Magicka

I've had this game for a long time and recently decided to play it. Everyone is right - it crashes a lot. I've tried playing despite the crashes, but the game saves from the beginning of a checkpoint which sets you back to the beginning of fights - and some fights have several waves of enemies. Furthermore, when you die, you lose any special magic staves you may have picked up. Controls are a bit confounding, at least on keyboard - why make it so I have to constantly hold a mouse button to move? After the end of a fight I have to stretch my hand out of the painful grip it has had to have on the mouse. There don't seem to be control settings where I can change this. Spell combos aren't as expansive as I thought they would be and some spell combos are dependant on order of the elements - something I don't think they specified in the tutorial. And I may be wrong about this but there doesn't seem to be a way to "progress" the character's abilities - so enemies get harder to kill while the player character stays the same. And why make putting a defence on yourself not allow you to heal yourself? I get it, it's kind of funny because it prevents anything from "affecting" you. But then why can some enemy attacks damage me regardless? Or for that matter, why does an enemy attack that sends me flying cancel the elements I have already spelled out? This would have been fine if it wasn't for the sheer number of attacks that [i]can[/i] send you flying. Worst is getting stuck in some corner I can't see and being unable to get out as 10 enemies beat the crap out of me. It's a bit insufferable to play this way. It's a pity because the game can be funny and interesting when it works. There is even a spell called "Crash to Desktop" which doesn't crash the game, but ironically, the game does so quite frequently on its own. When I first read the reviews, I thought that perhaps the game had only been crashing for the last little bit. Turns out this has been a problem for years - I can find reviews about it crashing as early as 2011 (which is the year the game released) although the negative reviews really seemed to increase around 2014 and then even more in 2018. In any case, I don't think I can recommend this game.