C+P Review: Magic: the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers (Colon.)

Written by: Chris McKenna

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a pretty big Magic: The Gathering fan. I first picked up the habit in junior high, when I thought that things like orcs riding dragon mounts were the coolest thing in the world, and it seems like every few years I pick it back up again, with only a slight twinge of self-loathing.

Now, when I heard that Stainless Games – whose past games include old Atari ports and an adaptation of Scrabble – in conjuntion with  Wizards of the Coast,  was making a new Xbox Live Arcade version of the trading card game, I was adequately excited.

See what I think of the game in my full review after the break.

Magic: the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers (Xbox Live Arcade)

Platform: Xbox 360

Developer: Stainless Games

Price: 800 Microsoft Points

Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers is basically a straight adaptation of the enormously popular Magic:The Gathering trading card game.

You play as a “Planeswalker,” a powerful wizard who bombards  foes with various spells, creatures, and enchantments until they submit to your mighty will.

It sounds a lot cooler than it actually is.

In reality, Magic: The Gathering works a lot like other trading card games: you play land cards for energy (“mana”), and from this energy you play other cards (the aforementioned “spells.”)

Sound confusing? Don’t worry, because Duels of the Planeswalkers will explain all of this to you in full detail, through a step-by-step tutorial mode and a string of informative popup messages designed to guide the player safely through the often-confusing labyrinth of rules.

Don’t want to be told how to play by a computer? With the “mentor” feature, you can even recruit a more experienced friend to help you over Xbox Live.

And this is where the focus of Duels of the Planeswalkers seems to lie: on being a simple way of getting new players accustomed to the game.

This is Duels of the Planeswalkers‘ biggest strength, but it can also be an obvious flaw.

For more seasoned players, all of the help messages, which appear almost every turn during campaign play, can be annoying. I found myself blindly mashing “A” to get rid of the things, not even bothering to read them most of the time.

To be fair, these can be turned off in the options menu – a feature which I was not aware of until after completing the entire campaign for the first time.

The single-player campaign of Duels of the Planeswalkers takes the player through a series of 16 battles against 8 different Planeswalkers, each complete with their own custom deck.

The core gameplay runs smoothly – you can select cards from your hand and play them with ease. The animations for various attacks and effects of certain cards make the game seem more vibrant than one would expect for that of a card game.

One of the best “features” of Duels of the Planeswalkers comes from the fact that it’s a videogame with a rigid structure. While in an actual game of MTG, players can flub rules or forget certain effects, but in DotP, the rules are enforced for you.

The game handles all land and damage management – it highlights spells you can play when you can play them. This streamlines the gameplay so you can focus on strategy instead of number crunching.

After each duel, you unlock a card for your current deck. After every few duels, you unlock a new deck which can be further customized.

Although you can add unlocked cards to the default decks, you can’t take out old cards to make room for the new ones.

This brings me to the biggest flaw of Duels of the Planeswalkers: the lack of complete deck customization. Half the fun of Magic: The Gathering is being able to hand-pick cards to make your own decks, a  feature which is sadly missing from DotP.

I understand that to allow players full access to the Magic: The Gathering catalog, with cards numbering in the thousands, would be a tremendous task.

However, giving players the option to only add new cards but not remove old ones only makes for unwieldy 80-card behemoths.

Besides the main campaign, Duels of the Planeswalkers offers multiple game modes, including a co-op campaign and a delightfully difficult challenge mode, which puts players in tight spots and asks them to win the game within one turn.

One of the main reasons I was attracted to Duels of the Planeswalkers was the opportunity to play head-to-head against other people over Xbox Live, but to get the full experience you have to unlock all the cards in the single-player mode.

All-in-all, Duels of the Planeswalkers is a good introduction for people who are unfamiliar with Magic and want to learn the ropes.

The only people who may have objections to Duels of the Planeswalkers are players who are already skilled in Magic: The Gathering and are looking for a deeper experience.

The lack of deck customization might not be a deciding factor for new players, but more experienced spell-slingers could see this as a reason not to pick up the game.

Ultimately, DotP is a solid adaptation of Magic: The Gathering, and new as well as existing fans of the trading card game should check it out.

Copy+Paste Score: 3/5

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