Magic: The Gathering Battlegrounds

Players are asked to pick a discipline at the beginning of the game.  Like the card game, there are five different schools of magic in the game: black, white, red, green, and blue.  Each color has its own focus and set of spells, and as far as I was able to tell, they seem quite balanced.  It is important to play each color with a different style, but once the appropriate strategy is discovered the five colors all match up pretty well.

Both duelists begin with twenty life points.  Summoned creatures try 

to cross the screen and damage the opposing wizard, but stop and fight with the opponent's creatures when possible.  Some creatures are blockers only and others are designed to give benefits when they die.  Regardless, the goal is to use these creatures to reduce the opposing wizard to zero life points. 

The interface is simple and intuitive, making it easy to scroll through available spells and get off the right one at the right time.  Despite this, the pace of the game is hectic, and the game can be really daunting to newcomers.  Heck, even some of the tutorial levels require perfect timing and performance to clear.  Still, once players are familiar with each of the spells and comfortable with the controls, spectacular butt kickings ensue.

The graphics are well-designed, with inspiration coming directly from the art of the card game.  Like a fighting game, the engine here has little to test the power of the Xbox, so lots of cycles are left over for sharp, alias-free renderings of the wizards and  their minions.  The non-creature spell effects aren't over-the-top or spectacular, but they do make good use of particle effects and colored lighting and never obscure the battlefield in a way that would be distracting.  Final Fantasy style flights of fancy just wouldn't work in this environment.  The creature design, lifted straight from M:TG is cool.  I've always liked how Magic's creature design lifted from many of the standard sources (D&D, Tolkien, Lieber, etc) while maintaining a left-of-center aesthetic and Battlegrounds keeps up this tradition.  The black mana creatures especially are odd and brutal looking.

The single-player game basically involves a series of duels and the A.I. can get a bit predictable.  The game really shines, however, multi-player, either face-to-face or online.  Human opponents can really wreck havoc with some odd strategies and the game becomes very creative and dynamic when played head-to-head.  Battlegrounds can really get the adrenaline pumping with its fast pace and with the fact that most matches really go down to the wire (even the A.I. matches which seem to contain a bit of rubberbanding, though that might have only been my perception).

Any way you cut it, Battlegrounds is a unique, chaotic experience and one that is worthy of a purchase if you are a fan of the card game.

- Tolen Dante

(March 3, 2004)