When I visited recently with Paradox at GamesCom 2010 they had a lot of stuff to show me, which might explain why some of it is only surfacing here at 
GDN after a couple weeks. One game that really looked great, and had apparently already created an addict in Paradox CEO Fredrik Wester, was Magicka. What’s the big deal?
Well first of all:
Magicka is an action-adventure game set in a rich fantasy world based on Norse mythology. The player assumes the role of a wizard from a sacred order tasked with the ultimate goal of stopping an evil sorcerer who has thrown the world into turmoil, his evil creations besieging the forces of good.
That’s where the fun begins. How you cast spells in the game is up to you. You are given eight elements to use and you combine them in different ways to make different types of spells. For example you can throw a fireball, or you can combine a couple fire elements with some rock elements and get say, a flaming meteor shower spell. Cool no? You can combine up to five at a time and do things like freeze enemies then run up and smash them to bits. But this is called Magicka, no Melee-ka, so why not just combine some earth or rock and blast that frozen enemy to pieces with that instead?
Better, 
yet, get up to three friends to jump in the game as well and when you freeze an enemy one of them can blast them to bits while another heals you all from the collateral damage you’re bound to take. Yes, you can hurt your pals in this game. I thought it was brilliant as it requires a bit of extra strategy. No running up to enemies when your partner is about to unleash that massive meteor strike because, you’ll get caught up in the blast as well.
The game features some really cool graphics in its sort of isometric top-down view old-school dungeon crawl view. Which works perfectly for this game and reminds me of games like Neverwinter Nights and Diablo.
The game features multiple ways to play including single player, up to 4-player co-op as well as hot seat and online LAN.
