You can be pointing right at a monster but unless you hit its hotspot your spells will go right past the monster. If the cursor isn't a wand, forget it. In the heat of battle I found this problematic at times, but not enough to really annoy me. You can also switch your active spell or weapon to one of four ready ones with a key press, though you can't customize the key mappings which was disappointing. Indeed, the game has no preferences at all.
Monsters are generally pretty stupid.
You can attack with magic and run away, the monsters will plod after you into the face of your spells. Still, that's OK, the pace of the game is reasonable and you are nearly always outnumbered in combat so the balance turns out to be pretty good despite the lack of customizable difficulty levels. In addition to the single player campaign, Clans can be played by up to four players in cooperative mode. You can cruise through the entire campaign, which is identical in multiplayer to single player save for the fact that each player has as many lives as it takes and a few quest items are switched as a result. Players can explore the map in different areas and combat bad guys in concert as well.