Technology news and Jobs 
Radioactive IT Review: Magic The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers
Radioactive IT Review: Magic The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers | Review: Magic The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers |
|
| by Mike Bantick | ||||||||||||||||
| Friday, 26 June 2009 | ||||||||||||||||
  
Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
The last attempt at digitising the game was back in 2003 with Atari’s Magic: The Gathering – Battlegrounds. Now we have the Xbox 360 (Xbox LIVE Arcade) and game for Windows version Magic: The Gathering – duels of the Planeswalkers. In particular the XBLA game, simplifies the CCG (Collectible Card Game) and presents an accessible way for newcomers to explore the world of M:TG And that world is ostensibly one populated by fantasy based stereotypes with a smattering of steam-punk and mythic creatures. It is a world that revolves around five colours of magic and the lands that power that magic. In M: TG, each player (2 – 4) gets dealt a hand of seven cards from a self constructed (following a small number of limitation rules) deck. From there it is all about laying out mana producing land cards, this in turn generates enough mana to summon creatures, enchantments, artefacts and more.  Attacking with spells and creatures, the aim is to reduce the other controllers (players) life force from the starting 20 to zero. M:TG: DotP allows players to play through a campaign, unlocking various themed decks as they battle the games AI personalities. Each win unlocks a new card to be added to the deck. There are about half a dozen decks to be unlocked, and each deck can have a further 17 cards unlocked for it, which sounds like a big campaign, rather, there are around 15 campaign competitors, so you will need to replay a number of the games to unlock the full amount of cards on offer here. Though there is little point. Apart from making somewhat bland decks a little more exciting with more powerful cards, with only a very limited card construction tool, a big part of what makes M: TG the ‘real’ card game fun is building your own personal battle deck. That option is not realised in this digitised version. But the game mechanics themselves, presented with wonderful representation of the card art work, on a lovely decorated card playing surface is well done. Each phase of each players turn is intelligently bypassed if unnecessary and if not contains a quick countdown timer for both the player in control, and/or other players to interrupt (to play a card out of sequence) as appropriate. The game provides only minimal sound and visual effects, enough to cleanly get across intent and meaning. That is, until an extremely long battle ensues (say, half an hour) at which point the board can become a little cluttered with cards, despite the engines best efforts to categorise like cards into mini piles. There are some early frustrations when an incorrect button push – to change turn phases – can see the demise of a carefully constructed plan. Learn from these mistakes young Planeswalker. There is a co-op campaign, where two players battle through against two AI opponents. Rounding out the offline experience are the challenges, mid or end game situations that must be solved in one turn. These work pretty well and provide a change of cerebral pace to the tense campaign battles. Both Single player (in matches of 1 – 4) and co-op mode can be taken online, but I was unable to really test this out to it’s full, as I never got a game to be taken to fruition. I will keep on trying, as I am curious as to how to unlock the Spellslinger achievement. According to the text of the achievement, to earn this, I must defeat an opponent who has the Spellslinger achievement (?!) Anyway, M: TG: DotP is a great way to get a bunch of Magic games under your belt, without too much hassle organising opponents, counters, space to play and shelling out massive amounts of money looking for the Black Lotus card (not that it is in this game either, neither is Chuck Norris). If the deck construction was even a bit more extensive, the score would have been so much higher.  7 Glaze Fiends out of 10 |
||||||||||||||||
Tags
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
