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Magic The Gathering: Battle Grounds lets you prove your skills as a magic-user by entering an arena to battle your equals!
While Battlegrounds certainly starts out in the same world as the original card game, it makes several changes to the rules of the game, which is natural when you consider that the card game is a slow, turn-based affair and Battlegrounds is more of a real-time strategy game. For starters, the game doesn't really have anything to do with cards at all. Instead of drawing and discarding cards, your spell book, which is limited to 10 spells, is available at all times. The card game uses land cards to give you spellcasting points. In Battlegrounds, you simply run around and collect mana spheres and shards and use them to create creatures, cast spells, and so on.
The game takes place in an arena that basically looks like a fantasy-themed take on a volleyball court. Each duelist stands on his or her side of the arena, and you can run around to collect mana and to cast spells. Spellcasting is handled with three buttons or keys, though if you have more than three of any one type of spell, you'll have to scroll through pages to get to all of your options. While the spellcasting system is passable, it's been lifted directly out of the console version. The clunky nature of scrolling through your creature list takes more time than it should in such a fast-moving game. When you consider that your spell book is always changing as you pick and choose different spells to bring into battle, you really have to keep an eye on the book to make sure you're casting the proper spells. Since you can only have 10 spells at a time, one-button access to them via, say, the number keys would have been a helpful addition. Instead, the manual recommends that you play with a gamepad, which doesn't really help matters. The game contains five different sets of spells, each broken up by color. Black spells tend to be destructive in nature, while white spells are of a defensive nature, and so on. Each set contains 14 spells, and you can create your spell book by using one or two different colors.
Read all about the game at the link above!
PC GAME
Age: 12+
