One of the handful of games that are part of Paradox Interactive’s budding partnership with Sony for the PS4, Magicka 2 is all wizarding nonsense, all of the time. Having gone hands on with the game once more at PDXCon, I sat down with Kris to chat about how it’s shaping up, as it heads towards release in the first half of this year.
For those who are averse to the moving picture, we’ve had a couple of previews of the game in the past, so I’d encourage you to check those out, but there were new things that were being shown off at PDXCon as well.
Replayability is the order of the day, and while you could play the main story can be played through multiple times with different co-op partners, something like the wave-based Challenge mode adds a little more on top of that. Rather than the scenarios and puzzles of the story, it will throw ever increasing waves of enemies at you, as you try to beat a clock or try to set a new high score.
What makes this and replaying the story more enticing is the new artefacts system, through which you can manage the game’s difficulty. Pick from obvious things to adjust, like health boosts, regeneration and character speed for both yourself and your enemies, to disabling particular elements, “teleport to kill” and making deaths repulse nearby objects away from them. Getting the right blend of modifiers sends the already over the top action into overdrive. Oh, and if that weren’t barmy enough, you can even turn on a laugh track.
Check out the video above to see some of these artefact modifiers in action, but it’s clever twists like this, combining with the co-op play, the humorous pseudo-Swedish gibberish and, of course, the friendly fire that have been at the heart of Magicka from the very beginning that make this a game to keep an eye on.
This preview video came through attending PDXCon 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden, for which travel and accommodation provided by Paradox Interactive.
bunimomike
Just about to watch the video now.
Seeing as you and I played this on co-op (for the first game) I’m curious to see if they can make it not so frustrating and spammy. Ultimately we only remembered a few moves that saw us grind through the latter half of the original.
Stefan L
They’ve talked about this before, and how there’s more puzzles in the story (like the water wheel and crabs bit in the video) and also how enemies will have more elemental biases and different strengths and weaknesses. Those giant crabs have weak spots at the back, for example, while goblins with bombs have a tendency to blow up if you hit them with fire. Stuff like that.
bunimomike
Sounds promising but still not convinced as I think it’s a fundamental floor not a secondary one. However, happy to be won over.
My biggest visual concern is that HUD. It’s effing awful! The size on it is laughable. :-)
Stefan L
Yeah, they’re working on it…
bunimomike
CTRL A… grab anchor… reduce in size. Combine layers. Done. :-P
Stefan L
They’ve got Swedish keyboards, mate.
bunimomike
Sorry…
CTRL Dunka-Dunka… grab anchor… reduce in size. Combine layers. Done. :-P