Having come across videos of that new Dragon Age game and its (by the look of it) cool looking combat I’ve gotten the urge for something similar. Action RPG of some kind, being able to rock on as a wizard and blast spells all day. Some tactical element to spell slinging and comboing would be nice.
Love me some recommendations!
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I’ll go a different route. Control.
Control has been really good so far, but the pacing of the difficulty is really wonky. Everything is a breeze, right up until something is damn near impossible. So I keep starting and stopping it.
Magicka comes to mind but it was utterly unplayable single player. Maybe the sequel is better.
It feels very wizard like because you don’t have a static list of spells. You have 8 elements you.can combine into spells. (It does have unlockable spells but those are sort of secondary.) So using the fire and shield elements makes a wall of flame, for example.
The Excellent YouTube channel TheStellarJay has a small series (3-4 Videos, ~10min each) about the state of wizard games.
This is part 1: https://youtu.be/quPKQIVEX5A
I’m sure you’ll find something that piques your interest
Yeah lots of recommendations here but let me give you some that I think answer your request more specifically.
Wizard Of Legend is a top down roguelite where you play a wizard that can equip different spells and upgrades. The combat and strategy is very focused on spells and how good you are at slinging them between dodging enemy attacks.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/445980/
Margoq’s Lair is a top down roguelike where spells are cast by composing them from elements, for example fire + shield casts the spell fireshield. It makes for a much more satisfying experience than pressing a button to cast a spell.
You should try Oblivion
Btw, have you played something like Hades? You’re not technically a wizard, but close enough. And there’s other hades-like games which might be more “wizard-like”.
Terraria has some really fun mage gameplay.
noita is insane and has absolutely zero handholding. it’s truly hardcore and kinda souls-like in difficulty/lore, but truly excellent!
magicraft is the king in casual spell crafting, very good game to play a bit after work, can call it quits anytime and pick it back up again. just had it’s full launch as well and might still be -20% (about 12€)
fictorum is fairly unique, because it’s first-/third-person and 3D, and also very good with an intuitive spell system and a little bit of indie game jank
If you are cool with CRPGs may I suggest Arcanum? Probably has one of the most weirdly in depth magics systems.
Its kinda different but maybe Two Worlds, I remember killing everything in the world and resurrecting literally everything so that every NPC was friendly to me. I killed the whole world and brought it back.
wizard and blast spells all day.
Runescape flashbacks
Badass wizard eh? Try Magicka! 😁
Fair warning that when I played it with a friend (two-ish years ago), it was broken and abandoned. Couldn‘t play in co-op for more than 30 minutes without a disconnect, some DLCs didn‘t even start, singleplayer you had to downgrade to an older version or else it crashes every so often. Every loading screen had me praying the game doesn‘t poop the bed. It was probably fun at some point, but it needs engineering attention and hadn‘t gotten that in years when I last tried it.
Oh man, that’s really sad :(
I‘m probably even downplaying it, my friend ragequit from the frequency of crashes lol
Maybe Magicka 2 is the better starting point, but I wouldn‘t know since after my experience with Magicka, I didn‘t wanna touch it
It was fun when it worked though!
This was going to be my recommendation. Probably not what OP wants, but definitely what they asked for!
Is it good solo? I don’t have a lot of time for games but this looks like it might be able to scratch my (MMO)RPG itch a bit without being too much of a time sink.
I enjoyed it solo, though it did become impossibly hard at one point. I don’t know if you need to have friends to help or if I just needed to be better at the game!
What’s important is the combos. There are very powerful combos that render the game very easy.
I definitely completed it solo. Finding spell books definitely helps, but just crafting spells with the given elements can be more than enough to muddle through.
You can give yourself armor to assist in your normal squishy wizard self that definitely helps with the tougher bits.
I loved wizard wars before it went down. RIP in peice
This one is completely different from your typical ARPG, but I’m going to recommend Noita.
It’s a 2d game where you play as a wizard off spelunking. The magic system is rad as heck, you find wands with spell slots in them, and spells that you can put in the wands. You can rearrange and combine spells to get some truly bizarre effects
I’ve killed myself in a dozen hilarious ways trying to make the perfect wand. It never gets old
Read the title of this post and immediately thought Noita. It’s such a fantastic game both stock and modded and even after 100 hours in it, I’m far from an expert.
You definitely will feel like a badass wizard.
I advice people to not install invincible mods right away. But the game is full with content and you often die instantly, I personally had to use a respawn mod to see all of it’s content. The game is really hard, probably the most difficult game I’ve ever played. Souls games are a cakewalk in comparison.
Also, there’s actually an egregious amount of content in Noita. There’s so much to explore
If you never played Magicka you should give it a shot.
Story is generic and it’s a little bit jank, but has one of the best magic systems in any game I’ve played.
I sometimes think back on this game, I loved playing the large two handed spears. Spinning around.
I wonder how well it plays on Stem Deck because talking about it makes me want to play again.
A lot of this games charm comes from the jank. But the magic system is absolute fun.
