I want to feel like a bad-ass wizard

Theoretically, Immortals of Aveum could be good for this. It’s basically a shooter, but with spellcasting for the shots.

This one is completely different from your typical ARPG, but I'm going to recommend Noita.

It's a 2d game where you play as a wizard off spelunking. The magic system is rad as heck, you find wands with spell slots in them, and spells that you can put in the wands. You can rearrange and combine spells to get some truly bizarre effects

I've killed myself in a dozen hilarious ways trying to make the perfect wand. It never gets old

Also, there's actually an egregious amount of content in Noita. There's so much to explore
I advice people to not install invincible mods right away. But the game is full with content and you often die instantly. I personally had to use a respawn mod to see all of its content. The game is really hard, probably the most difficult game I've ever played. Souls games are a cakewalk in comparison.
Read the title of this post and immediately thought Noita. It’s such a fantastic game both stock and modded and even after 100 hours in it, I’m far from an expert.

You definitely will feel like a badass wizard.

Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind lets you fly around, jump over whole cities, and kill most NPCs with one high powered spell. It's a very unique game, but if it clicks with you there's nothing quite like it. Vibrant modding scene too.

The base game is certainly playable, but if you want modern resolutions and some vanilla-friendly bug fixes OpenMW is an open source recreation of the engine, there's instructions on their website.

Morrowind was always my favorite Elder Scrolls game, but I'm probably biased since it was my first. The tech, while good for its time, was always the #1 thing holding it back for modern times. Hadn't heard about OpenMW, but now I'll have to check it out.
- Check out Tamriel Rebuilt too! It's a mod to add the mainland that, while incomplete, already has 100s of quests. Good quality control too.
Morrowind is great and people should definitely play it, but god damn will it not meet the need of feeling badass. It makes you feel like a wooden chess piece and you just get used to it.

Those spells area very cool, though.
I really struggled to get into modding with Morrowind. I'm so used to mod launchers that make it so easy and I was expecting the same with openmw but nah.
- You can install mods directly into the OG game directory, why OpenMW doesnt tell you that I dont know. Only problem is that ya need to do trouble shooting the old fashioned way.

Skyrim has some mods that go really deep on magic and combat strats.

Honestly with the amount of mods built up over the years Skyrim has become the ultimate fantasy RPG.

I'm so thankful for every modder out there

Badass wizard eh? Try Magicka! 😁

This was going to be my recommendation. Probably not what OP wants, but definitely what they asked for!
- Is it good solo? I don't have a lot of time for games but this looks like it might be able to scratch my (MMO)RPG itch a bit without being too much of a time sink.
Fair warning that when I played it with a friend (two-ish years ago), it was broken and abandoned. Couldn‘t play in co-op for more than 30 minutes without a disconnect, some DLCs didn‘t even start, singleplayer you had to downgrade to an older version or else it crashes every so often. Every loading screen had me praying the game doesn‘t poop the bed. It was probably fun at some point, but it needs engineering attention and hadn‘t gotten that in years when I last tried it.
- Oh man, that's really sad :(
I loved wizard wars before it went down. RIP in peice

Kingdoms of Amalur has very fun, very flashy combat. The rest of the game is really ehhh, but if you just want to blast magic and have cool skills then it's a great choice.

Kingdoms of Amalur is a great example of a perfectly enjoyable, mid action RPG. It's not going to like define a generation, but every time it comes up I think back on it fondly.

I would like another like it.
- Maybe less open environments to make it feel less like an MMO. But yes.
- Divinity 2 Ego Draconis (not to be confused with Divinity Original Sin 2) had a quite similar feel to me.
- They did a remaster a couple years ago. I love the ease of changing and variety of gameplay styles it affords.
- Recently released Wayfinder has been scratching that itch for me! It used to be a multiplayer live-service game, but during early access it got converted to a normal singleplayer/coop game with 0 microtransactions and it's a lot of fun. My only issues are with performance, which isn't great, and build variety, which doesn't exist. There are 8 characters with limited customization (except visual, you can do a lot with all the dyes and trinkets) and you just gotta rotate between them to keep the playstyle fresh.
  
  But the combat is fun, the graphics are great (they aren't beautiful, but they have that timeless cartoonish high fantasy aesthetic, like early WoW), and there is a lot of stuff to do and reward chests to collect. It really is feeling like a new KoA to me - as you said, just a solid, mid-tier action RPG.
  
  So considering that we're in patientgamers... add to a wishlist and wait for a sale? :P
Agree on KoA. Playing a mage is super flashy with plenty of cool looking spells that make you feel like a badass wizard. The chakrams (one of the main wizard weapons) flying around look awesome, too.

ARPG: Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn.

Also consider the survivors/bullet hell kinds of games: Vampire Survivors, Soulstone Survivors, etc.

Last Epoch is so good ! It's less chaotic than PoE

It is mayor jank but Dragons Dogma was the closest to feeling like a mage I've ever experienced. There are no cool downs in the game but channeling spells takes some time and upholding a continuous spell drains your stamina. In this setting the art of a mage was reading the battle and estimating how much space you have to channel spells, several of which can easily break the encounter wide open.

Edited since neither my English nor my autocorrect were working as intended.

In this setting the art a the mage was reading the battle and estimating you much space you have to channel which spell

Am I just not awake yet or is this incomprehensible
- Yeah that's a horrible sentence my bad. You're not the only one who's not fully awake.
- I mean you only have to change a few words to figure out what they intended to write so I'd say not awake fully?
  
  "In this setting the art of the mage was reading the battle and estimating how much space you need to channel each spell"
  
  At least that is how I read it

noita is insane and has absolutely zero handholding. it's truly hardcore and kinda souls-like in difficulty/lore, but truly excellent!

magicraft is the king in casual spell crafting, very good game to play a bit after work, can call it quits anytime and pick it back up again. just had it's full launch as well and might still be -20% (about 12€)

fictorum is fairly unique, because it's first-/third-person and 3D, and also very good with an intuitive spell system and a little bit of indie game jank

Dark Souls. If you play a mage, you'll be on easy mode, which very much does feel badass in a game so full of terror.

For a new player sword and shield is the easy mode. Magic tends to make you squishy, and if you aren't great at not dying getting your souls to the spell merchants is rough (if even know how to do their quests)
- Hard disagree. Having nearly infinite ranged attacks and being able to run away while attacking made it way easier for me.
  
  Maybe in 2 and 3 what you're saying is true, but sword and board was way harder for me than playing a mage with a shield in Dark Souls 1 and Elden Ring.
- As someone who came into the series at elden ring, I agree with you. I initially tried a mage and it felt quite a bit more difficult than sword and board.
  
  The game felt like it was designed for physical weapons and shield, whereas with magic the difficulty was all over the place - easy time with one boss, nearly impossible on another. If you aim for a boss cheese build maybe magic is easier.
DS3 and Elden ring do magic best of the Fromsoft game IMO. An MP pool works much better in an action game than the Vancian "casts per rest" of the earlier games.

If you are cool with CRPGs may I suggest Arcanum? Probably has one of the most weirdly in depth magics systems.

If you never played Magicka you should give it a shot.

I’ll give a shout out to Fictorum, which is kinda janky but is a physics-heavy wizard simulator with on-the-fly spellshaping and some real wild spellslinging combos. Between the combat levels, there’s a travel/encounter-type rpg thing vaguely similar to FTL as you try to stay ahead of a wave of Bad Things^tm

Thanks for the recommendation Fictorum looks awesome!

Have you played Dragon Age Inquisition? I hadn’t until someone here recommended it, so I grabbed it for $3 and am deep into it. As a mage, it’s full-throated magical glory. You can use lightning, fire, and ice magic, get badass staffs, and have a good combination of AoE and normal spells. I definitely feel OP after crafting some custom armor and weapons. Lots of fun.

AND you have two other great mages to hang around with, so you can combo off each other real easy.

Hogwarts Legacy. Combat is fast and brutal.

The side stuff feels kind of bland mechanically and something about the open world doesn't capture me like I want it to, but it's pretty good pure magic combat.

I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned more. Unlike a lot of the other games, the world feels a bit more centered around magic. Also if you're a fan of Harry potter it does a good job of capturing that setting (in my opinion).

Fictorum is the game that most scratches the wizard itch for me. It's an indie game, so don't expect AAA polish, but what is there is absolutely what you might call a "hidden gem".

Its kinda different but maybe Two Worlds, I remember killing everything in the world and resurrecting literally everything so that every NPC was friendly to me. I killed the whole world and brought it back.

Terraria has some really fun mage gameplay.

Yeah lots of recommendations here but let me give you some that I think answer your request more specifically.

Wizard Of Legend is a top down roguelite where you play a wizard that can equip different spells and upgrades. The combat and strategy is very focused on spells and how good you are at slinging them between dodging enemy attacks.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/445980/?snr=1_5_9__412

Margoq's Lair is a top down roguelike where spells are cast by composing them from elements, for example fire + shield casts the spell fireshield. It makes for a much more satisfying experience than pressing a button to cast a spell.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2516550/Margoqs_Lair/

I'll go a different route. Control.

Control has been really good so far, but the pacing of the difficulty is really wonky. Everything is a breeze, right up until something is damn near impossible. So I keep starting and stopping it.

Wayfinder. Recently discovered it and i've been having quite a bit of fun with it. It's a former live service converted to singleplayer/coop, so the story kind of blows. But it's a good ARPG - a Torchlight meets Warframe sort of thing.

Two Worlds II

Story is generic and it's a little bit jank, but has one of the best magic systems in any game I've played.

I sometimes think back on this game, I loved playing the large two handed spears. Spinning around.
- I wonder how well it plays on Stem Deck because talking about it makes me want to play again.
A lot of this games charm comes from the jank. But the magic system is absolute fun.
- I agree. Worth a play through for sure.

You should try Oblivion

Btw, have you played something like Hades? You're not technically a wizard, but close enough. And there's other hades-like games which might be more "wizard-like".

wizard and blast spells all day.

Runescape flashbacks

The Excellent YouTube channel TheStellarJay has a small series (3-4 Videos, ~10min each) about the state of wizard games.

This is part 1: https://youtu.be/quPKQIVEX5A

I'm sure you'll find something that piques your interest

Magicka comes to mind but it was utterly unplayable single player. Maybe the sequel is better.

It feels very wizard like because you don't have a static list of spells. You have 8 elements you.can combine into spells. (It does have unlockable spells but those are sort of secondary.) So using the fire and shield elements makes a wall of flame, for example.

For just a solid combat system, hogwarts. Was really surprised. They had some solid people design and build it. Really stood out against the rest of the game which wasn't bad by any stretch just repetitive. There are some serious combat challenges too. Just make sure you play on hard. It really needed one difficulty higher tbh.

Lots of good suggestions already, adding Magicmaker as a fun build-your-own-spells game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/319250/Magicmaker/

Play Skyrim with ordinator mod that adds more spells.

Heretic and Lichdom: Battlemage