This is not a game for everyone, but it provides a very fun card/board game mix with Magic: The Gathering.
Like I said in my opening, if you ever played Magic: The Gathering then this might be a game you will really get into. I wasn't a huge fan of Magic, but I played it a decent amount. And as soon as I started playing this game, I really got into the mix of collecting cards, making up a deck, and the mix of a board game similar to Monopoly.
The game basically goes like this: You start the game with a deck of cards. Each one has a certain 'element' that it's associated with. Fire, Water, Earth, and Wind are the four elements. You can then mix up your deck with any fifty cards you want. In those fifty cards, you can mix between creatures, items, and spells. It's up to you how to use those cards and which cards to mix in the deck with others. Some people prefer to just take all the best cards they have, but those might not mix well together. Others may want to focus on just bring with cards that help one or two elements and blend together well. For instance, the Fire and Earth cards tend to work well together. It's all up to you and it's fun to mix and match to find a deck that fits your play style.
After you have made a deck you like, you are then placed on a board that is very similar to the board in Monopoly. As you roll the dice, you will land on certain spaces that correspond to the elements that you carry in your hand. If you land on a red space, and you have a Fire creature then you can place it on that space. You can place conflicting elements on colored spaces if you want, but then you don't get an element bonus. Or if you do put, say a Water creature, on a Fire spot on the board, you can always change the color later by spending some 'magic' (the game's form of currency). As you work your way around the game board, if you land on someone else's creature, you either have to use another creature to defeat the defending one or pay the 'toll' (same thing as rent in Monopoly) that is on the land. As the game goes on, the owner of the land can level it up and the toll goes up with it (again similar to buying houses and hotels in Monopoly). And just like in Monopoly, when you pass the starting point ('Go' in Monopoly, here it's a castle), you get more magic to spend, etc.
There are lots of other little things I could get into and go on for awhile here, but that basically sums it up. You can also use spells at the start of a turn, use items when attacking/defending a land, and there are other special lands on the board that do a variety of different things depending on the map. It's a very fun and addicting type of game, but it can be frustrating because some of the game relies on luck. Of course, with any game that a dice is involved with, you will have to deal with the luck factor. And it can especially frustrating when the CPU seems to have MUCH better luck than you.
In fact, some games can take up to three hours to go through and your only reward for losing is that you receive several random cards for your deck. If you win, you get many more. As I mentioned before, you will have to have patience to enjoy this game and this is exactly what I meant. A lot of people will not be happy with playing a level for three hours, only to lose to the CPU when you thought that they got a bit 'luckier' than you. Thankfully, the game is very fun and it's not the end of the world to replay the same level again.
In the single-player game you get a story in between levels. This story is actually pretty lame and you won't give a damn about the characters or the story in general. You can skip through the scenes if you like and you won't be missing much if you do. The storyline is certainly not one of the strong points of the game. In fact, the presentation as a whole, is NOT a strong point in the game.....
To say that the visuals in Culdcept Saga are last-gen, would be giving it a compliment. This looks like a lousy looking PS2 game. Now while I didn't expect the graphics to be great, by any means, I was expecting a little better than this. In fact, the only reason I didn't score this game higher than an '8' is because of the graphics and voice acting. The poor visuals really didn't bother me too much, but it might be a big deal to some other gamers.
To listen to the voice acting in this game, I find it similar to what it would be like to listen to the sound of 'nails on a chalkboard' for about eight hours straight. It's terrible. Like the visuals, this was clearly not a priority when bringing this game to the Xbox 360. Once again, that will disappoint a lot of people, but I wasn't expecting it to be much different. This is a budget game and as long as the gameplay is solid, I was happy. The music isn't too bad, but it's nothing that will be in your memory for any amount of time after shutting the game off.
Sure the presentation blows hard and the story is crap, but this game is all about the gameplay. And that is where Culdcept delivers if you are interested in the premise of the game at all. I would love to see what a bigger budget version of this game would be like, and I am hoping the next game in the series will give me that wish. I would highly recommend this game to anyone with patience and was into Magic: The Gathering at all. It's not going to appeal to everyone, but this is the type of game that will garner some hardcore fans and could end up being one of those 'cult classics' that people might be talking about years down the road.