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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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.
You should try Oblivion
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
Also, there’s actually an egregious amount of content in Noita. There’s so much to explore
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.
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!
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.
What’s important is the combos. There are very powerful combos that render the game very easy.
What are your combos of choice? I remember having a few good ones committed to memory at the time.
I had muscle memory, but I think it was QRRASE or something like that then put on weapon. Next time you attack, you cast a row of exploding icicles that put wet status and electrocute your enemies and really slow them down. Almost nothing in the game can resist. It makes the game stupid easy. You kill any boss in a few hits. You can also cast it around you, but it’s way too easy to kill yourself. The combo is hard to pull off the few first time, but once you get the touch, you’re unstoppable.
Also, cast SAFE on you regularly, easy to remember and its a very strong defense.
A lot of people use a combination of QFQFASA beam. It’s high damage, but you’re a sitting duck, never liked it.
I loved wizard wars before it went down. RIP in peice
If you never played Magicka you should give it a shot.
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
Wayfinder. Recently discovered it and i’ve been having quite a bit of fun with it. It’s a former live service converted to singleplayer/coop, so the story kind of blows. But it’s a good ARPG - a Torchlight meets Warframe sort of thing.
Kingdoms of Amalur has very fun, very flashy combat. The rest of the game is really ehhh, but if you just want to blast magic and have cool skills then it’s a great choice.
Kingdoms of Amalur is a great example of a perfectly enjoyable, mid action RPG. It’s not going to like define a generation, but every time it comes up I think back on it fondly.
I would like another like it.
Divinity 2 Ego Draconis (not to be confused with Divinity Original Sin 2) had a quite similar feel to me.
They did a remaster a couple years ago. I love the ease of changing and variety of gameplay styles it affords.
Maybe less open environments to make it feel less like an MMO. But yes.
Recently released Wayfinder has been scratching that itch for me! It used to be a multiplayer live-service game, but during early access it got converted to a normal singleplayer/coop game with 0 microtransactions and it’s a lot of fun. My only issues are with performance, which isn’t great, and build variety, which doesn’t exist. There are 8 characters with limited customization (except visual, you can do a lot with all the dyes and trinkets) and you just gotta rotate between them to keep the playstyle fresh.
But the combat is fun, the graphics are great (they aren’t beautiful, but they have that timeless cartoonish high fantasy aesthetic, like early WoW), and there is a lot of stuff to do and reward chests to collect. It really is feeling like a new KoA to me - as you said, just a solid, mid-tier action RPG.
So considering that we’re in patientgamers… add to a wishlist and wait for a sale? :P
Added to the list! Thanks for the recco, it sounds like a good game to go in to if you’ve got reasonable expectations.
Fictorum is the game that most scratches the wizard itch for me. It’s an indie game, so don’t expect AAA polish, but what is there is absolutely what you might call a “hidden gem”.
I’ll give a shout out to Fictorum, which is kinda janky but is a physics-heavy wizard simulator with on-the-fly spellshaping and some real wild spellslinging combos. Between the combat levels, there’s a travel/encounter-type rpg thing vaguely similar to FTL as you try to stay ahead of a wave of Bad Thingstm
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.
Terraria has some really fun mage gameplay.
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/?snr=1_5_9__412
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.
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”.
Hogwarts Legacy. Combat is fast and brutal.
The side stuff feels kind of bland mechanically and something about the open world doesn’t capture me like I want it to, but it’s pretty good pure magic combat.
I’m surprised this wasn’t mentioned more. Unlike a lot of the other games, the world feels a bit more centered around magic. Also if you’re a fan of Harry potter it does a good job of capturing that setting (in my opinion).
