I picked up the PC version of Magic The Gather... the PC version of "DotP" a few weeks back, after I watched a "WTF" episode from Totalbiscuit about it that sparked my interest. The game looked nice and clean, with mechanics that were easy to understand but looked to have a lot of depth and opportunity for strategy and intricate tactics.
Way back when I was a kid in school I dabbled a tiny little bit in playing Magic, but I was never really grabbed by the game due to its lack of loud animated explosions or women getting nekkid.
Since then I have grown older. and my voracious appetite for undressed females and things going "boom" has been bountifully tended to, which means that I am now in a better position to take in the simpler joys of a card battling game.
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| It may not look as adrenaline fueled as a game of MW3 but when the cards start to fly things get real intense real fast |
DotP offers a few different ways to get your card battles on. You can play through three different campaigns, which pit you against different opponents with different decks of cards. As you pummel these troublesome spell slingers into submission you'll gain access to their decks, thus building up your Magic card arsenal.
The campaigns also present a number of "challenge" scenarios, in which you are tasked with winning a match in a single round from a given position. These challenges start off easy enough for even the most dim witted Harry Potter wannabe to win, but soon you'll be ready to snap your magic wand in frustration as the difficulty ramps up and the puzzles get increasingly fiendish.
Aside from the campaigns, which I should add have absolutely no semblance of a story aside from the CGI intro sequence to the game itself, you're also able to fight single "Skirmish" games against computer opponents.
You can also take your card wielding skills online and face off against other people in a fight to see who has the bigger wand. I had a bit of trouble getting the "Quick match" feature to work, but I did manage to get into some games by using the "Custom Match" feature. It's not exactly teeming with card shuffling wizards out there on the interwebs though, so you may have to be patient if you are looking for online matches.
Luckily the computer offers a pretty good challenge by itself, at least if you crank the difficulty all the way up.
It seems pretty smart about when to push the attack and when to wait and gather its forces. I occasionally saw it do something really stupid that resulted in it throwing the game away completely, but I guess that real players also make mistakes from time to time, eh?
As long as you're not Magic player level Merlin or Gandalf, then I would imagine that the AI should offer sufficient challenge to keep you interested in DotP.
Casual Planeswalker's Ultimate Deck Building Guide
The game is aslo pretty good at initiating new wizard acolytes into the world of Magic The Gathering.
As I mentioned earlier, I have practically no experience with playing Magic, but after the game's single tutorial mission I was able to pick up the most important aspects of Magic card dueling pretty well.
The game also offers extensive info on every card and terminology if you zoom in on them during the game, so you'll quickly be able to understand what everything does.
Of course it takes a lot more games before you start to understand how the various cards compliment each other, and that's the real draw of playing Magic.
You really feel incredibly clever when you fire off three or four cards right after each other that all work together to create the perfect magical shitstorm for your enemy. And even when it's the enemy wizard that is hurling previously mentioned fecal wind phenomenon in your general direction, you still feel like you're learning something that makes you a better player.
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| The loading screens are about as much story as you'll get in the campaign missions |
The actual presentation of the game is not much to look at. It's simply a board layout with cards being put down and taken off as the situation requires, but it has a very clean feel to it and does a good job of letting you focus on just playing the cards without adding needless clutter to the proceedings.
If you need big explosions in your video game (or naked women), then the minimalistic graphical design of DotP will probably put you off. But then again, if those are the kinds of games that you prefer, then you'd probably not be interesting in a card game under any circumstances anyway (unless that card game was strip poker with grenade wielding busty blondes, I guess).
For the price of admission (Duels of the Planeswalker is currently 9 Euro on Steam) there are actually quite a good few hours of fun in DotP. It's not quite a full Voldemort on the scale of greatness, but I've dumped 10 hours of my free time in it so far and have been enjoying every moment of it, which that's more than what I can say for some "triple A" games that I've been playing recently (Uncharted 3, I'm looking at you).
If you've always had a secret card playing sorcerer inside you (and who hasn't?), then DotP offers a great opportunity to let him out and revel in some good clean dueling fun. If you enjoy turn based games or if you're interested in the world of Magic The Gathering then there should be something for you in Magic The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012.
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