Magicka

The surprise budget hit is equally full of dumb explosive fun, gobs of potential, and frustrating bugs. Exploring its explosive combat system is worth the low price for entry, but the game quickly gets frustrating in solo play – and online multiplayer is totally broken right now.

This isn't a review for one simple reason: online multiplayer is still busted, where connecting to a game is impossible, and Magicka is designed from the ground up to be played cooperatively. Local play mostly works, but how often do you gather around your computer desk with your buddies to play a silly arcade game? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Magicka is a tongue-in-cheek $10 budget PC title that gets by entirely on its charm and unusual gameplay. The ESRB has a listing for 360 and PS3 versions and gamepad control works quite well, so draw your own conclusions there. Screenshots make it look a bit like Diablo, but don't be fooled – there is very little RPG here. Sure, you play a wizard saving a fantasy world from peril, but the 15-second chunks of humorous dialogue punctuating the carnage here and there aren't exactly trying to compete with Dragon Age. Magicka is all about combining the eight elements into devastating spells that can do everything from freeze enemies with chain lightning to fire healing novas or raise volcanic geysers from the ground.

To play Magicka is to live entirely in the moment. Half a dozen monsters or more are typically active at a time, and it doesn't take long for your frail body to be torn to shreds the moment you stop moving. You're constantly loading up elements (via the left half of your keyboard or with right analog gestures, depending on your control scheme – personally I prefer a gamepad) and firing them off. The frantic drive to load up proper combos is all-consuming and easily flubbed, which leads to that much more chaos.

The same combination of elements has dramatically different effects depending on whether you fire it as a projectile, exude it in a radius, or target yourself directly. Fire + lightning + arcane shoots a powerful beam that electrocutes and burns its target, launches a short-range nova with the same effects, or does it to yourself if you self-cast it for some reason. Earth + cold + shield conjures a freezing rock shield in a semicircle in front of you, a full circle around you, or immobilizes you in a protective rock shell. The possibilities, as you can see, are enormous, especially since you can imbue your sword with elemental combos for later use, which often has slightly different effects as well.

In addition to all of this, you can find tomes that unlock special spells with specific combos. Haste lets you channel lightning + arcane + fire into a temporary speed boost. Rain gets everything (including you) wet. Meteor storm does what you'd expect, and is a great way to kill yourself if you don't take precautions.

Next up: Tactics, frustrations, and bugs

I like to open encounters by sweeping an arcane + water beam across the enemies, doing little damage but getting them all wet. Following this up by charging in and blasting arcane + cold novas (adding in lightning for bonus damage if I'm feeling fancy) will freeze them solid and kill them shortly thereafter. There are several similar interactions between the elements; flame will light dry things on fire, thaw chilled or frozen targets, and dry off soaked bodies.

Freezing bad guys with a water-cold sequence works great for run-of-the-mill goblins, but adding in vampires who shake off the water and immobilize me with a blood-sucking grapple changes the dynamic considerably. And vampires are the first step along the enemy spectrum.

Trolls regenerate their enormous health pools and deliver devastating melee attacks. Mortar-toting ogres launch concussive shells that send everyone flying in addition to their non-trivial damage. Worst of all, enemy spellcasters have access to the same magics as you do. Keeping track of everything onscreen is nearly impossible, and you'll often find yourself madly flailing to blast the most immediate threat only to screw up your combo and dry off a wetted troll with a fire spell instead of freezing it with cold, only to eat a club swing from a truck-sized ogre you didn't see winding up.

Magicka's chaos is a thrilling madhouse full of hilarious explosions and cheap deaths. The destructive power you can unleash with just a few button presses is quite simple to kill yourself with, and adding enemy mages creates a volatile mixture likely to explode and kill everyone at any time.

Most deaths are trivial, returning you to a checkpoint at most a few minutes back. The fraction of deaths that fall during one of the adventure's several checkpoint dry spells, though, are maddening. The boss fight at the end of chapter six is an infuriating ten-minute gauntlet with the possibility of unavoidable, cheap death every ten seconds.

The uneven difficulty and arbitrary deaths caused by magical interactions with other spellcasters are both mitigated in cooperative play. Healing is even easier with a buddy, as projectile healing beams and novas are considerably more efficient than self-healing. Bringing your friends back from death is a simple two-element spell, so it's no big deal if someone buys it from a sudden enemy combo. Most importantly, the interactions between elements are that much more interesting to explore with a friend.

Also, friendly fire is always on, and you'll kill each other. A lot. And laugh about it, because there's always something exploding and seeing the fireworks is far more amusing than the sting of death is irritating.

The developers are hard at work patching the busted multiplayer, and assure us that they won't rest until it's fixed. I hope they follow through – Magicka's $10 price tag only buys around three or four hours of decent single-player before the co-op design focus makes it more frustrating than fun. Still, the lighthearted fun of blasting hundreds of enemies into goo with dozens spells that would be overpowered in any game that concerned itself with balance in the slightest makes Magicka one of the more interesting and unique titles I've had the pleasure to play recently.