There’s been a few nice games coming out on Steam, and since TF2 doesn’t have anything interesting going on around it right now I gave a couple of them a shot.

Magicka is sort of an RPG, but you don’t exactly build your character. You start out with 8 magic elements, and different combos yield totally different spells. There’s a ton of combinations and the game’s pretty much built on satire. You can play it solo, but the best way to do it is to play with up to 3 other friends. The game doesn’t hold back on ways to die, since FF is permanently on in multiplayer and your teammates can quickly revive you with a two-element spell. It was rather buggy at launch but they’re patching things as they go.

Monday Night Combat also came out recently, it’s like TF2 with mashed up classes and DOTA mechanics. I kind of like it, but if you’re on a team where nobody’s got any clue what to do you’ll get irritated rather quick. At least there’s other ways to entertain yourself. The devs also seem to have picked up Valve’s style of offering free DLC in the future.

Now the last two games are around 10-15 dollars each, which makes them a rather nice investment considering they’ve got good replayability. Dead Space 2 came out, and after playing it I realized it’s just DS1 with a new set of missions, items and monsters. Somehow they expect people to pay 60$ for that and some half-assed ripoff multiplayer. The game was okay if you want to follow the storyline, but crap if you were expecting more of DS1′s atmosphere. I just don’t see how they can justify the pricetag.