I used to play a lot of video games with my girlfriend recently, sitting on the couch, laughing a lot and screaming at each other, when other person was fooling around. And these moments are just brilliant and, definitely, unforgettable.
So, when I saw Nine Parchments announcement trailer, I was hyped about this one a lot! I really enjoyed the trailer and I already knew from the beginning, that this game will be boring to play it solo. Then I shut it down after 10 minutes and was waiting for my girl to come over to my place. My girlfriend didn't even know about a new game, so she was pretty much excited when I told her that I have an activity for us on this evening. We started to play that game and first 30-40 minutes were pain in the аss, because we were getting into it, especially my gf, trying to understand how everything works. Another problem for here was to realize, that this game has a friendly fire mode and you should be really careful with your spells casting around your teammates.
Basically, the whole gameplay idea is all about casting spells of different schools, killing enemies which are protected with magic as well. That means, that if the big fat boar has a fire shield, then its pointless to throw fireballs at him. The best tactic was to freeze him up with my ice beam, while my bae was shocking him with her electric spells. So now, imagine, how fun can it be, when you are running around small narrow area, surrounded with dozens of enemies, with different magic school shields, trying your best to survive in that madness.
At the start of the game, you have only 3 spells to cast and the more you play, progress through the game and level up, you gain an opportunity to choose another spells. At this moment, after 4 hours of non stop gameplay, we already have 6 spells on your action wheel, for a different situations, which we need to use efficiently, working as a team. Plus, every level you can upgrade your skills, adding points at the tree skill, to make them more powerful and effective.
You can find staffs and hats through the game, I still dont know anything about the hats and I am not quite sure either they are just cosmetic or they can change your hero stats, but staffs thing are much more interesting. Staffs are used to start trials to unlock new characters with new abilities and stats. The trick is that these staffs and trial enters located at some random places all over the levels and you have to find them by yourself and I missed already one staff, which makes me sad, especially knowing that fact, that we don't rush through the game and try to explore every single piece of the map.
After few levels, you end up with a boss fight and we really enjoyed them all. We defeated three bosses at the moment I am writing the review, the only concern that I have, that only one of them was a bit difficult, other two were pretty much doable and we nailed them quickly. What I really liked during these fights - bosses were unique and with their own mechanics and visual differences, so you can be sure, that devs never wanted to copy paste enemies in Nine Parchments.
Cherry on the top of the pie is graphics. It's really beautiful and colourful, after four hours of gaming I have already seen already dozens of different landscapes with amazing and breathtaking sceneries. So, that part didn't let me down as well, it works really well with animation and professionally designed environment.
Just don't let the mixed reviews on Steam fool yourself - all these reviews were made during the first hour of gameplay and players weren't able to save their game progress during multiplayer coop game, which was fixed in hours.
So, to sum everything up!
You should grab this game if you:
+ Love coop gaming
+ Want to play something, where team play really matters, and you need to coordinate with your friends, not just auto-play
+ Enjoy beautiful games with a well design levels and brilliant graphics
+ Used to play Magicka games before and want to play something better and much more improved
+ Eager to play the game with interesting mechanics
+ Just want to spend a really great time with someone you love/care. I literally, lost count of the hours, playing this game, 4 hours went like 4 minutes to me, super addicting and absolutely amazingly fun!
You better avoid if you:
- A tilted person. Playing this game with someone in coop means that you will die sometimes because of a Friendly Fire mode and some of the skills have a bouncing effect, which can also hurt you and your teammates, so if you are easy triggered one, better move on to the next one
- Were never in love with this cute games, with cartoonish graphics, cheesy visual style and all these magician fairy tales and prefer something more bloody and gore
- A solo person, seriously this game is completely dull playing it alone.
Enjoy!