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Warlock, Hasbro and Invoke’s open world action romp, looks like a good time—at least if your idea of fun is using magic to steal an ogre’s sword before tossing it at another horrible creature, or using fancy blood rituals to ruin a sunny day, bringing rain and gloom. “Creative use of magic,” Invoke calls it. I call it being a magical party pooper, but I’m here for it.
OK, so here’s the deal. You’re Kaatri, an experienced swinger of swords who’s made a deal with D&D celebrity Tasha—you might know her from such spells as Tasha’s Hideous Laughter—who has gifted you with a wide range of tricks. I’m sure it’s not going to be a deal that comes back to bite her on the ass. Weird goths offering power? Always trust them!
Since Kaatri had this whole other life before making a deal with Tasha, she doesn’t exclusively rely on magic. She’s perfectly capable of removing heads from bodies the mundane way, in melee scraps that look snappy and cinematic. How the melee actually feels, well, I’m going to have to wait to find out, as Invoke and Hasbro aren’t handing over the controller just yet.
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Honestly, though, I’m more interested in the magic—even if using a sword is sometimes a bit more efficient. Take a simple obstacle, like some nasty, stabby brambles blocking a path. Now, you could just chop them away with your sword, but you know what’s cooler? Using the spell Tasha’s Leash to grab a lamp, which can then be used to set fire to the brambles. If too much fire is the problem, then you can use the same spell to grab a bucket of water to put it out.
It strikes me that Kaatri might be a victim of Maslow’s hammer. No, that’s not another spell. It’s the idea that when we become overly familiar with a tool, we start to see it as the solution to everything. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail. Which is bad. But screw Maslow—magic is awesome, why wouldn’t you want to use it to solve everything?
And to be fair to Kaatri, magic is a wide-ranging bag of tricks. In the demo, I get to see her Shadow-stepping all over the place, teleporting to and away from enemies, as well as through obstacles. Any heavy objects in her way can be deftly moved aside without her breaking a sweat, or even moving. And when she’s faced with a big gap and an imposing drop, some magical tentacles build her a bridge. I wish hammers were this useful.
So magic is incredibly convenient for traversal and puzzles—and traversal puzzles—but seeing it used in combat is where it becomes downright seductive. This is why you make dodgy deals with witch queens.
I kinda hate when videogame combat gets compared to ballet—a deadly ballet, a lethal ballet, blah blah blah—but seeing Kaatri firing on all cylinders (all credit to the Invoke dev driving the demo) really is physical poetry. It looks elaborate, technical and elegant. Yes, I’m annoyed I didn’t get to play myself. The stringing together of melee, teleporting, time manipulation and telekinesis is just a delight to watch. And the interplay between all these spells and attacks goes beyond the immediate, instantly gratifying stuff.
At one point, we see Kaatri summon a little table, at which she performs a blood ritual to change the weather. It starts to rain. Bummer. But this drizzle does more than make enemies sad and damp—it makes them more conductive. And Kaatri can hurl lightning at them. Now we’re cooking.
After the methodical, measured chaos of Baldur’s Gate 3, I find myself really in the mood for this more action-dense, almost DMC or Bayonetta-style approach to D&D magic. It’s flashy and over the top, but there’s still this tactical grounding. Invoke’s got something pretty cool brewing here, and I’m keen to see more as it gets closer to its 2027 launch.
