So a bit of a deep cut here, but there was a game from almost ten years ago that - as far as I can tell - flopped abysmally. I’ve never seen anyone else talk about it online, since I heard about it from a random Reddit comment buried deep at the bottom of an unrelated post.

Lichdom: Battlemage

It’s jank. It’s not a great game. But the magic system and the depth there made the repetitive enemies and dull environments completely worth it - at least in brief sprints.

Magic is ‘runes’ - or items. They drop in the world with various properties, and you can pick them up and assemble them into spells - you get, like, four bound on the UI. Base type is runes that classify the element of the spell, each having very unique mechanics. Fire does either big swingy crits or DOTs, ice is consistent damage or stored combo damage, electric is fast casting and AOE, etc. Then you get the physical shape of the spell, sometimes it’s a beam, or a bolt, or a mortar, or a pool on the ground, etc. Then last up you get some added runes that will manipulate the mechanics of the element and shape you’ve chosen.

From there, though, all of your spells can interact with each other.

So for example, ice will freeze on enemies and only do a small amount of base damage directly, but then will “store” damage. Hitting with another ice spell pops the stored damage and stores another charge. Hitting with a different element magnifies that hit relative to the stored damage - so hitting with ice, then popping it with fire, does far more damage than just hitting with a second ice because the fire has a larger base hit. But you can also modify fire to also store a damage multiplier on the enemy - so if you set up a pool of fire that stores multiplier, then hit them with cold to add more stored damage and lock them on top of the pool where multiplier continues accumulating, then finally follow up with a different very high-damage fire spell … the stored damage and multi kick in and Big Numbers Go Boom.

That is probably the simplest elemental interaction in the game, that’s the basic gameplay loop combo. There’s like a time element that will put the enemies in timed stasis, and you can shoot them while in stasis but it won’t do anything - then when stasis pops it’ll repeat every instance of damage applied X times per second for Y seconds, based on the numbers on the skill, and if you also use another skill it’ll do the same damage to every other enemy within a radius …

The shit you could do was wild.

It’s a pity that the level design and enemies weren’t really on the same level, so there wasn’t a ton of motivation to fully explore the depths of the magic system - and then separately, the game also gave you tons of reasons to go play a different game.