Eye Exam Pt. 2
See the thing about this game is that it requires light – a lot of light. I had two lamps and an overhead light and it still wasn’t enough. When the camera can’t read the cards the screen tells you to place the cards again, but it took numerous attempts of various illumination techniques until the board would read the cards again. Time waster. Then the music…Oh god. It’s like twisted screeching pain echoing through the swollen stomachs of pus demons wailing in the night. It’s just really bad. I don’t even want to think about it anymore (thankfully you can turn it off but unlike on the 360 you can’t play your own tunes during gameplay).
The actual gameplay is super fun, at least to me, and it’s easy and fast to pick up even if you’ve never played a card game like Magic before or anything involving Mana and Hit Points. Like, you could basically just place cards down til one worked if you really didn’t know what was going on…The goal is to own five out of the nine squares which you do by simply standing on them. Each square is either Mechanical, Water, Fire, Earth, or Air (which looks like desert). Each card has an icon to tell its elemental alignment, mana cost, hit points and damage. Placing water cards on fire is bad because if they have low HP they die; the same goes for Earth in Desert/Air, Fire in Water, etc. Some cards don’t have elements so they can rock it anywhere. The big bad awesome cards have chains on them, which means you can’t use them until four squares are in play.
This easy-to-learn gameplay would be super fine if not for the constant card misreading and light issues with the camera. The mic on the camera also wasn’t super clear for me but that could have been my setup…though I doubt it.
The last thing that was bothersome to me was the length it took for the animations to occur. You can turn them off but the whole point of the game is to see them interact so why does it take so long! Seriously, you place the card and then it has to be summoned and then it goes into battlefield mode and then it strikes and yeah this all should just happen immediately! Summon and then strike should happen in like 15 seconds tops. Yeah, yeah patience, Luke, patience…Whatever! I needs me speed man! If I’m playing a card game, I need speed to make it awesome!
Besides all of the above silliness I really did enjoy the play. I wanted to play round after round and would have continued to do so if not for the need to play The Simpsons demo. If I had more time, well, could have played more but I definitely will be playing more Eye, which is weird since it does have so many bugs…but I guess it did win me over after all.
It had me at Triceptaur Behemoth…It really, really did.