mobyslick

This is Vegas, take a gamble... but remember the cardinal rule: the house always wins. As in you lost $60 on a broken game. If you have a good PC, DO NOT buy the PS3 version of this game. Simply put, you'll get sick of the constant crashing and hard-resetting (as in get up and go hold down the power button) long before you get to the end of the main quest. Don't even think about it. There is no patch coming to fix it because it can't be fixed, it's a problem of the game engine being unsuitable for the PS3, as already proven in Fallout 3. I can't believe and at the same time am not surprised that they didn't revamp it for New Vegas. I rate this game an 8 on PC but a 3 on the PS3, because I and many other users can only play for... hmm, what will it be this time? 1 hour? 5 minutes? Spin the crash-wheel, who knows!? Enjoy the **** frustration!

If you're a long-time MTG fan, there's a lot to like and a few things to dislike about this game. If you're new to MTG, please note that this game does not give you the whole MTG experience. The reason I say both of the above is that in this particular game you cannot create your own deck. A lot of the fun in MTG for many fans is creating a unique or at least personalized deck. There are so many cards and so many interesting strategies in MTG that provided one has the cards, one can come up with a vast number of different winning (or losing) strategies. Building your own killer deck feels great, but alas you can't do that here. That aside, what the game does give you as far as decks and gameplay is very nice. And Duels won't bankrupt you the way constantly buying MTG booster packs could, so that's a plus. In a nutshell, Duels of the Planeswalkers has you use any of a variety of unlockable decks in a series of duels against increasingly difficult opponents (read: their decks get better). There are also a number of puzzle challenges where you are presented with an end-game situation and you have to figure out the correct play in order to win. Furthermore, there are online modes including a co-op campaign and 2-, 3-, or 4-player free-for-all matches, and two-headed giant mode in which two players per side share one increased pool of total life points. The decks provided by the game run the gamut of what an experienced MTG player might expect. There's the always popular red "burn" deck featuring goblins as cheap fast attackers. There's the white deck (my favorite so far) which goes with a theme of flying creatures and life gaining. The green deck with land acceleration, wurms, and token creatures. The blue deck with counters and spells for all occasions. The black deck with some nasty and annoying creatures that tend to come back from the dead and some discard effects to add to the feeling of desperation. Later on you get multi-color decks; not having unlocked those I can't comment, but multi-color decks tend to be even better at winning. Each time you win a duel with a deck, you unlock a new card for that deck as well, until you unlock them all. These unlocks are very nice, giving you some primo spells, creatures, and even artifacts. You can replay any campaign duel you've already beaten, so by doing that repeatedly you can work on improving a particular deck. MTG newbies, note that replaying the same opponent can be a totally different experience than before since every game depends on which particular cards get drawn from the deck, thus keeping it interesting. One critical element of MTG is the timing of plays. Certain spells are only effective if played at the right time. The game gives you the ability to accomplish this by means of a 3-second timer that appears every time you could theoretically play a spell or take some other action. You can pause the timer with the square button. Other than the lack of ability to build your own deck, I recommend this game to both fans and newbies to MTG. Also purchasable separately are the three add-on packs that give you even more decks to play around with, more puzzle challenges, and more campaign levels (and 3 trophies per add-on).

This game looked and sounded very promising before release. When I fired it up for the first time after buying it, I thought to myself that I was playing a shareware game from 10 years ago. Remember shareware? Bad UIs, graphics seemingly drawn with crayons, lack of documentation... Elemental hits all these marks. There is also a lack of exciting content. There is no variety of teams or factions to play - a problem brought on by the sandbox design. You create your own custom units from a pool of base types and gear. The story is nothing original. The game just utterly lacks drama. Also the magic system is awfully boring. Master of Magic is still 10x better than this game. It feels like **** put everything into designing the engine and technical details but forgot to give this game a heart. They had been pretty fast with new patches right after release, but I notice that version 1.1 is still not out and even that patch will not give this game the total revamp it needs. After a very rough release (lots of bugs, crappy AI, lack of direction for new players) I doubt this game can recover. They are better off sweeping it under the rug and putting out a new title next year, using what they learned from this bad experience.