Long before it was known as the house of Helldivers 2, developer Arrowhead Game Studios had to its name a lovely little wizard action game called Magicka, one of the bigger surprise hits of the 2010s. For players, Magicka was a treat, but for computers, it was poison, frequently crashing and generally running like a bag of hammers going up a down escalator even on the best hardware available. In recent and amusing comments, Helldivers 2 creative lead and Arrowhead veteran Johan Pilestedt owns up to the game's reputation and connects it to Arrowhead's more recent stumbles.
Wading into a Reddit discussion of where Helldivers 2 should go from here, Pilestedt points out that Magicka wasn't review bombed at release because "Review bombing as a concept wasn't a thing". And it's true the practice of sticking it to developers and publishers by hitting them in the user review score over – to distill a wide and gray discussion of review bombing criteria – non-gameplay problems has been deployed far more often in the past decade or so.
Rather, Magicka "got so-so reviews" because it "was buggy and wasn't optimized," Pilestedt says. Famously, this was partly because the game was shipped without the development team's knowledge. "Publisher had hit the release button while we were still fixing bugs - made us release patches every day until it was decent," Pilestedt adds.
There was a bit of confusion given Pilestedt's own prior mention of a Magicka review bombing, but as he clarified, that was related to modern unrest over Helldivers 2 – specifically the great PlayStation account linking fiasco – spilling over to Arrowhead's other games. This, too, has become more common; Genshin Impact players, for instance, have notoriously review bombed games and apps made by unrelated companies in response to bad updates.
"There was collateral on Helldivers 1 from the review bombing which I thought was unjustified, and I then tweeted about it being the same as review bombing Magicka - which some people then took like an instruction," he says.
The sad ending to this story is that Magicka's recent Steam reviews, far removed from any Sony-stoked outrage, are just 58% positive for good reason. This game just does not work half the time and seemingly won't be fixed. Thank goodness for modders.
Last year, Arrowhead had to sit down and recognize just how buggy and badly optimized Helldivers 2 had become, outlining a dedicated repair plan and delaying new content to give it space. I haven't had any massive issues with it myself, and compared to Magicka, it runs downright heavenly.
In August, Pilestedt rather teasingly floated the idea of making a sequel to Magicka. My kingdom for an expanded spin on the build-your-own-spells action game that actually works.
