Robot Viking

Your opponent's hygiene is not an issue.

Duels of the Planeswalkers hit Xbox LIVE Arcade this week (after a bit of a false start). As of last night, I was ranked in the top 10 overall on the leaderboards, so clearly I’m eminently qualified to review this game. It’s a lot of fun, but suffers from some flaws that I hope can be corrected.

Microsoft suffered some serious problems with their Xbox LIVE network on June 17, the day Duels of the Planeswalkers went live. It was unfortunate timing and predictably generated some Internet nerd rage, but most people seemed to realize it wasn’t Wizards of the Coast’s fault. The game came online shortly before midnight, eastern time.

One thing to keep in mind about this game – it costs 800 Microsoft points, which equals $10. So whatever shortcomings the game may have (and there are a few), it’s totally worth the money.

Some of the speculation in Robot Viking’s preview of this game turned out to be incorrect. It isn’t based on the old Microprose game of the same name. That game had an RPG aspect where you wandered a 3D world and encountered characters and monsters. Instead of combat, you dueled with your Magic deck. The Xbox game has none of that. There’s no RPG aspect whatsoever. The campaign mode is simply a series of matches against various characters from the Magic mythology, each using his or her signature deck. You choose each match from a menu, and unlock a match by winning the prior match. Certain matches in the campaign unlock new decks for you to use. Winning a game also unlocks a new card for the deck you used to win. You don’t have to do anything special to unlock cards, just win matches. You could play against the same computer opponent 17 times and unlock all the cards for a deck (there are 17 for each).

I’m a little disappointed by the missing RPG aspect, but, again…$10. I can see how that just wasn’t in the development budget. As a bonus, you do get a series of puzzle challenges, which I think are very fun. Each one is some variation of, “Your opponent is going to kill you next turn, so find a clever way to win the game in one turn with exactly the cards on the table and in your hand.” There’s also a two-player co-op campaign mode in which you play the Two-Headed Giant Magic variant, which I haven’t tried yet, but is sure to be fun.

The game engine replicates a table-top game of Magic very well, albeit with sound effects that get a bit annoying after a few games. Timing can be tricky – there’s a timer that counts down rather quickly during intervals when you have the chance to cast a spell or fast effect of some kind (in response to an opponent’s spell, for instance). You can pause the timer at any time with a button press, but you still have to be on your toes and anticipate those moments, because the timer goes pretty fast.

There are a few other weird timing issues. There’s an upkeep step, so effects that trigger during upkeep happen, but there’s no way to do anything during that step, which eliminates some common tactics. There’s no clear way to pass priority, and if your opponent is taking her turn quickly, your chance to destroy a creature or force a discard prior to the attack phase can slip by. The benefit of this is that the games move quickly. You don’t have to constantly sit there and wait for your opponent to pass during each phase.

These are just quibbles, though. Overall, playing is a lot of fun, especially against other people via Xbox LIVE (except when they quit just before they suffer a loss, and if you do that, you’re a $@#%&#%). The default AI is pretty pathetic, but you can turn it up and face a solid challenge from the computer players. Elspeth’s white deck is particularly annoying to play against.

There are two major flaws with Duels of the Planeswalkers, however. On the bright side, I think they can both be fixed, if the developer chooses to. First, a lot of the on-screen information is just too hard to see. On-screen text (menus, loading screen tips, creature power and toughness, for example) is way too small. I’m playing on a decent HD TV that is the perfect size for the room it’s in. Playing this game at my normal TV watching distance, I can barely read some of the text, and I have excellent eyesight. If you suffer from even a slight visual impairment, there’s no way you could play.

You can press right trigger to zoom in on any card while playing, at which point it becomes easy to read. But I should be able to identify my opponent’s creatures and see their power and toughness by glancing at the table, without having to zoom in to each one individually. It’s also impossible to tell how many lands you and your opponent have in play without literally counting them on screen. When there are eight or more lands in play, the game stacks them up, and your oponent’s lands are so small you end up just guessing how much mana they have available.

The other major problem is deck customization. It’s very limited – you unlock certain decks, and then unlock a handful of new cards that can be added to those decks. It’s rather bizarre, actually, because the mechanism for fuller customization is there, but they seem to have crippled it. You can either add your unlocked cards to the basic deck, or not add them. You can’t remove any of the original cards. You don’t control lands at all – the game appears to arbitrarily add a few lands to a deck when you add a new card. You end up playing with a 74 card deck or some other nonsense number once you’ve added more than a few.

I can understand why there’s a limited card set in the game (approximately 250, by some reports). It’s difficult to program each effect for thousands of cards. But within that limited card set, why not allow players to build their own decks? Once I’ve unlocked decks and cards, I should be able to freely mix them, build decks from scratch, create new color combos and find interesting ways of using the basic cards included. If you could do that, this game would be unbelievably amazing.

As it stands, Duels of the Planeswalkers is a fun diversion. You’ll probably get bored with it after a while (though there’s almost certain to be new sets of cards and decks available as DLC in the future), but you’ll definitely get your $10 worth out of it. A lot of classic cards are included (Sengir Vampires against Serra Angels!), and the decks are fairly evenly matched and most often result in fun games with lots of twists and turns, mostly focused on prolonged creature battles. With a few fixes, it could be truly great.

Incidentally, if anyone would like to play a few games against me, my gamertag is zeppelined. If you friend me, just send a message letting me know who you are.

Related posts:

1. Duels of the Planeswalkers Hits PCs Via Steam
2. Duels of the Planeswalkers Expansions Brings New Decks, Puzzles and Unlockable Cards
3. Duels of the Planeswalkers Heading to Xbox LIVE Arcade
4. Why Haven’t Planeswalkers Visited the Forgotten Realms?
5. Magic iGoogle Themes Put Planeswalkers On Your Start Page