Magicka: Vietnam (PC)

Magicka: Vietnam has players take on the role of four wizards to go through the jungles of war-torn Vietnam.

Release Date: Apr 12, 2011

Magicka came out earlier this year, it took up the number one slot on a lot of digital distribution sales sites. Though it may look at a glance like a Diablo-style game, that's not an especially accurate description. The gameplay is surprisingly involved, requiring you to tap in combinations of eight magical elements and then activate them for various effects. Each element is assigned to a key, and rapid, precise keystrokes directly results in a greater effectiveness on the battlefield. It's an intuitive and instantly satisfying system to use, especially once you learn how to combine elements to create fiery laser beams, frost mines and bubble shields. 

The presentation of the game was already humorous enough. It's a co-op game where magical effects fly all over the screen, often obliterating enemies and friendly players alike in showers of blood and body parts. Arrowhead is looking to continue that style with its upcoming content expansion

Aside from being a brilliant send-up of what publishers and developers tend to do with higher profile franchises (the Battlefield series, for example, has two Vietnam versions), the expansion will also offer some new gameplay experiences. In Magicka: Vietnam you fight against the goblin-cong. "They're military goblins," said Johan Pilestedt, CEO and game director at Arrowhead. "Their elite troops are the orcs, which are far more fierce. They prefer melee with their bayonets on their AK-47s. Trolls also make an appearance. They're heavily armored with a heavy machine gun. That's sort of a boss fight type of enemy." 

The goblins will come at you with rocket launchers and mortars and more, which you'll be able to pick up during play. You'll even get a napalm spell, which will call in a fiery airstrike when initiated that's set down perpendicular to the direction it was cast. Should two people cast the napalm spell while playing co-operatively, the result won't be two lines of fire. Instead, it'll change the orientation of the original airstrike to be perpendicular to the second player's facing when cast. So, like with most of Magicka, things can spiral out of control pretty quickly if you're not paying attention. 

There'll also be a cover system. "We had implemented a cover system where goblins prefer to stand behind cover and shoot over it, we felt that it was sort of unfair having a wizard standing behind sandbags. But you couldn't take cover because you were just standing there. We realized that the block function of the original game wasn't very useful with rifles. So we changed it so that if you're holding a rifle, the block will instead make you crouch." 

If you decide to pick up the Vietnam expansion, this crouch behind cover functionality will transfer into the original game too, along with all the new weapons. "Most games, when you buy an expansion it's very isolated and it doesn't affect the rest of the game. If you get Vietnam, you can actually do a full playthrough of the original game with the napalm strike magic." 

Regarding the actual magic system and its eight elements, not a lot of that will be changing in Vietnam. "We want to leave it be for as long as possible. If we do add a new element, it will upset the balances in the game. For example if we were to add poison we would have to either remove one element or make it a combination of two elements." 

The new content will be spread across a few new maps, including a section where you need to pulverize waves of attackers as you wait for a chopper to land. "Choppers are always late," said Pilestedt. 

It may sound like a great idea now, but originally there was no guarantee Magicka: Vietnam was actually going to happen. Paradox had initially rejected the Vietnam pitch, though later warmed up to it. The original concept stemmed from the unlockable M60 in the original game. "We had one of our graphics artists model an M60 and we implemented it into the game and we actually spent the rest of the day just going around shooting goblins. It's so much fun being a wizard, shooting stuff with an M60." 

"The natural progression from that is Vietnam. The M60 belongs in the jungle," said Pilestedt. 

Magicka: Vietnam will require the original game to play and be ready for some time this spring. Arrowhead will also continue to patch the original game, balancing its magic system and crushing bugs. Beyond Vietnam, Arrowhead doesn't want to get into the run of only doing spoofs of big budget shooters, but spread out to other things. "If we were to only release modern war expansions people would get tired of that. We're intested in doing original spoofs, maybe Dungeons & Dragons. We haven't forgotten the fantasy fans." 

And in case you were curious, Arrowhead is still working to make a console version a reality, but nothing is happening for sure just yet.