Having something like Ventrilo/Skype/TeamSpeak makes it exponentially more awesome.

[Tarlane]

Its not happening to everyone, but I know a number of people are experiencing really bad lag playing multiplayer, even direct connecting rather than using public servers.

[KaeYoss]

I'll have to remember that game for when I'm done with all the stuff I've yet to play and that is going to be released in the next days, weeks, months.