Magicka has no difficulty setting, you just have to get through it as is and I found a fatal flaw in Chapter 3 that could frustrate many and prevent them from finishing the campaign mode. Actually I found a couple. For example, if you summon a spirit and it doesn’t take any damage it will never disappear and it will anchor you to the screen you are on. You must destroy it to move. It so happened that I was stuck in some ruins because of that and on a whim I destroyed it so I could go destroy an enemy that was stuck off screen. I also had a lot of problems with the game crashing my display driver. I’m using an ATi Radeon HD 3870 and haven’t had any problems with the display driver crashing prior to starting to play the game. Nor do I have any when I’m not playing the game.
You can tell that the developers are fans of Star Wars, Bond and several other culture icons in that they took lines and scenes right from them, like "No Mr. King, I expect you to die" and then later the king picks up the warlock with lightning crackling out of him and tosses him into a pit a la Darth Vader and the Emperor. All very humorous. Also there’s an achievement called King’s Quest which is all about finding all the dead moose. Why moose? Who knows, more interesting than dead ducks and more believable than dead penguins?
Anyway, it’s all good fun in the end. You might even see some other reference to Star Trek as well. They really went all out in filling the game with humor.
The soundtrack in Magicka and the sounds are all high quality and well done. The voice work is, for lack of another word, bizarre. You’ve got Vlad you sometimes speaks in I don’t know what, then in English and all the while with a Transylvanian accent. Much of the other voice work is done in Swedish I guess or perhaps Finnish. I am not so good with the languages from that part of the world. However, there are subtitles so don’t worry. I skipped much of the story as I just wanted to get on with the exploding of enemies, and the story was very, very predictable.
Overall, Magicka has a lot to offer. I’m going to have some friends come over this weekend and we’ll try out the local multiplayer. I imagine my monitor isn’t quite large enough, though I think this would be awesome game on a large LCD TV with multiplayer.
The gameplay could use a little work. You will often kill yourself when trying to cast a spell because you might be, wet, and you hit lightning three times in rapid succession. Or you might click the wrong mouse button and blow yourself up. I guess it speaks to the dangerous power of magic, but it’s sort of lame and frustrating. Especially when you take into account that you can’t just walk away from a game. You have to finish a whole level as the checkpoints only work to save your progress per session. So you can only end between levels, that sort of 
defeats the purpose of checkpoints, doesn’t it? It would be a nice addition in an upcoming patch, being able to quit at checkpoints, some of us have work to do!
A lot of the bugs are being squashed as you read this. They’ve been actively working on it and have released a patch almost daily. All that tells me is that they didn’t do enough QA testing and maybe released the game too early. That’s not to say it’s a bad game, it’s a great game, especially since it’s only $10 and I’ve already put 10 hours into it. The weekend proves to be another 10 hours easy. Just be prepared to want to pound your keyboard to bits from time to time because in the heat of battle, you won’t notice that you’re dripping wet and electrocute yourself, more often than one should in a video game.
