Release date: 2011

Magicka is an action-adventure game, where you play a mage on his journey to save the world. The story is held in a very humorous tone featuring many pop-cultural references.

The combat system is very unique: You can combine up to 5 elements in one spell and the outcome depends on the way these elements interact with each other. This is probably the most prominent (gameplay) feature this game has. It offers seemingly endless possibilities to combine the different elements for new effects. At the same time, since it's necessary to constantly cast the elements, it's quite the button smashing at times. Still, it is very unique and it's a lot of fun to experiment with different combinations for different types of enemies.

Magicka is notoriouly buggy featuring ingame bugs as well as constant CTDs. I think I probably had 1-2 CTDs per hour, which makes the game very frustrating to play at times.

Achievements: Most of the achievements are not that hard to get, but can be quite frustrating due to the CTDs, which force you to start over again. Some DLCs however feature a bunch of very hard achievements I didn't even try. Most can be done solo, but there are also several MP achievements.

Verdict: A fun game, unfortunately suffering from an almost unprecedented amount of bugs.

Release date: 2016

Midsummer Night is advertised as a puzzle / adventure game and whilst I'm not sure this description is really fitting, I don't have a better one. You follow the story of a little boy trying to save his sister after she was kidnapped by a bear. He enters a deep forest and with the help of its inhabitants manages to find his sister only to find out that she… well, I don't want to spoil the end.

The pixelart look didn't really work for me with the game. The soundtrack is okay, but nothing spectacular. Gameplay is simple and without any noteworthy features (beware of some QTEs though). What bugged me the most was the lack of directions the game gives you. Honestly, half of the time I had no idea what I was supposed to do. And the comparably huge amount of backtracking didn't make it better. Also, from the description on the store page I figured I would learn a bit about russian/slavic folklore, but that wasn't really the case either. All in all, there is little good I can say about the game, despite its good overall reviews.

Achievements: Require multiple playthroughs as you cannot save the game by hand. Achievements are easy to obtain with a guide, but might be rather confusing without.

Verdict: Nah, I don't recommend the game.

Release date: 2014

Beyond Earth is a turn-based strategy game, as one might have already guessed. It's basically Civilization set in the future on an alien planet.

Honestly, there isn't really much to say about the game other than that. All Civilization games play basically the same and this one is no different. The different setting has its charme but at the same time lacks the feeling of being part of Earth's history that other Civ games invoked in me.

Personally I quite enjoyed the game, not having seriously played any Civ game since 2012 iirc. It was nice to play this kind of game again. However, was it really necessary to make another Civ game?

The games is rated rather badly on Steam, but as far as I can see there is little actual criticism, most reviews are just "It's not Civ V!!!!111" or something like that. Which is similar to what I wrote above, about not having the "real" Civ feeling to it, but that's not enough to give a thumbs down in my book (That's the friendly version of what I actually wanted to say).

Achievements: Straightforward, but time-consuming. DLC is required to get some of them. Most of the achievements can be cheesed in Hot-Seat Multiplayer if one doesn't want to play too much hours.

Verdict: Civ fans seem to hate the game, but I think it's decent, albeit not inventing the wheel anew.