So I'm making a game review again. Clearly I must be bored out of my mind. And I will no doubt become incredibly frustrated with my keyboarf throughout this blog. It really sucks.

So I'mma be reviewing this lovely little game I got for like £3 on Steam, called Magicka.

This is a relatively small fantasy indie game by the developers Arrowhead Game Studios.

It's riddled with horrible fantasy clichés and tropes, as well as innumerable references to various other franchises, such as Back To The Future, 300, Star Wars, Legend of Zelda and goodness only knows what else.

But that's OK, because it's supposed to be satirical. It's pretty funny.

This game can be played singleplayer, or online with up to three friends. While I've only tried the singleplayer version, I've looked into it and I highly recommend that you play multiplayer if you can. It can get pretty hectic.

Anyway, so Magicka is a game all about, unsurprisingly, magic.
You play as an obscure little mute wizard who has to go on a quest to save the world from something. It's not really important what. Nobody really cares. The important bit is that in order to do so you have to go around blasting enemies to smithereens using your not inconsiderable magical abilities.

You control your character, cast spells, and interact with things by using the mouse, and you cast spells by summoning elements. This is where the fun comes in.

When you're just standing there like a lemon, if you right click, then you perform a sort of weak little 'push' with your staff, which chucks up a little dust and irritates a couple of smaller enemies, but is kinda useless overall.

Hold it down before releasing, and you charge up your push so that it becomes pretty strong.

Hold down shift while you release your push, and it does an area-of-effect push in a circle around you.

But you're not going to save the world using a push, are you?

No, the fun comes from summoning various elements to cast obscure and powerful spells upon your hapless foes.

You summon elements into your spell-bar by using the Q,W,E,R,A,S,D and F keys on your keyboard. The elements are-

Q- Water
W- life
E- Shield
R- Cold
A- Lightning
S- Arcane
D- Earth
F- Fire

You can summon up to five elements into your spellbar at any one time. By combining two elements together, you can also create two extra elements, Steam and Ice. Doesn't really take a genius to work out which ones.

When you Right-Click, Shift-Right-Click or Middle-Click, a spell is cast according to the elements currently in your spellbar.

Say you summoned a fire element and held down right click, a cone of fire will be projected from your staff to incinerate whatever's in your path.

But if you were to summon five fire elements, then you would produce a stronger, larger and longer-lasting cone of fire.

Say you summoned some water elements and Shift-Right-Clicked, then a surge of water will come gushing forth in all directions, soaking all nearby enemies and pushing them back.

Middle-Click is self-cast, so if you stacked up five life elements and Middle-Clicked, a sizeable amount of your health would be restored.

So I imagine you get how it fundamentally works now.

The game works in a fairly rock-paper-scissors kind of system. If you cast cold at a lake, it'll freeze over for a bit. likewise if you cast fire on a frozen enemy, they'll thaw out. Each element has a certain opposite, or sometimes multiple opposites. For example, earth and lightning. So if you stacked up a spell with both earth and lightning in it, the two would cancel each other out and not be included in the spell.

Obviously half the fun of the game is coming up with powerful and entertaining combinations of spells. If you stick earth and fire together, instead of shooting a cone of fire in front of you, you would charge up a projectile of earth which, upon impact, would explode in a fiery mess. Effectively a fireball, without which no fantasy game would be complete.

Likewise, if you combine shield and water and cast it in front of you, then a semicircle of rainclouds will appear in front of you and soak whomever walks underneath them.

That would seem slightly useless, except wet opponents take double damage from lightning attacks, unsurprisingly.

Walls of fire, electrified daggers of ice, beams of concentrated lightning and steam, even a circular shield of volcanoes, can all be created from the very beginning. For the most part, you're able to cast the most powerful spells in your arsenal from the start, and the fun part is discovering new and potent combinations of elements.

There is one exception to the 'everything's available at the start' thing. There are these fun little devices known as 'Magicks.' These are special incantations that one casts by sumoning a particular set of elements in a particular order, then pressing the spacebar.

These range from pretty simple key combinations, such as A-S-F, which activates a spell to make you run at super-speed. Or there's W-A, which revives a fallen comrade.

Of course, as you go through the game and find more of these elusive spells, you'll become more adept at firing them off as quickly as possible. At first you'll be kinda slow and clunky, but before long you're stacking and casting them like there's no tomorrow. A personal favourite of mine is 'conflagration,' which releases a searing heatwave to ignite all the foes in your path. The combination for this is F-Q-F-F-Q-F-F-Q, and it doesn't take long before you can fire off about two a second.

Eventually you'll get magicks which do far more interesting things.
There's a magic which sprays a slippery, flammable, cheese-like greasy substance in a small semicircle in front of you.
There's one which causes the entire screen to rain, soaking everyone who doesn't have protection from water.
There's one which summons a tornado.
There's one which slows down time.
There's one which summons Death himself to instantly slay the character on the screen who is closest to death.

So yeah, the magicks are pretty fun.

One of the downsides for me was, even on its lowest graphics, the game is pretty graphics-intensive. This would be good except this cranky old computer can't handle them for very long. So I have to wait until my brother's out so I can use his beastly graphics capabilities on his computer.

Also the game's relatively buggy. It's OK for the most part if you're playing it on a computer which can handle the graphics. Apparently it was very buggy when it first came out, but they patched up most of the major bugs fairly quickly.

It's got an adventure mode, which is narrated by Vlad. At first you think he's a vampire, but then he assures you in no uncertain terms that he isn't. So there's a relief.

It also has a challenge mode, where waves after waves of enemies come at you in increasingly difficult varieties. I only tried this out today actually. It's pretty fun, except it's hard to get beyond a few rounds if you're playing singleplayer. It's the kind of thing that would be much better co-op.

It also has a versus mode which I haven't tried out yet since none of my friends have it yet, but my bro' will be getting it soon so we can try that out.

The graphics are pretty fancy, for such a small game. The water's pretty realistic, and the scenery is vibrant and detailed. It's not like, accurate down to the last millimetre, but it's pretty fine.

There's some pretty effective effects with all your spells too. You've got some nice icicles, earthquakes, fancy glowing beam-spells and what have you.

So anyway, in conclusion, it's a pretty sweet game.
Now for god's sake somebody buy it so I have somebody to go on multiplayer with.