I battled through the original Magicka earlier this year with a friend at my side. It started of brilliantly, with a bizarre sense of humour, giving you a seemingly limitless variety of spells, with just your own personal knowledge as the barrier to your spell-casting abilities.
However, as we approached the end of the game, it certainly became a war of attrition. By around the midpoint we had learnt some of the game’s most powerful elemental combinations and spells, and were spamming our way through with these at our side. For the newly-formed Paradox North, taking these over-powered combos into a multiplayer environment was simply not an option, and amongst a sea of changes to the formula, these über-spells have been disappeared from your arsenal in Wizard Wars.
For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s a PC-based wizard ’em up, in which you control a wizard and cast a vast array of spells by combining eight elements. Mixing rock with fire and charging the attack, for example, shoots a flaming brick. Accidentally (or intentionally) clipping allies with these super-charged spells was part of the original game’s appeal, no doubt helping Paradox to secure a few million in sales. Magicka’s continued success also led to a mobile version being released on iOS and Android.
These reached a much larger audience, but didn’t sell as many as on PC. As John Hargelid, the Executive VP guiding us through the game said, you can do the maths.
The game is partly about hitting your enemy with flaming rocks, but it’s also about spotting your opponent’s state at that point. If they’re wet – perhaps you just sprayed them with water or combined fire and water to make steam – then you’ll have better luck hurting them with electricity. Combine the dark energy beam with electricity for a bit more range, but just make sure that you’re not wet yourself, or you’ll be electrocuted too.
It’s a complicated mixture, which is difficult to describe, but relatively easy to pick up and play. It’s made easier by having been pared back to only allow three elements to be combined as opposed to five, for this multiplayer outing.
In addition to these on-the-fly combinations, you can bind a few powerful spells to hotkeys. These range from being able to revive people – friend or foe – to calling in a huge meteor storm, which is likely to just wipe everyone out. It helps compensate for the missing high-powered spells, and also means that you have to play well in order to fill up a bar which unlocks the four powers in turn.
Instead of a story-based co-operative experience, what we have here is a control point battle arena, in which two teams of four can compete. There are just three control points to spawn from, and if you hold the majority then the other team’s respawn tickets will start to deplete faster. If all the control points go to one side, then that means the other team can’t respawn at all, and must capture one as quickly as possible before they’re wiped out.
It’s simple and actually quite fun – though I only had the opportunity to play it 1v1 with my hectic schedule – and a good starting point for the game, which is still in the early stages of development.
Thankfully, a lot of the humour of the original persists, with animals in the world represented by wooden cut outs, which will bizarrely explode in bloody gibs if shot, and there are many silly explanations to items as you customise your character.
Customisation could grow to be fairly extensive, with the early choices of a few robes, a staff and a melee weapon each offering up a few little perks. There’s always a trade off however, so your robe might let you heal better, but you may then be subject to taking more fire damage, or walk a few percentage points slower.
A lot of the tweaks and changes are for the better, with the control scheme a lot slicker than it was before. You can set a waypoint and continue to cast and fire spells as your character walks there, melee strikes are easier to manage too, and self-healing requires you to stand perfectly still. It should feel familiar to anyone that has played Magicka before, but also polishes the experience and turns what was chaotic friendly fire into a finely tuned tactical wizard fight.
This free to play title will go into closed alpha this autumn, before hurtling through beta and to a final launch some time next year. As with their other upcoming game, War of the Vikings, Paradox have a very scaled down and pure initial experience planned for the beta, so as to get precise feedback on what they need, and which will have additional content added over time.
The heart of Magicka was really a silly romp through a ridiculous world with friends. Wizard Wars takes the friendly fire “accidents” and vindictive revenge to another level, and I really do feel it has a great chance of turning it into a tense and tactical multiplayer game.