A Communal Evening With: Magicka: Vietnam

20 Apr 2011 at 10:30:00 by Staff Writers

Battlefield Bad Company 2: Vietnam. Men of War: Vietnam. Magicka: Vietnam. Wait ... what?

Basing the first full add-on to your team-based, fantasy wizard game in Vietnam was always going to make it stand out. In a market perpetually saturated by too many great games, that was presumably the intent. But is Magicka: Vietnam just a comedy stunt, pulled off by developers with a keen sense of humour, or is it a worthwhile addition to an already funny game?

With the Vietnam expansion just released, Tim and I decided to find out. We also recorded a few videos of our feeble attempts to rescue POWs from the depths of the jungle, for your viewing pleasure.

Peter Parrish: Tim, I need your help to prance around in a bathrobe.
Tim McDonald: That's actually not the first time someone's said that to me.

[A hectic game of Magicka: Vietnam ensues]

Tim: Right.
Peter: Magicka, then ... but in Vietnam!
Tim: We're very bad at it.
Peter: We could lie about that I suppose, but the video evidence will probably speak for itself.
Tim: I can do some artful editing. No-one'll even notice the cuts.
Peter: Hey, it looks like they're about to die again ... oh, it's the end credits. Hey, why are they drawn in MSPaint?

Tim: Well, I dunno about you, but I enjoyed that. It's chaotic as all hell, but that works for it.
Peter: I also enjoyed it a lot.
Tim: It's been so long since I've played Magicka, I'd forgotten about all the wonderful, wonderful emergent things that happen, like when you laid down some healing mines and revived me on top of them.
Peter: Yes, I'm going to pretend that was on purpose.
Tim: I assumed it was!
Peter: No, unfortunately I was just miscasting the revive spell.
Tim: I kept expecting you to repeat the feat.
Peter: Haha, well, there's a reason why I didn't ... (it's because I wanted you to die.)
Tim: You bastard.
Peter: I'm a goblin-cong sleeper agent Tim, I'm sorry.
Tim: Genuinely, though, I keep forgetting how skill-based Magicka is. Whenever we failed it never felt that unfair to me. I kept thinking "If only I could cast Revive quicker," or "If only I wasn't panicking and trying to remember useful spells when things went horribly wrong." Which, obviously, are things that good players wouldn't have issues with.



Peter: I should probably mention that I played the game for the first time yesterday.
Tim: Magicka? At all?
Peter: Yeah.
Tim: Oh wow.
Peter: Going back to what you said up there though, the game does seem very fair with its deaths. If you die, it's your fault. I mean, excluding bad ping or whatever. You're given so many options to keep people alive, and I imagine that gets easier with four players too.
Tim: Well... sort of. You're given so many options to keep people alive, but also so many options to accidentally kill everybody.
Peter: Haha, of course. But those deaths are fair too! Never trust your friends ... There were a couple of times in our game where I had no idea why you or I died, though. We just kind of blew up. I'm assuming there was a sensible reason.
Tim: Usually, yeah. Sometimes I think it was the goblins with RPGs, who seem able to one-shot anyone who doesn't have a shield up. Once it was because I was trying to cast Revive while wet, thus electrocuting myself.
Peter: It's very taxing on the fingers to cast the right spells, I find. Which is why I bungle so many. And yet it's obviously something you can learn.
Tim: That's another thing I love about Magicka - if you can memorise the key inputs for one spell, then you can cast it almost instantaneously.
Peter: Right, exactly. That's cool, it rewards people who know what they're doing - and rewards learning.
Tim: Yup. And then you inevitably meet something that's resistant to those spells, and then you have nothing to fall back on and die horribly. So you learn more.
Peter: Learning through death! Kind of like Jesus.
Tim: Did you just compare a game full of wizards and magic and other heretical things to Jesus?
Peter: I'm pretty sure Jesus was in 'nam, so it's ok.



Peter: The Vietnam mode, specifically, we should talk about I suppose. I do love the audacity of bringing your fantasy wizard spellcasting game into 'nam.
Tim: Yeah. Magicka was never the sort of thing to be taken remotely seriously - I mean, the main campaign has references to quite literally everything, ever - but I wouldn't have expected a Vietnam campaign.
Peter: And yet, why not set it in Vietnam? That's one of the things I love about games, but which also frustrates me - you can do anything! So why don't you?
Tim: Mm. It seems like a really good idea, actually. In a game containing almost everything, it's pretty much one of the few things I wouldn't have expected. It's a much better way of grabbing attention than going "Download the Demon's Castle DLC."
Peter: This represents a developer going "Hey, we actually can do this faintly ridiculous thing," which I really admire.
Tim: Absolutely. More of this sort of thing, please.
Peter: Yes please! But also maybe some more checkpoints. I mean it's a game where dying is usually funny and not really a big deal. But it's also nice to make progress occasionally. Of course, this issue may be related to our badness.
Tim: Mm. I think the Vietnam stuff is geared towards four players, like the original content. So, y'know, it's John's fault.
Peter: Haha, yes, let's blame John. Damn him for being swamped with ... writing important things.
Tim: I know there were only two of us and Magicka, inevitably, is about a group of four, but still. It started getting a little frustrating the fifth time we were going through it all.
Peter: So if you're lonely and depressed, don't buy this expansion, you'll just die a lot and feel worse.
Tim: Again, that was always true of Magicka. It's usually possible to get by in single-player, it's just tricky.

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