At their Gamescom press conference today Sony announced a new digital reader for the PSP, and that Marvel Comics will be available for it.

Marvel’s Vice President of digital global marketing, Ira Rubenstein, took the stage to make the announcement and said that “hundreds” of comics will be available for the PSP.

The digital reader will be available sometime this November.

Yggdra Union is an unabashed port of a two-year-old Game Boy Advance game. Its move to the PSP doesn’t herald an overhaul of the rudimentary battlefield display nor does it spice up the skirmishes with graphical flashes. With a strict reliance on strategic battles over fancy visual flourishes, it has nothing to hide behind when the combat falters. There is a severe lack of depth in the battle dynamics, which makes this game more grueling and repetitive than a handheld war should ever be. Getting caught up in the rhythmic motion of combat can be hypnotizing at times, but the repetitious confrontations become predictably uneventful after a while. While Yggdra Union offers a unique spin on tactical combat, it lacks the creative spice that makes other games in the genre so captivating.

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Flying griffins versus curved axes should be a lot more exciting.

Trouble rears its ugly head in the kingdom of Fantasinia, and Princess Yggdra is on a mission to right the wrongs of her fallen world. As Yggdra, you amass a small group of plucky individuals to help you conquer the dark foes who hound you at every step. The core element pushing you through beleaguered towns and crumbling mountain passes is a holy sword that promises to bring justice to those who have hurt your people. The idea that this holy sword is guiding you on this quest to decimate anyone who opposes you proposes a dark question that you must answer for yourself: Is the sword truly special, or are you acting on your own accord?

The story is told so inexpertly, though, that this ominous decision feels slight. The characters are devoid of personality. A few crass comments interject some energy into their dialogue, but the characters predominantly settle on bland cries of either outrage or acceptance. Twists occasionally throw a stick in your spokes, veering you down a path that couldn’t have been anticipated. These turns are not always for the better, though. During one maddening detour, you’ll momentarily lose control of Yggdra and watch in horror as she undoes hours of your hard work. The turns the story takes are often illogical and serve to artificially lengthen your quest instead of provide much-needed substance.

A good third of the game is devoted to all-too-long story interludes that fail to provide the proper motivation to continue fighting, while the rest takes place on battlefields. Here you’ll navigate your troops around a grid as you attempt to quickly quash your enemies. The battles are strictly turn-based, but unlimited preparation time is unnecessary since the battles are fairly simple. The most important strategy is setting up unions before battles. Unions are formed depending on where your allies are stationed. Battles can often be won by sheer force so taking as many people as possible into battle with you is the key to winning. If you overwhelm your enemies with numbers, you’ll be able to quickly vanquish them and claim victory before they can make a dent in your plans.

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As the game progresses, you’ll often find yourself severely outnumbered on the battlefield, so smothering your foes under your massive weight isn’t always possible. There is a rock-paper-scissors dynamic in effect, which means swords are strong against axes but weak against spears, but there are often too many skirmishes going on in one battle to let this strategy play out. The most important in-combat skill is knowing when to fight passively and when to let loose with all-out aggression. This is the only direct control you’ll have over your troops in battle, and it’s the key to swinging more difficult duels in your favor. There isn’t much thought required as far as when to be passive and when to be aggressive, though. You’ll need to fight passively at first, building up your combat meter, and then switch to aggression for the rest of the battle as you recklessly tear down your foes.

When your combat meter is full, you’ll have the option to let loose a special attack. Before battle, you choose a card to play for that turn. The cards determine how strong you are, how far you can move on the battlefield, and which special attack you have access to. Unfortunately, the restrictions are so severe on the special attacks that you’ll often have to fight battles without them. For instance, you can use your healing ability only at noon during the in-game day, and many cards are restricted to just one character, so the stealing card, for example, can be used only by the thief. This means that the majority of your fights will boil down to how you use the passive/aggressive meter, with only a few duels fully using the special abilities these cards offer.

The revolution come to an abrupt end when Yggdra bites the dust.

There are neither towns to visit nor side quests to partake in. You are shuttled from one battlefield to the next, with no chance to wander down an uncharted path or to go back to previous battlefields to level up. This strict focus could have been an advantage if the strategy was deep enough to be constantly engaging, but instead it serves as a detriment because of the repetition of the battles. It’s hard to distinguish one battle from the next, so the experience amounts to mindlessly forming unions and unleashing aggressive attacks, without any notable moments to make the experience memorable. Still, it is possible to be caught up in the rhythmic motion of battles. The sway of battle is almost soothing, making it easy to get lost in the rock-paper-scissors battles to decide the fate of the world. Despite the game’s lack of any real strategy, it’s rewarding to take down a particularly troublesome foe or deftly plow through a battlefield without losing a single person in battle.

Yggdra Union is a different take on the strategy genre. It places an emphasis on forming powerful unions on the battlefield while letting you manage your own aggression during fights. But the game doesn’t evolve from its simple roots and unfortunately casts you in the same basic battle over and over again. The intoxicating rhythm is easy to get lost in, but it’s impossible to ignore the archaic graphics and poorly developed story. There is a certain charm on this simple battlefield, but those looking for a serious challenge from their strategic endeavors should look elsewhere.

Source [ GameSpot ]

Creating your own band of characters, taking them on dangerous quests, then watching them slowly become richer, more powerful, and equipped with much cooler gear can be a powerfully engrossing experience. Valhalla Knights 2 proves that it can also be extremely tedious and frustrating. This rote dungeon crawler for the PSP is not worth even a few minutes of the countless hours it will try to take from you.

Despite all the available options, combat often boils down to running up to the enemy and pounding on the attack button.

The story here is standard and uninteresting. In ages past, a battle raged in the kingdom between the destructive Goddess of Judgment and the noble Witch of the Crystal. Now the conflict between their acolytes stirs anew, and your character joins an anti-Goddess order of knights and sets off for war. The story advances in fits and starts, moving at a snail’s pace. The overwhelming majority of your time will also be spent engaged in action that has no real connection to it. This isn’t a story-driven game by any stretch. The plot is more of an afterthought than an integral part of the experience. It’s just a flimsy structure on which to hang all of the dungeon-crawling you’ll be doing.

That would be fine if the dungeon-crawling were more compelling. Unfortunately, the gameplay is marred by a number of frustrations that make the whole experience a real chore. You start by creating a character, which is a simple process that involves choosing from one of five races and one of five jobs. Then you select from a handful of different face and hairstyle options. The job you choose at the start–be it fighter, mage, priest, thief, or monk–doesn’t limit your experience later. You can switch between jobs at any time, and you’ll end up creating playable ally characters for your party as well, so you’ll experience each of the available jobs during your time with the game.

As you navigate your way through the numerous monster-infested dungeons, battling bees, bunnies, dragons, mushrooms, pixies, insects, robots, and all manner of other creatures, there are no random encounters. You see all the foul beasts moving about on the world map, and coming into contact with any of them sends you into battle. You’re tossed into the thick of battle without any kind of tutorial, although you can read up on all the details in the manual. If the game took a moment to familiarize you with the options during combat, however, it would have been helpful because there are lots of them. On the other hand, the game’s real-time battles tend to go by so fast–in such a quick flurry of blows–that you probably won’t end up using many of the available options much anyway. To access magic spells, for instance, you need to call up a menu, indicate the spell you wish to cast, and then select the target for the spell. That may not sound like much, but considering how fast things are happening, it’s actually a significant amount of time. Because there’s no option to pause the action to issue commands, having spells and items buried in a few layers of menus limits their effectiveness during battle. You may be better off setting your AI-controlled allies to handle such things as casting healing spells while you do the grunt work of running up to enemies and hitting the attack button. You can have up to six members in your party, and your companions tend to stick to the behaviors you designate for them, which makes them effective support. In any case, the combat is simple and shallow, lacking both the strategic depth found in many role-playing games, as well as the visceral fun found in good hack-and-slash action RPGs. That’s a shame because you’ll need to do an awful lot of it in Valhalla Knights 2.

To earn a little extra scratch for your monster-slaying efforts, you can undertake quests at a guild that involve heading to a certain area and killing a predetermined number of a certain monster. Oddly, there’s no indication of how much progress you’ve made toward completing a quest, so it’s up to you to keep track of how many more creatures you need to slay before you can head back to town, collect your reward, and start the process all over again. What’s more, you can only undertake one quest at a time, which is tremendously inconvenient and results in a whole lot of unnecessary back-and-forth travel. And while you can find items or learn spells that let you warp back to town from a dungeon, you can’t warp back to where you came from. As a result, a very significant portion of your time is spent just passing through the same areas over and over again. And you can only save your progress at inns, so should you make your way deep into a dungeon, only to fall in battle, you’ll once again have to hike all the way back from town. You might also get lost trying to find your way back because the dungeons are full of forking paths and the map only shows your immediate surroundings. Each of these frustrations could have been alleviated with basic features found in other RPGs, which makes their absence here baffling.

There’s an option for two players to take up to three characters each on some missions that are as mundane as those found in the single-player game. Experience and items earned here carry over with your characters back to the single-player game, but if you’re playing with someone whose characters are significantly more powerful than yours, you’re liable to get slaughtered because the strength of the monsters appears to be on par with the more powerful characters in the group. You can also pit your party against your friend’s characters in an arena battle in which the victor wins a wagered item or set amount of gold from the defeated player. It’s more interesting than fighting the monsters you find throughout the dungeons, but not by much.

The minimap is fine when you’re hanging out in town, but it’s useless for finding your way around dungeons.

Valhalla Knights 2′s visuals are unremarkable. The limited options for customizing the appearance of your characters are disappointing, and while towns have a quaint, charming design to the buildings with interiors that have some attractive touches, such as windows with light streaming in, the monster-infested areas in which you spend most of your time are bland, and lacking in detail. The action plays out smoothly, though, even with several party members and monsters battling it out at once. The sound is thoroughly lackluster, with repetitive music that may put you to sleep and muted sounds of battle that lack any sense of character or urgency.

Even if you’re just looking for the satisfaction of killing monsters, leveling up your characters, and scoring some nifty loot, there are so many better options than Valhalla Knights 2 available out there. Thus, there’s really no reason to bother with this tedious, frustrating, and generic dungeon crawler.

Source [ GameSpot ]

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Star Ocean: First Departure is an enhanced remake of Star Ocean, the original Super Famicom classic and progenitor of Tri-Ace’s most renowned franchise. The game has received several graphical improvements for its Western debut, highlighted by impressive anime cutscenes courtesy of the popular anime-house, Production I.G. It retains the hallmarks of the series, including a fast-paced, real-time battle system and a highly robust crafting element. But it soon deteriorates into empty button-mashing combat and a ton of tedious backtracking vaguely related to a narrow, mediocre plot. Pretty cutscenes and crafting simply cannot mask its overall shallowness.

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Battles are now in real time and just as flashy as ever, complete with free movement.

The game opens on the primitive planet Roak, where a disease is turning people to stone. Roddick, a simple country guard, is searching for a cure but so far has come up short. Soon, however, he is joined by two Earthlings who transport him into the past with the hope of obtaining a vaccine. The overall plot is quite bland, with almost no side quests, but it is accentuated by brief character dialogues called “private action scenes” intended to add depth and intrigue. Unfortunately, this leads to roaming cities in search of new scenes, which may occasionally help you unlock party members, but are rarely informative or useful.

The bulk of the gameplay occurs on an almost barren 3D world map, where you use an improved onscreen minimap with a convenient zoom feature to locate castles and villages. Battles are random and utilize a very quick, real-time battle system in which you control the party leader while the competent AI manages your teammates. The system allows for precise strategic control by enabling you to set party tactics either across the board or individually, and as is customary with the series, you’re free to switch between party members even midfight for more direct intervention. You can now roam the battlefield to dodge attacks or switch targets, which is a great improvement that more closely links the game to the rest of the series.

Though the battle system has finally joined the 21st century, it quickly grows wearisome because of the game’s barebones three-hit combos, lack of enemy variety, and limited skill slots that restrict your melee leader to two special attacks. Little to no strategy is involved even for boss fights, and while some enemies exhibit elemental weaknesses, they rarely impact skill or spell usage. This results in a lot of monotonous button mashing. You may also find it difficult to outmaneuver or block attacks, which is especially irritating when you’re being pummeled from all sides and the targeting reticle is locked bouncing between foes.

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When you’re tired of battling enemies, you may enjoy exploring the comprehensive skill system and crafting options, which provide nearly all of the game’s depth. Skill points, which are acquired by leveling, can be spent on skills to learn special abilities once you’ve mastered them in the right combination. For example, in order to master art, you need to distribute skill points into both aesthetics and sketching. There are numerous abilities for you to unlock, including item appraisal, crafting, and cooking. These should please item collectors, but unlocking them is largely an unnecessary, time-consuming venture given the ease with which you require money and items. You’ll probably find it more useful to spend skill points to directly modify character stats for greater character customization or to enhance combat by unlocking special battle abilities that ignore enemy defense, decrease casting time, and the like. A final set of skills exists for additional tweaking, called specialties and super specialties, which activate unique skills that adjust experience or skill points earned in battle.

Star Ocean’s most disappointing aspect is that it feels devoid of everything except random battles and an optional crafting system. There aren’t that many villages to explore and even fewer quests. There are few full dungeons to complete as well, and those that you are given are easy to navigate. In fact, there’s not much for you to do other than shop and enjoy pretty cutscenes. Tri-Ace compensates for this lack of “stuff” by requiring frequent backtracking, which usually culminates in another cutscene that orders you straight back to where you came from–on the other side of the world. There is a port system that will normally take you to a sister port on another continent, but the majority of travel is done on foot between landlocked villages. This frequent backtracking is accompanied by pointless random battles against foes you defeated 20 levels ago and combines with slightly overpowered casters to make the game so easy that you can often set the PSP aside to let your party members do all the work for you.

Every element of the presentation has been significantly updated, beginning with the inclusion of Production I.G.’s beautiful, vibrantly colored anime cutscenes that are so striking it’s confusing as to why they’re so rarely utilized. Full dialogue voicing complements these sequences and is rarely annoying except during battles, when characters tend to scream out their attacks as they spam them. Character sprites are now more colorful, and the sharp, prerendered environments that are the game’s most obvious visual improvement are highly detailed. However, you may now find it difficult to locate the proper entrances and exists because they tend to blend in with the walls. Battle environments are 3D, but they are just as bland as the world map, although spell effects and special abilities are quite flashy, enlivening any fight. Music is very reminiscent of the Super Nintendo era and usually consists of charming melodies that provide a good exploration backdrop.

Striking anime sequences freshen up the presentation.

You should finish the main quest line within 20 hours, which is normally a healthy range for portable RPGs, but in this case, you’ll spend the majority of your play time watching cutscenes, backtracking, or demolishing vastly underpowered foes by mashing the action button. The intensity does increase after you reach the epilogue, where a second quest and a bonus dungeon open up. However, it’s a short segment and a shame that the gameplay is such a breeze until the end. Unlocking new characters or crafting extends the game a bit, but the crafting is rather useless considering that everything is cheap and it’s so easy to make money.

Star Ocean: First Departure offers good fanfare with stunning anime sequences and a fresh look. However, it’s also padded with backtracking, crafting, and cutscene dialogue that hide its sparse dungeons, as well as its quests. There are simply too many better RPGs on the market that offer pretty visuals and depth to broaden Star Ocean’s appeal.

Source [ GameSpot ]

Pro Evolution Soccer has become an established franchise on the PSP, and the 2009 version is the fifth for the console. This year’s edition makes a few new additions, including the new Become a Legend mode, online play, and a soundtrack that doesn’t make you cringe. But with outdated visuals, as well as an absence of licensed clubs and leagues, there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

We hope you’re a Manchester United or Liverpool fan because they’re the only licensed Premier League clubs in PES 2009.

The gameplay in PES 2009 remains largely unchanged from last year, but matches are still challenging and fun to play, and the controls are still intuitive and responsive. It’s easy to link passes and moves using the face buttons, but tricks are awkwardly performed by double-tapping the shoulder buttons. Matches feel fluid; you can easily pass and cross the ball to teammates, setting up some spectacular goals in the process. You’ll need to keep an eye on Pro Evo’s always-challenging AI, which is constantly looking for opportunities to snatch the ball from you, and this makes scoring goals all the more rewarding. There are plenty of game modes packed onto the UMD, with Exhibitions, Leagues, Regional Cups, a World Tour and the Master League all vying for your attention. The latter allows you to take control of your team’s management as you play all of the league and cup matches a real team would play. The only really disappointing game mode is Training, which offers no tutorials to provide tips to Pro Evo newcomers; just the opportunity to hone tricks without hassle from opposition players.

Become a Legend is a brand new mode for this year’s game, which shifts your focus from controlling an entire team to just one individual player. You take a fresh-faced teen from obscurity to the international spotlight as you work your way up from a minor team through to a professional club, international stardom, and eventually retirement. You can customise player attributes for your virtual self, including name, appearance, footedness, and you can even choose from more than 70 different goal celebrations. On the pitch, the camera focuses on your single player, while the rest of the team is controlled by the AI.

Ultimately, Become a Legend is a novel but dull take on Pro Evolution Soccer. At the start of your career, you can spend a considerable amount of time on the bench, and while you can speed up the game when spectating, it’s still a boring process. Once your team’s had some on-field success, you’ll be able to move to more impressive clubs, but you’re not rewarded for being a team player by performing passes and making tackles. The result is that much of your success comes down to the effectiveness of your AI teammates, which makes for an unrewarding experience.

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PES 2009 features online play for the first time, pitting you one-on-one against players from around the world. This is a welcome addition, because playing real people is certainly more rewarding than playing against an AI opponent. However, with occasional lag and an archaic registration system that makes you type in your login credentials every time you play, it can be a frustrating experience. If you find a decent connection, then online gameplay can offer the same enjoyable feel and experience as local multiplayer, but with only five- or 10-minute exhibition matches on offer, it’s a basic mode that offers little in the way of longevity.

While the Dutch, French, and Italian leagues appear in full this year, Liverpool and Manchester United are the only officially licensed Premier League teams. The rest of England’s top leagues are stuck with generic regional names. For example, Tottenham Hotspur is back to being named North East London, despite making a brief licensed appearance in last year’s edition. The Scottish Premier League suffers even greater indignity, with only Celtic and Rangers present in licensed form and only as extra teams to be added to custom leagues. Other popular leagues, including the German Bundesliga, USA’s Major League Soccer, and Australia’s A-League, are completely missing. It’s also a shame that Konami’s much-touted Champions League licence hasn’t made it to the PSP.

The new Become a Legend mode switches focus from an entire team to an individual player, who you’ll take through his professional career.

Pro Evo 2009 isn’t an ugly game, but the player models and animations are starting to look a bit dated. The character animations lack fluidity and variation. Although players are easy to control, they certainly don’t look realistic. The main menu has received a pop-art facelift this year, but the pregame menus and in-game displays look stale. Thankfully, the pervasive menu advertising from PES 2008 is gone. While there are regular advertising billboards around the pitch, they’re not obtrusive and fit the setting. The soundtrack has also undergone an overhaul, replacing the J-pop numbers of PES 2008 with a mix of alt-rock and pop, which suits the tone of the game.

At its core, Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 doesn’t deviate from previous entries in the series, and while there are new game modes this year, they don’t offer a compelling reason to upgrade. The new online mode, while shallow, is still fun to play, and the Become a Legend mode is a novel but boring take on the standard game. This is still an enjoyable football experience at heart, but it’s only for those willing to look past the game’s flaws.

Source [ GameSpot ]

The last PSP version of Midnight Club, Dub Edition, was plagued with frame rate problems, insanely long load times, and hammy acting during its crummy story bits. The only issue that remains in its newly released sequel, LA Remix, is the duration of the loading screens. Actually, there are still some over-the-top trash-talking and too-extreme-for-you characters, but the thin story serves its purpose to motivate you to demolish the competition. With its big list of varied vehicles, a substantially sized city, and great visuals, Midnight Club: LA Remix is a surprisingly dense PSP game. Remix is packed to the brim with hours of intensely fast racing as well as addictive aesthetic and performance upgrades, making for a well-rounded racing experience. Its crushing difficulty will have you agonizingly restarting races during anything tougher than the easy-rank challenges as you arduously advance through a slow career–but even that won’t deter you from having a good time behind the portable wheel.

You can slipstream opponents to get a significant speed boost.

Intricate shortcuts litter the metropolitan playground and you’ll be forced to find and exploit them to get ahead of the overly talented competition. Whether you’re sprinting to reach a goal or doing laps around the city center you’ll immediately notice that the AI competitors are a tough crowd. Opposition suddenly becomes violently aggressive when you graduate beyond the easy-class matches, forcing you to restart races at a constant and aggravating rate. Though you can easily be smashed off course and into a wall by the annoying trash-talkers that burn past you, they will barely budge when nudged, slammed, or grinded against. It’s almost as if they are immovable on a preset course. Blasting by the competition at almost 200 miles per hour after a turbo boost or drafting an opponent’s rear-end slipstream to finish first is an immensely satisfying feeling, though it rarely happens without you limping through the city in a dozen tries as you attempt to figure out the critical path to the finish line.

In spite of this punishing career challenge, Midnight Club: LA Remix is ridiculously fun. Tearing across cities, launching over freeways, and drifting through tightly woven Los Angeles traffic is surprisingly exhilarating on a portable screen. The sense of speed, heightened by a subtle screen shake, makes for intense and exaggerated driving with surprisingly tight vehicle controls on the PSP’s analog nub. And whether you’re rotating in midair or dipping between lanes on two wheels, you’ll find that you’re almost always able to navigate your ride exactly as you intend.

When you’re not in the middle of one of the high-octane races you’ll be navigating the shrunken version of Los Angeles in a free-roaming mode in search of new events or rival racers. When you approach one of them, flashing your headlights with the D pad initiates the race, or a minigame-like race to the starting line that can earn you a little bit of reputation before the real deal kicks off. The reputation, or rep, is very similar to a role-playing game’s experience system. Each win earns you a certain amount of experience with increased difficulty yielding more rep as you build up your name as one of LA’s finest racers. Once you’ve earned a ridiculous amount of rep, you can take a trip to Tokyo for an entirely new layout with all the same fun and frustrations. Since you’re earning so few rep points at a time, however, you might start to feel like LA Remix is a little too like an RPG at times. Though it never stops being fun, the repetition of driving the same routes in the city’s racetracks begins to irk as you grind your way to a better rep with repeated matches. It’s a slow burn, but you’ll feel the reward when you unlock delivery or payback missions to break up the standard competition.

Vehicular customization is also a rewarding process, and it’s where Midnight Club shines. Pining over which hood would look best with your brand-new Camaro concept car is something you wouldn’t expect to have such a profound effect on you, but detailing your vehicle with personalized parts and paint jobs allows for incredible aesthetic tailoring. While it’s not quite as deep, performance customization offers an incentive to save some of your earned scratch to drop on better engines or exhaust instead of patterned paint jobs and side skirts with boosts in acceleration and handling to help you in your rep-race to the top.

You’ll definitely see advancement in your own skill as you progress, but it seems to do little against the previously mentioned crushing AI. You’ll find yourself relying on your vehicle’s special abilities and power-ups when you’re in a tight squeeze: slowing down time with the Zone ability allows you to focus on sharp turns or slaloming between pedestrian traffic, while Roar sees you blasting traffic out of the way with a deep pound and Agro allows you to simply smash through it without consequence. More special abilities like the vehicle-launching Pulse or slick-controlling Ice are available during the four-player competitive ad hoc multiplayer. You can take any of your 58 tightly tuned cars or bikes against a few friends in standard races as well as a few other unique game types: Capture the Flag is full of ramming and slamming as you try to steal the flag marker from your opponents to score points; Paint is a trial of checkpoints as you try and paint the city in your colors before the clock runs out; and Tag is exactly as you remember it on the playground–except you’re T-boning and fishtailing opponents’ rides instead of tapping their shoulder.

There are more than enough customization offerings to keep you busy in the garage for some time.

Midnight Club: LA Remix is an extensive game with loads to offer, but the difficulty might hamper your experience. You’ll spend plenty of time retrying and redoing races as you attempt to rack up your rep, but the grinding rarely becomes a problem because you’re enjoying the intensity of kicking off of ramps for crazy hang time, drifting around tight bends with the help of automotive super powers, and creaming your pals in the crash-heavy multiplayer modes. As one of the better-looking and best-controlling PSP racing games on the market, LA Remix is a must-play for portable racing pros thanks to the variety of game modes, substance of the city, and a mess of great customizable rides.

Source [ GameSpot ]

Turn-based strategy and collectible-card gaming collide in Neverland Card Battles, the latest release in the little-known Cardinal Arc franchise from Japan. And when we say “collide,” we mean it, because this strategy-card hybrid is awfully close to a train wreck. Breaking out a regular deck of cards for some 52 Pick-Up is a better use of your spare time than firing up this exercise in frustration, which is afflicted with an obtuse tutorial, brutal difficulty, tedious gameplay, and eight-bit visuals.

Duels are simplistic, featuring visuals and animations that will make you nostalgic for your Sega Genesis.

Even with all those negatives, Neverland Card Battles could have been a contender. Developer Idea Factory certainly starts from an interesting place. The single-player campaign’s backstory (there is also a storyless ad-hoc multiplayer mode) is based on tales told in the Japanese anime-influenced Neverland universe, which gives the game something of an exotic vibe from the very beginning. You play Galahad, a human gambler blessed with the ownership of a pack of magical Spectral Cards, shards of a gate that imprisons the evil god Hellgaia, who wants to destroy humanity. Given that this gate is in the process of breaking down, you are summoned to do battle by Egma, the leprechaun-like teen guardian of the gods, with the survival of the entire world of Neverland at stake. Or so it seems. Making sense of the story developed here relies on you already knowing something about the world on which everything is based, and we don’t, so some of the finer details may be a bit off-kilter.

Game mechanics are also mildly innovative. Play is based on an oddly fitting mishmash of the classic board game Othello and traditional collectible-card gaming in the style of Magic: The Gathering. Instead of building decks and throwing down cards in straightforward duels, you earn the points needed to play cards by taking control of spaces in checkerboard battle arenas. In each turn, you move both your hero Galahad and any summoned allies to change the color of the board and thereby gain more card-playing power. The idea is of course to take control of more boxes than your opponent and use the points earned to play and maintain the most formidable card army on the board. Combat itself plays out in a fairly conventional fashion for a collectible-card game, with each card representing warriors, mages, monsters, and spell effects. All have various special attributes: stats such as hit points and attack damage, costs for use and maintenance, and so forth. As with every other card-based game out there, battles involve a mix of strategy and luck. You need good fortune when drawing cards and solid tactical thinking when it comes to determining the right time to play them.

Sound simple? It sort of is, although Neverland Card Battles sure doesn’t take it easy on you. The tutorial is more of a sample battle than an actual primer on how to play the game. Your supposed teacher, Egma, tosses off a couple of brief comments about the fundamentals of play, but then simply settles in to a duel that is awfully tough for a novice to win. No actual tips are provided regarding card selection, movement strategy, when to play specific cards, or even how to move. You’re just stranded in the middle of a match and have to figure out what to do by watching your opponent’s moves. Expect to lose this opening “tutorial” battle a couple of times while figuring things out. You can’t skip this fight, either, because the campaign isn’t unlocked until you emerge from it with a victory. Even a draw isn’t good enough.

Things don’t get any easier when you progress to the actual campaign. Battles are extremely tough, considering that you have to face a computer-controlled opponent that not only knows the deck inside and out, but also seems to get some incredibly favorable draws while you get stuck with underpowered crap that you don’t want to play or overpowered crap that you can’t afford to play. The learning curve levels off somewhat as you move through the dozen or so matches, but it still takes many hours before you learn the deck well enough to feel like you’re on a level playing field. The game’s checkerboard battlefields tend to be huge, too, which drags out the frustration early on because it takes so long to stumble through each match. Even after you’ve mostly sussed everything out, the big maps still put too much territory between you and your enemies when duels begin. Limiting you to drawing just a single card per turn throughout games, even when you’re down to holding one card in your hand, also slows everything to a crawl. Almost all of these irritants would have been avoided with a more thorough and comprehensive tutorial, which could have at least explained the card limitation and the strategy that you might employ when starting at such a long distance from your opponent. It’s hard to imagine why the developers didn’t make more of an effort here. A proper walkthrough of the deck and the strategic concepts behind play is sorely needed, especially for those without collectible-card-game experience.

Mixing turn-based strategy and card gaming is great in theory, but the battlegrounds are too big and the learning curve too steep.

You don’t need to have any experience with other collectible-card games to know that this one is ugly. Aside from the close-ups of the oft-beautiful card art displayed when you go into battle or pull up a card to check its numbers, everything here is blurry. The battle visuals are so rough and indistinct that it is just about impossible to tell one summoned creature from another; they’re all little more than colored blobs on a checkerboard. Dueling screens are even worse, with slightly larger blobs duking it out via simplistic animations that you would normally need a time machine to see in this day and age. Audio is similarly old-timey. The soundtrack is the same old triumphal ode that has been featured in games going back to the Sega Genesis, and the voice acting is the standard sub-Saturday-morning-cartoon junk depressingly common to anything inspired by anime. Vocals are at least unintentionally hilarious at times, especially when characters start yelling in the middle of sentences for no reason whatsoever.

A sense of promise wasted is what lingers after giving up on Neverland Card Battles. Combining turn-based strategy with card-based combat is certainly an intriguing concept, but a series of terrible design decisions blows any opportunity of blending these concepts into a successful game.

Source [ GameSpot ]