I, along with many, many
millions of individuals, was one of the ones that dumped a small fortune into
the Magic : The Gathering card game. In between friendly and championship
tournaments, I never could seem to get enough of the nifty strategic card game,
and that’s what most of my money went to a few years ago. Well, time has gone by
and aside from the occasional internet game now, I really don’t have a lot of
time to devote to it like I used to. I was excited that the Xbox release of
Magic The Gathering : Battlegrounds would allow me to get into it on my console
system in more of an action-based format (as I have seen in info about it), but
too many things went wrong with this game along the line for it to hold my
attention or even be enjoyable for a long period of time …
Magic The Gathering:
Battlegrounds has players selecting a champion and using various creatures and
spells to try and decimate an opposing caster before he or she gets to you
first. As its namesake implies, players choose cards based on actual ones from
the MTG game from the 5 different “mana” (magic power that must be accumulated
in order to bring out creatures, spells, and enchantments) pools of dark, light,
fire, water, and earth in one of three different play modes: Quest (story type
mode), Arcade Duel, and two player either on the console or online.
During play, players will
first choose their caster champion and then have the option to go in and alter
their spellbook in a mixture of different mana styles and can update their
spells, enchantments, and creatures the way they see fit to do. When play
begins, rather than being the standard turn-based “draw a card, play a card,
perform combat action” of the tabletop game, players fully control their caster
to run around an arena gathering mana crystals and shards to generate the magic
needed to cast out what they want to use. Once a caster’s 20 life points have
been reduced to 0, the game is over.
The main issue that I had
with this game right up front is the fact that you have absolutely no starting
ground to really do anything other than the quest mode. Even the PSX MTG game
that came out a few years back (which met reviewing doom due to the action-based
style versus the traditional play) allowed you to design your own decks up
front, but Battlegrounds only contains two creatures and two spells to use if
you want to play in an arcade match or a versus duel, and they really aren’t
very good. I tried to play a blue mana versus a black mana caster in arcade mode
up front, and simply turned the game off after the match ran for 30 minutes with
no resolution since I just got bored with it. Well, off to the quest mode …
The quest mode also serves
as somewhat of a tutorial up front, as it shows you how to run around scooping
up mana and tries to show you how to use some really basic strategies like
casting a goblin king out to give your goblins that you are summoning extra
defense and damage. You can only play as a red mana caster at first, which is
not my favorite one to play as (so if you’re partial to something else up front
… sorry about your luck), and each series of quests that you run all the way
through just makes you play another set of quests as a caster that the computer
chooses rather than letting you pick your own path. In addition, the individual
quests require you to do something in particular, so while the five goblins
that you have out may tear into your opponent and take them down to 0, if you
didn’t use a certain card then you have to go back and do it all over again.
One really big thing about
MTG that was always enjoyable for me was the creature aspect. There was nothing
quite like sending four goblins across at an opponent and then using a trample
spell to increase all damage by four, or playing spells to boost defense and
guard against an attack. Well, there’s none of this choosing who to attack or
block here, and creatures will keep running across the line of the arena over
and over and over again until they are killed either attacking or blocking the
closest thing to them. Part of the strategy to the card game was choosing who to
attack and block, and sometimes it was for particular reasons, but unfortunately
you have no control over anything that happens once they are out and on the
field. Add in a consistency problem since all of the opponents creatures defend
them with no problems but yours don’t (and the fact that flying creatures will
never-ever block a ground creature) and it gets really annoying really quickly.
The biggest problem that I
had with MTG: BG is the overall frustration with the quest modes themselves and
one addition that I personally didn’t care for at all. Basically, you never
really seem to have enough mana to release what you want to release while your
opponent happily cranks theirs up by the second and keeps throwing a ton of
stuff at you. After a few seconds, strategies tend to go out the window and
instead I started relying on just throwing as many low level things out as I
could to use as cannon fodder. The second issue is that casters can block and
attack, which is a whole new concept to MTG, and makes it particularly maddening
if you cast out a creature, use an enchantment that adds a healthy attack bonus,
then sit and watch him get swatted down by the opposing caster in one hit which
not only wasted mana to make more cannon fodder, but also resulted in me getting
smacked pretty hard and ultimately in me throwing the controller down in
disgust.
Overall, I was really
looking forward to playing MTG : Battlegrounds, but what I was left with was a
lot of disappointment for a long-awaited title to one of my favorite card games.
MTG fans need to stay far, far away from this game, as they will probably find
the same annoying factors that I found while playing. Gamers who like fighting
games may get a little enjoyment out of the fighting game format with magic
casting … but it may not last too long there either. Please rent this title
before you buy it if you’re still interested, and all I have to say at the end
of this journey is if it ain’t broke … don’t fix it. The card game is fun enough
as is, and trying to add action or a new style to the game proved not to work on
PSX (which I enjoyed more than this surprisingly), and once again proves not to
work on Xbox.
Gameplay:
5.5
The whole idea
and fun behind MTG is building your own decks and using your own strategies. In
Battlegrounds, you have to beat levels of the super – duper frustrating Quest
Mode in order to get new cards to use in a 10-card only deck, and on top of it
you don’t even get to select which mana caster you want to be. Basically the
whole strategy to this mind-numbing game is to grab as many mana crystals as
possible and just throw as much stuff out as you can to use as a living wall,
then watch in sadness as everything gets killed.
Graphics: 6.0
The backgrounds
contained some neat ideas to them, but overall looked kind of flat and dull. The
creatures and spell effects also could have been done better in my opinion, and
looked more first generation than stuff that we know that the Xbox is capable
of.
Sound: 6.1
The music tends
to just fill in as background noise to give you something listen to, and the
overdubbing of the character voices was a little too overdramatic in a “William
Shatner from Star Trek” kinda way.
Difficulty: Hard
Way too
frustrating to be even remotely enjoyable for a long period of time. The
computer tends to generate mana and cast constantly as they need to, while you
always seem to run around frantically trying to grab mana just to throw out more
things to get killed. Also, if you had some deck building ability up front to
use the casting color that you were more partial to, this may have helped with
overall strategy.
Concept: 5.0
While I can
appreciate what the developers were trying to do in bringing the cards from the
game to life for gamers to use, this whole thing wound up as a frustrating train
wreck in my opinion and once again shows why it’s best to leave card games as
card games … especially Magic.
Multiplayer: 6.0
Multiplayer is a
little more enjoyable since a live opponent can get just as frustrated as you do
running around trying to gather mana and get out their treasure trove of two
creatures, but it probably won’t be fun enough for either party to play more
than a round or two.
Overall: 6.0
After a wealth of
thrown controllers and four letter words, I can honestly say that I probably
won’t be playing this anymore after the review is submitted. As I said, I
appreciate creativity and ideas, but sometimes they just don’t make good video
games … and that is what happened here. If you have any possible thoughts that
you are willing to brave the brutal aggravation of this game and try it out, I
would highly recommend renting it first.
