Magicka, Anyone Else Interested?

So this game is out today and I'll admit, I had no idea it even existed until reading Rock, Paper, Shotgun this morning. Firing up the demo in a bit and will post first impressions. In the meantime here's the RPS post and a pretty youtube trailer.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/01/25/put-on-my-robe-wizard-hat-magicka-demo/#more-48691

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAWnnpPINRk

Couldn't embed it without it being obnoxiously large. You can get the demo off Steam.

 

Yea never heard of it until someone on my twitter announced it. It looks fun, but I think im going to wait for a steam sale to get it.

 

No point buying anything full price on Steam anymore.

 

It's also very buggy at the moment, which is kind of expected with a dev team of 8 people. They're churning out patches already though, which is a good sign. Played through a bit of the demo and was entertained, definitely worth it at full price and will be a bargain when it goes on sale.

 

you should be able to put in a buy order for a game at a particular price at this point.

 

There is a lot of thoughts in this game. It first looks like Diablo, but they introduce a lot of new ideas.

For example, your character is extremely powerful from the beginning. But even though you have so much power, as long as you suck playing it, you will be crushed by a couple of goblins. You either play godly or fail miserably if you make a mistake.

You cannot run away like in Diablo if things go bad. There is always a tiny detail you forgot, you leave a magical mine or you use electricity when you’re wet. Also you can only save at checkpoint, it’s not an easy game but it’s not impossible either.

It also require a lot of creativity to find new way of killing mobs. Some part which you think hard can be very easy for someone who found a way to kill quickly. This way, there is no need to level, based on your personal experience you will get better and beat the game.

Be careful to try the demo first on your notebook. It seems like a little game but it requires descent specs.

Can’t wait to try multiplayer.

 

Hm...

-Buys-

 

I liked it, beat the demo with no deaths.

Spread Out Mobs - Lightning
Surrounded by Mobs - Area Lightning
Strong Mobs or Mobs in a line - Charged up Earth

Heal as needed and use barrier and its GG

Dont quite get what the space bar does yet, it effects some spells and its needed to cast magics. I created some interesting barrier spells that I am not sure what they all do.

Edit: Bought it, seems like a game I can have fun with and where skill and coordination are important.

Reizo got it and me and him are up late together all the time so this is something to do if we dont want to play SC2.

Having trouble actually playing though, game locked up first time I tried to start and CTD the 2nd time, probably has something to do with the demo files because it already had my character created on the full version of the game. So deleting the demo and the full game and will install again.

Edit 2: Ahhhhhhhhh I like this game but its so frustrating. Its not all skill like I hoped it comes down to random luck way too much I am on the boss for world 6 or 7 where I have to fight a wizard and I have died hundreds of times over the last 3 hours because I keep getting knocked off the stage or die from an instant death spell.

I almost had him beat last time too and that is when I called it quits for now.

Another thing I do not like is way way too much knock down and knock back from regular mobs.

 

Best part of the game is definitely friendly fire. More often than not player death is caused by other players rather than mobs. It also has some great humor and references, both in the dialogue and also in the achievements. It's also pretty funny when you accidentally blow up your team by crossing opposite streams.

 

Have not done co-op yet. I want to beat single player for practice and wondering if any weapons/spells you get carry over to online.

BTW not sure if anybody else got it yet but since world 2 I think it was I have had a M60 machine gun as my sword its actually quite good often better than spells for smaller stuff.

 

yeap i also brought the game, so if anyone is up for some co-op some time let me know, im currently at chapter 5 as have to say its enjoyable, a little frustrating at times but great ideas well implemented...and have to agree about the M60 great off hand weapon

 

The game was difficult until I learned the combos:

Arcane + Earth + Ice = Easy Mode Spam

I very much like the unique concepts and gameplay. I might wait for a sale though, and this game desperately needs some optimizing and fixing. It has simple graphics, yet it runs at 20FPS. This game now pushes my system harder than Crysis. Until that gets fixed, I'm not paying full price.

 

Just played the demo for a little.

I have to say that I was quite surprised with the quality.

For what I understood its just a 7 guys team.

Glad to see that the independent developers are not only working for the iGadgets.

It's a buy for me.

Edit: just read it, 30.000 sold day one!!

 

Just bought this on Steam to play with some friends. One of my friends plays with his brother, though, and they experience terrible lag even though they're just connecting coast to coast. Cali to NY.

Looks really fun, though Gonna give it a go in a bit.

 

Just beat the 1 player game.

Now to try to find some of you guys to try out multiplayer.

Use my mumble server to have voice chat it should make multiplayer easier and more fun.

 

Purchased and downloading. At $10 it's a must have for me.

 

Direct2Drive is offering 20% off everything. Buying from them saves you a whopping $2. If you care about that kind of stuff.

 

Played co-op today was a lot more fun than single player felt like how the game is supposed to be played.

Spells like revive that had no use in solo play are suddenly spells you will be using a lot

Beams FTW makes it easiest to manage friendly fire, i used ice mines here and there and teliport to setup mobs for the best position.

Can summon elementals to help too.

I was playing my new game+ so I had all the spells pretty much @ start. I imagine if it was a new game you wouldn't have all the nifty spells like my game had.

One of the best solo play spells, thunderbolt is now almost useless, it almost always kills a friendly.

 

Really want to play more co-op games with this. It was fun and the game I want to play most right now.

I only have 3 people on my friends list with this game. Hiro, Reizo, and Drevan.

 

The coop game crashes a lot if you didn't notice ._.

 

We made it from chapter 3 to chapter 7 or 8 before it crashed.

Was worth the time/effort.

Game team is patching constantly to make it better and more stable, the largest patch yet is due on Monday promising a lot of good stability fixes.

Details: Weekend progress update January 30th

 

Excellent. Crash fixes

 

Played some MP, and am at Chapter 8 of the single-player campaign now. MP seems like it's a lot more fun - and a lot easier, to boot - but I can't really play very easily with my friends because they're in California and NY and I'm in Singapore. The lag is -terrible-.

 

Its a peer to peer connection. So as long as both people have a fast solid low latency internet service provider the lag should not be too bad.

There are still performance issues in the game inducing lag when there should not be any, so maybe your getting a mix of both real lag and the induced lag.

The monday patch is supposed to fix the performance issues seen when the game lags on a high performance machine so I will like that.

Also there seems to be some kind of internet flooding problem where its doing something crazy to UDP packets, this if anything may be causing your issues. A cheaper router or even a ISP not designed to handle bad traffic like that will crumble. Only a matter of time before its all patched and working well.

 

It's not a computer performance thing; the lag isn't stuttering or the like. It's more of things like watching my friends freeze halfway through animations and start sliding across the floor. Or shooting beams at monsters that I can't see.

That, and the constant crashing.

 

How long is single player game? What is the goal of the game besides winning it? Do you collect anything or experience points?

Thanks,

StevenX

 

Nope the neat concept is that there is not exp to gain or gear to grind for, your skill is the only factor in if the game is easy or hard.

There is some gear to be had but it is not game changing, and there are some spells to find as you progress through the game, but you start the game with all elements and able to cast any combination of them.

I just made a video tutorial showing the key spells that helped me beat the game. Without some of these it would have been a lot harder.




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This is a game that is fun in one player but meant to be multiplayer for best effect, suddenly your worst enemy may be your best friend this game takes friendly fire to a whole new level, but if you sync up well you can do a ton of damage to the enemies.

Lots of humor in the game, and good mechanics. The bugs are being squashed daily too so support is top notch.