Magicka 2 Review (Hitlit127)
Where to even start with this game. I really want to like it. I want to play it more and just enjoy the story, but there are so many obstacles in the way. Coming from the first game, they've weakened many/most of the decent spell combinations that used to exist. It's hard to tell if they simultaneously made the enemies hit harder and have more health or if that effect is just from your overall weaker offensive abilities. Regardless, the game struggles to fulfill the power fantasy of being a wizard. Let's also not forget that self-healing has been dumped in the garbage, meaning that if you wanted to go through solo, which was very easy to do in the first game once you learned the mechanics and combos, you're going to have a much harder time. A harder time that you can't just skill-up to deal with by learning better combinations and memorizing spell sequences, because they've gutted the power of all of them.
On top of nerfing the strength of many spell combinations, they've also drastically lowered the skill ceiling by placing a hard cooldown on magick casts. I'm not talking about the stupid focus system, I mean you have a global cooldown on casting magicks even with manually inputting the element combinations. Want to keep your haste up? Better not try to use too many offensive magicks. You just cast revive? Wait 2 to 3 seconds before using a completely different magick. I can understand having a cooldown for users that are just using the focus system and the easy keybinds. I can even sort of understand having a cooldown on the using the same magick manually to prevent over spamming it (i.e. how you could spam thunderbolt easily in the first game), but I think if you have the muscle memory and the regular memory to manually input the various element combinations for many different magicks, you should be rewarded and allowed to use them without some garbage cooldown.
I so want to enjoy this game, but I've given it enough tries at this point. If you're a fan of the first game, I'd highly recommend you stay away from this one. If you're new to the franchise and are either willing to deal with the new frustrating solo-experience or have friends to reduce some of these issues that they've introduced, you may be able to enjoy it