Magic the Gathering: Battlegrounds

The story behind this game is that you are a young female magician trying to make your mark on the world and you go on a quest to collect five stones (black, red, white, blue, green) to put on this disk. And to do so, you must go around and fight many wizards from every region (the swamps, islands, mountains, forests, and plains). Gaining new magical spells along the way while freeing prisoners of magical spells after you defeat them (the bosses of each land is under a curse and is cured when you defeat them in a Magical battle). Sounds like a good story with fun goals, half of what you say is true.

I've been a fan of Magic the Gathering the card game for about five years and I was naturally excited to discover that X-Box was releasing the game "Magic the Gathering: Battlegrounds" excited is to say at least what I felt at the time.

Well I went and bought the game only to find out that it is extremely difficult. When I say this, I don't mean challenging; I'm saying that this game is hard! So much so that it eventually loses the fun and it just becomes frustrating. Some of the battles only by the skin of my teeth, in other words, it was luck that I won.

The graphics on this game are really great, I mean they didn't take short cuts on this game, the look is pretty impressive. It's really cool to see all of the monsters you've only seen in the cards take on 3D dimension and become real on the TV screen. I have to admit, it's neat. The cut scenes with the story are beautiful to look at and are always fun to see, it's also satisfying to see after you defeat a difficult boss.

The game play is where this game lacks. It becomes very taxing. Difficult and repetitive is a better way to describe it. I mean you learn the controls pretty fast, with each round they teach you more on how to play, but it does little good. It really takes trial and error to really understand what you are doing. They even give you hints every now and then on how to defeat a enemy, which is a good thing, but they state the obvious which on the difficult levels once again does little good. To fight in this game, you have to run around the screen until manna pops up out of the ground and you have to collect enough of it to summon a creature, much like they way you do in the card game. This is not as easy as it seems since you have creatures from the opposing team attacking you while you are trying to do this. And the computer is better at this game than you are, so they are sending monsters at you way before you are ready to send some of your own, hard. There is also a magical line that separates you from your opponent, which if you cross, your life will begin to deteriorate and until you go back to your side. But you carry a staff with you, so if you want to cross the line to where your opponent is, you can still hit them with your staff to take off a little of their health. This is not recommended if you are already having a hard time fending off the monsters already. You also have your spells like you do in the card game.

An interesting part about this game is the multi player games; you can either play by yourself or fight against a friend. Now in this, you can choose a character you want to be. I like to use the black sorcerer that controls the swamp creatures, black is my favorite deck in the real game. And you can also choose where you want to fight at. You don't get anything from playing this, but it gives you good practice and it is fun to play with a friend.

Overall the game is a thing of what could have been. The graphics are fantastic; the game is fun…up to the point when it becomes difficult. If you have never played the card game before, you may find it more difficult to play than an avid card player since you don't know all of the rules. The game is fun, but it becomes difficult and slowly just becomes frustrating. If you love difficult to impossible games, than this is definitely for you. If you don't like a challenge, a HUGE challenge, than just rent this game before you buy it unless you find it on sale at some store. Because no matter how big of a fan of the Magic game you are, you will discover that it would be easier to take on a Drake with a fork than tackle this game (Magic fans will understand what I mean). I may be exaggerating a little, but for real, if I had to say one word about this game, it would be "difficult". This is a rental for sure, but an iffy buy.