Magicka Demo Available on Steam

Not sure this is news, but it was surprising to me that the Magicka demo is available for download on Steam right now. Not sure it will be playable yet, but I'll know soon.

How is this one different than all the other action rpgs? The combining elements sounds good, but I'm not sure it's innovative enough for me to try another action rpg with the same monsters, same spells, same equipment, same skills etc....

I don't know. I think I'm just burnt out on the action RPG genre. Torchlight was the straw that broke the camels back for me. It's all the same. I'm not even sure if I'll get Diablo III.

However, if they do something different or interesting that sets it apart from the crowd like in Depths of Peril then that interests me.

How's your experience with it?

Bought it via Gamersgate, now just waiting for them to unlock the game. Will comment on it later.

There's a demo.

Yea, but I asked that question while I was at work and can't be "caught" playing a demo there

BTW, thanks for the helpful comment. I would never had known there was a demo if you hadn't of said something.

Ugh. About an hour more till it's unlocked. Guess I'll go to bed first

the demo area is a tutorial (big surprise) and was fun enough, but like you I'm sorta waiting till D3 to get heavy into an action rpg. If you have a few friends to do coop I can see it being pretty fun, burnout aside.

The problem for me is if it will be fun single player, multi player involve too many constraint for me. Downloading the demo to try but if it's just a tutorial it won't say me much. There's 13 levels, not much but no idea what are their size.

I'm curious about it as well, might make an interesting distraction, and I'm not as burned out on the shooter/RPGs like this, since my last one was Marvel, UA2, nearly two years ago.

I tried the demo, and would recommend against this one, even without touching the full game.

1 - I have a quad core, 3.2ghz, 8gbDDR3, nVidia 9100 system. Nothing spectacular, but well above the minimum reqs for this thing. Performance, even with nothing on screen, is abysmal; my character stutters through the game world. It gets far worse if there's actually something to fight.

If I can run DDO with every setting maxed out, then this is inexcusable.

There is no way possible that this can even run on a P4 2.4ghz with 2GB of DDR2 and a 8800.

2 - Controls are fine, though some things are non-intuitive due to random changes between casting different kinds of spells. Casting a heal spell on yourself, for example, requires hitting the mouse wheel, which in and of itself is a poor design choice. Casting Haste on yourself, however, randomly requires hitting space to do so. Several mages ended up being squished in the demo because of this weird choice.

At least, they would be fine, if they actually worked. Selecting elements for your spells means hitting one of the Q, W, E, R, A, S, D, and F keys. Except it only occasionally decides to register the keystrokes. Making casting spells an exercise in frustration.

It is also worth noting, that hitting the space bar repeatedly to power up your shield doesn't even work.

3 - I had to CTRL-ALT-Delete to shut down. Not a good way to end my (brief) foray into Magika.

Avoid.

The 8800 is a massively superior card to the 9100. You do not meet the minimum requirements for this game.

edit: I said the above without research, and then later verified I am correct. The 9100M is an integrated motherboard chipset, just about as slow a graphics adapter as you can get nowadays. A chart from Toms Hardware in 2009 lists it on the same level as the ATI 9600 LE. Now, I had a ATI 9600 in 2004.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card,2362-6.html

graphics card aside, my beast of a system had weird performance issues as well, stuttering etc. They are planning patches every 24 hours as well, so, they must still have a laundry list of issues under the hood.

Charming game nevertheless, maybe in a few months.

i like it so far, and am not having any performance issues. Not that far in, but it seems ok.

Me too, no performance issues. Maybe it has something to do with the demo, since the last patch weighed in at 500mb.

I'm enjoying it so far though, quite a hilarious game. I'll be playing some multiplayer later tonight, that's probably when the fun really starts.

skavenhorde said:

How is this one different than all the other action rpgs? The combining elements sounds good, but I'm not sure it's innovative enough for me to try another action rpg with the same monsters, same spells, same equipment, same skills etc….

I don't know. I think I'm just burnt out on the action RPG genre. Torchlight was the straw that broke the camels back for me. It's all the same. I'm not even sure if I'll get Diablo III.

However, if they do something different or interesting that sets it apart from the crowd like in Depths of Peril then that interests me.

How's your experience with it?

Click to expand...

That's what I've been saying since like D2. I even had to force myself to finish D2 and didn't bother with the expansions. Then, every 'highly recommended' action RPG that came out, I tried, and to me it was the freaking same old thing. Every one of them.
I guess you just have to like the game style, which I don't. It was innovative in D1, but after that it's pretty much the same old.

I played the demo, up to outdoor with a bit of outdoor done but gave up, I felt controls was designed for expert players, a lot too complicate for me.

Played the demo for 10 minutes. Seems pretty cute and I have a feeling I might like it, but I'm swamped with tons of games that I need to play - and I don't have the time.

But it was kinda slow and clunky, which suprised me. I have a pretty beefy setup, so it's obviously not very optimised.

*watches trailer* aarrrgh...what chaos...is there a pause ?

DArtagnan said:

Played the demo for 10 minutes. Seems pretty cute and I have a feeling I might like it, but I'm swamped with tons of games that I need to play - and I don't have the time.

But it was kinda slow and clunky, which suprised me. I have a pretty beefy setup, so it's obviously not very optimised.

Click to expand...

Those performance problems are rather strange, I didn't notice anything on my old computer but the worse situation I got was about 10 enemies harassing me. Perhaps I didn't played long enough to quote the performance problems.

It's not really an RPG - it's got a satirical fantasy setting and that's about the only thing I can think of that's (very loosely) connected to the term "RPG". It's as much an RPG as L4D is.

I'm having a lot of fun with it. It's not really about finding the best way out, and the chaos in trying to spam different runes adds to the fun of trying out different combinations. Of course there are certain combos that are more useful than others, but none of us really cared when trying to fend off the hordes of raging mobs. Hilarity ensued as we blew each other off the map when I tried to heal one guy who put on a shield, or when he tried to revive me, only to be torched by my grease-fueled fires and running off a cliff in uncontrollable panic.

OTOH, the game crashes especially frequently for me in multiplayer. Even in singleplayer, CTDs aren't uncommon. It's good though that Paradox and Arrowhead are actively working on resolving the problems - I only hope they don't give up on these random CTDs. We're playing less frequently because of these crashes.

I would urge everyone to buy this if only it wasn't riddled with bugs, but I'd still say it's one of the most entertaining games I've played recently.