Never thought I would enjoy a CCG as much as I've enjoyed this game.
The next course of action after my artwork and quality admiration was to set up the Playstation Eye on the suspiciously flimsy looking camera base. To be honest, I was a bit worried about the quality of the camera base simply because each bit of plastic individually feels like it will blow away with the slightest breeze or simply topple over from the weight of the Playstation Eye (which, to be fair, the Playstation Eye is lighter than I imagined it would be). I was pleasantly pleased to discover that the camera stand, once assembled, is a pretty sturdy little piece of engineering. I placed the stand in several different places on my gaming table to see if there were cold spots where I simply couldn't place it for game play. While I found that I certainly had preferences to camera placement there was nowhere that the camera stand was placed that made me nervous or caused me to worry about instability. Camera placement WILL have a drastic effect on actual game play though but I'll get to that in a minute.
After placing the camera stand and the gaming mat in a comfortable position my next course of action was to fire up the PS3 and load the game. After the brief load time and mandatory kudos to the various development teams I was greeted with one of the most impressive game introduction videos that I have seen to date on any platform. From the start-up music, to the action animation, to the animated depiction of actual card combat, everything looked and sounded amazing. I was actually excited to start playing before the game had even started. After the game introduction you're walked through a very, very easy to follow and illustrated camera and display setup. You're basically shown how to calibrate the camera to your liking as well as how to setup the camera on the mat. I was really pleased with this portion of the setup because for some reason I expected to be thrown to the wolves and left to figure out my optimum setup without much input from the game.
Next step was to register my starter deck. The game already knows what cards should already be in the deck so your job is to simply find the cards that have duplicates and lay groups of the same cards together to register them. Then do the same with the singles. Registration of 30 cards took me about 5 minutes and while I did have some brief problems with the Eye reading multiple cards it was quickly remedied by going back to the camera calibration settings and making sure that my game mat was properly lined up.
After deck registration you're off to either look at the tutorial, which I highly recommend, or jump right in to a game. The tutorial is invaluable and it is exactly what it sounds like so I won't waste any time describing it. You'd be well served to go through it at least once.
Game play was absolutely wonderful. My first game was against the CPU so I could get a feel of the game mechanics and actual flow prior to going online and getting a proper pounding from an anonymous gamer in the nether. A game against the CPU can be set up and started in a matter of minutes. You select the difficulty level of the CPU, the location of the combat which can be randomized if you like, the time alloted for card placement, the deck that you wish the CPU to use, whether you would like the first player to be manually selected or randomized, and whether you would like battle animations on or off. Once you've made your selections it's off to battle.
The PS3 provides you with a disembodied voice the entire time you're playing the game which guides you as to when it's your turn, when to draw a card, what your opponent is doing, etc. There was no point during the game that I was curious as to what I should be doing because not only is the disembodied voice directing you but the screen also provides a brief line of text suggesting what it expects you to be doing right now. Playing a card is nothing short of remarkable. You do just that. You rotate the card in the direction that you wish your summoning or spell to assume and you set the card on the mat. The Eye reads the cards (which you're absolutely certain it's doing because it provides a small animation over the card confirming the read or, at worst, letting you know that it's trying to read the card if there's an error), the disembodied voice announces what the card action is doing, and then an animation of the effect appears on the screen. The battle animations are fluid and the texturing of what characters and animations I have seen so far are brilliant. Very cartoon looking but aesthetically rounded in form and smoothly colored. No garish graphics, choppy edgings, or hiccuping animations.
The basic goal of the game is to maintain control of five territory squares which can be achieved through a number of different tactics from what I have seen of the various card stats. Although the game can be played very aggressively it really does reward patience and careful resource and territory management. This was a really refreshing change for me because most CCGs that I've seen to date have all been about the biggest and baddest card and how much damage it can do. And while that is a slight concern with this game the requirements for summoning a juggernaut are rather high and the penalties for maintaining said juggernaut are stiff. Very balanced game play to the point where I don't feel that I need to go out and invest in ultra-rare cards just to stay competitive. A cool head and the basic understanding of the cards that I do own seem to be enough to create a challenge.
The only complaint that I have to this point in my playing experience has been the card read errors that pop up infrequently. While saying "infrequently" is a good thing it's still extremely frustrating when it happens because odds are the card read error is focused on a particular area of the game mat. This translates to you not being able to play a card there unless you spend some time tinkering with camera and mat positioning. And while this doesn't sound like a huge deal out of context; when you only have 5 minutes to play a card, you have your opponent checked, and the last square that you need to occupy happens to be the one square that you can't play on, it's a HUGE deal. I've found that combating this particular problem requires that you go through the mat/camera setup religiously after setting the game mat up and prior to going online or playing with the CPU. It'll add an extra 2-3 minutes to your overall setup time but it's well worth it.
All in all, from someone who's never been a really huge fan of CCGs, I have had absolute blast with this game. I'd highly recommend this to anyone who's interested in trying the CCG genre, or to anyone who just enjoys playing a good strategy-based game.