Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers Image
  • Summary: An extension of the world's premier trading card game, Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers' brings a pulse-pounding mix of strategic thinking, fantastic artwork, and arcade-style thrills to your PC. Experience an epic game of fantasy and strategy, as never before, when you take on the mantle of a planeswalker - a powerful mage capable of traversing the infinite planes of existence - and forge your destiny! [Wizards of the Coast] Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6 out of 9
  2. Negative: 1 out of 9
  1. A decent game. [Sept 2010, p.105]
  2. Disappointment. [Sept 2010, p.103]

See all 9 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 18
  2. Negative: 14 out of 18
  1. There's a lot of hate for this game for the locked system, where decks are fixed with a set amount of cards which you cannot subtract. Each deck gives you a certain amount of unlockable cards that you may add to the deck as you defeat AI opponents. If you compare it to the outside, sure it's highly nerfed version of the game, but if you look at it from a stand alone game perspective or even from a challenge point of view, it's a fun and challenging game, you'll be using your brain because you're not mowing your opponents down by the size of your wallet. The depending on the A.I. setting you choose, the AI will not be a pushover. Both sides are balanced and depending which deck you choose, You may steamroll them, get steamrolled or its a fair fight. The decks are all fairly balanced, there's the annoying overpowered elf deck of course, but even that has it's weak points. :P The game also has some challenge scenarios where you must defeat the opponent in one turn, but those are usually fairly simple until the last few ones, which get a little trickier but nothing drastic. At $10, you get 6 or 7 decks (maybe more, I've bought the 2 expansions which ups it to 14 decks total) and as most of you guys knows, $10 will not buy you 7 decks in the real world and $20 will not buy you 14 decks. They also have two expansion packs at $5 a piece and .99 packs to unlock the ingame decks if you're lazy. Those who want to reminiscence about playing the game without reminding yourself how much you spent on Magic The Gathering Online or the thousands (Yes I've spent that much over time) in real life, or hell, just to use to learn and get into the real game...pick it up, it's $10 bucks. Expand
    • 3 of 5 users said yes
  2. A really fun and rewarding experience when it works, but horribly frustrating when it doesn't. In general I've had loads of fun with this game, but some of the bugs and broken mechanics makes it really frustrating at times. The best thing about it is the local coop against AI and playing online, why you can't play coop online beats me, that would instantly raise the score of the game in my book. Playing with a friend on the same PC using kb+mouse and a controller works great though, I even wish I had 2 controllers because using the controller is much more comfortable and speeds up the game, kb+mouse controls aren't as innovative and clicking and dragging takes longer than using the controller. The bugs and broken mechanics really brings this game down though. There's a bug in multiplayer online where the game freezes for both players when you use an artifact ability or sometimes when you sacrifice a creature which makes artifact abilities unusable. There's also the issue of wrong mana being used, which lost me a game once when I needed mana of a specific color and the game tapped the wrong land for me. Being able to choose which mana to tap should have been included from the start as an option for advanced users, or just a specific key you press when playing a card. Then there is the issue with time limit on your moves online, most often you will not have time to think and act if an opponent attacks with too many creatures at the same time, and it can be really hard to tell which creatures are blocking each other, even with just a few creatures attacking. With more than 10 on each side it becomes almost impossible.. There has also been a lot of people bashing on the lack of deck-building, which I think is valid from their standpoint, but it's more of a relief for me. As a former Magic-nut I used to spend loads of cash building decks, getting boosters and looking up cards online to get the perfect fit for my deck, but that was years ago. I recently decided to get back into magic and play with a few close friends but with one rule, pre-made decks only. Building decks and tweaking them is too time consuming and way too expensive. I cannot say I would be against the ability to fully customize a deck, or even partly. But at the moment I feel that pre-made decks are a relief, since they are somewhat balanced, or at least I hope they are. And I don't have to spend loads of time theory crafting which cards to put in my deck, or be afraid of playing an opponent because they might have a really good deck with some crazy combos. Expand
    • 1 of 1 users said yes
  3. 0
    Might be an entertaining game for someone with no experience with tabletop Magic. For an actual Magic player however, a terrible disappointment - the interface is limiting, the game rules are dumbed down, and worst of all you can't even edit your deck. The experience was not unlike buying something sold as a chess set and finding the package actually contains a checkers set with half the pieces missing. It's hard to imagine why Wizards of the Coast ever greenlighted this travesty. Expand
    • 3 of 3 users said yes

See all 18 User Reviews