Magic 2015 - Duels of the Planeswalkers

A friend of mine recently got me playing Magic the Gathering and I enjoyed the collecting part of it more than playing the actual game; almost a reflection of my actual collection of games. Well, that’s not particularly fair, I do like playing games - I just don’t have enough time to play them all.

Anyway, after playing for the card game a bit and getting to grips with how it worked, I thought I would give the computer game version a go.

Magic 2015 attempts to have a storyline of types – you are on the trial of Garruk the Worldslayer and you travel across various plains, which are symbolic of the card game series,  in order to track him down and stop him from destroying the universe. Along the way you fight duels against other decks which have specific skill sets depending on what plane you are in.

That basically takes care of the story. When you start out you pick a card set depending on how you want to play and as you win duels, you get more cards to alter and change your deck to make it better – just like the card game, except without having to spend any actual money.

As it is just a card game, there isn’t really a lot of graphical animation to comment on but they have put a lot of effort into it to be fair. The sound effects are also really cool. The background music fits the epic fantasy setting of the magic universe and considering I spent over 50 hours playing the game, it didn’t ever irritate me.

My one criticism is that they don’t half draw this shit out. 50 hours is a cumulative effort for everything I outline below but I can’t help but think it could have been half of that if they sped up the animations a bit. Even though I had most of the effects turned off to speed it up, turns still took an age despite knowing what I was going to do before I did it.

Achievements – 1,100 Points – 35 Achievements

To start with this is a real slow burner. There are achievements for clearing the various planes of which there are 5 and a few achievements for actually setting up the game, completing the tutorial and getting your first deck sorted.

As well as clearing the planes, picking up cards and shaping a deck, there are loads of situational achievements for you to get. Now, the great thing about this game is that it allows you to do practice duels against your own decks. This means that you can set up a deck that can’t cast any spells or creatures and get these yourself without having to worry about random chance playing a factor.

Outside of these, you also have to clear all Explore Nodes which are present in every plane and have some challenging duels in them. The best way I found to beat all nodes is to set up a deck with Battlegrace Angels who have an ability to give you life when they attack alone. They are strong and they can fly which means you should win most of the fights relatively easy – assuming you get the right cards of course!

That leaves only three achievements that were massively time consuming. The last single player achievement is for collecting all the cards from the main game. This basically means play explore nodes until you don’t get any more cards and this is where battles start to feel excessively long and painful. But not as painful as...

Multiplayer

The multiplayer wants you to win 100 battles. Even if you are exceptionally good at the game and have the best deck, this process will still take in excess of 8 hours to do. I have the help of a certain gamer to trade wins with and we managed to do it in about 14 hours, give or take so this is a long haul no matter how you look at it. And any long haul really sucks the fun out of the game.

Downloadable Content

There is one DLC with 5 achievements which sees you take control of Garruk’s deck and play against decks from the plane of Alara. You have to beat the plane, collect all the cards from the new plane and add a card from the DLC into one of your main game decks. There are also two more situational achievements to get but one of them has to be earned on Alara as opposed to a practice deck.

Magic 2015 – Duels of the Planeswalkers was a fun and rewarding experience for me right up until the boosting online matches which destroyed it. I may look at one of the older or newer Magic games if it doesn’t have such a high number of online wins... but first, to play some more games I actually own!