Eye of Judgement review (PlayStation 3)

What are we here at Boomtown doing reviewing a Collectable Card Game in the vein of Magic the Gathering, Eye of Judgement when there are all of these great video games to play? Well obviously because Eye of Judgement is really a video game that’s played like a CCG, with real cards and the PlayStation Eye.

The actual game works by setting your PlayStation Eye (comes with the package) up on a little stand (included with the package) looking down at a 3x3 grid play mat (you get the idea). Each of the cards have four green triangles as directional markings on them and glyphs printed on the top and bottom to identify the card (in actual fact it’s just about whether it’s a black block but more on that later. The game then judges whereabouts you’ve placed the card and what it is to continue the game.

Strategy of play

The actual gameplay is simple once you’ve grasped the basic concepts, either by launching yourself in there with a friend locally (don’t go online straight away, you’ll not do so well) or by watching the lengthy, in depth, full, lengthy, slow, useful but lengthy tutorials. You have a deck of 30 cards specially arranged by yourself to be an unstoppable force of domination, must shuffle them and pick five cards to open your hand with. Each turn you are given two mana points that stack up if you decide not to use them, and draw a new card. Each creature costs a different number of mana points to summon into the world, and must be placed on one of the unoccupied spaces on the grid. Each grid tile has an element on it (and a different one on the reverse of the tile; important because they can be flipped mid game) and if you summon a fire creature to a fire square they gain two hit points, but if they’re sat on an element opposite to them (water to the fire) they’ll lose two from their original health.

On summoning they’ll automatically attack anyone within their attack field based upon the orientation that you place it and what it says on the card, chipping away at the enemy. If you hit it from the blind side you’ll do extra damage, but attack it from the opposition’s attack squares and they’ll counter attack back at you. Then there are magic spells to cast, some that just sacrifice your own minions for more mana or some that rotate you enemies creatures to a vulnerable position or flip their tile to the detriment of their health. With over 100 cards to collect (110 if I’m not mistaken), there are numerous tactics and strategies that constantly change as you find out what your opponent’s deck has within it.

It’s all about the cards

Some cards are rarer than others, doing more damage but costing more to summon, and it’s the balance between power and expense that makes the game much fairer despite the fact that you opponent may have all 110 cards to choose his deck from. Already controversy over the fact that you can forge cards that the eye will not distinguish with a good printer (or in one documented case, a marker pen) exists, but again, filling your deck with super powerful creatures and spells won’t help you that much since it’ll take more turns to summon each one, while your opponent is filling the grid with smaller cheaper minions, heading towards victory, achieved by controlling five of the nine squares.

Obviously access to more cards allows more strategic planning over which cards may come out of your shuffle so the designing of your perfect deck is as much of a skill as playing the game itself. The addictive nature of collecting more cards to find a useful card that will compliment your others means that if you purchase Eye of Judgement you should expect to spend more cash on further cards, if only to be able to legitimately play with your friends locally.

Play against whom?

My first experience of the game was against the computer with its measly starter deck (the same as mine) and because it knew exactly how to play each card it did beat me, but I learned a lot. The second time, I cheated. Because the game can’t tell whether you’re really shuffling your cards, if you’re feeling particularly mean and deceitful there’s nothing to stop you pulling out exactly the best card for the situation while your poor PS3 is having to deal with random cards from its pre-designed decks. I won the second time and never cheated again.

Winning against the computer unlocks more decks for it to play with, so you’ll get to see a lot more cards, although not being able to see the cards of the opposition in real life makes it difficult to tell certain factors such as where they’re blind, special features of the card or anything but the HP and attack power, a factor of online games where your opponents may use enemies that you’re completely unprepared for that perform skills that you’re not expecting, so collecting more cards will also help you prepare defences for certain cards when they turn up.

Destroy all humans

Your second point of call should be to play against a willing friend on your machine, and since it assumes that you’ll stop each other cheating, there’s no security from the game over which cards you’re picking up, allowing us to split the 38 cards that came in the package between us and pretending we had the full 30 card deck each, before we were able to get any more.

Then there’s online, perhaps the greatest factor of having a CCG as a video game. Any time you’ll be able to find an opponent to challenge even if you don’t know anyone else personally that collects the cards. For your own protection, the online mode is achieved slightly differently. The Deck Builder mode is where you’ll be scanning all of your cards to build a 30 card deck for the online mode, to ensure you don’t cheat. When the game tells you to draw a card it’ll also tell you which card (randomly selected) you’ve picked up, so that you can’t pick and choose, so you’ll be searching through the deck for the card to add to your hand. It all works very well to ensure a smooth online experience and keep the game as fair as possible considering your opponent may have spent twice as much money as you on extra cards.

Confused yet?

Generally, with such a complicated stat system, having to keep track of all of the numbers, hit points, mana points and stat bonuses from all effects would be much harder without the video game element, so the strategic game benefits from your PS3 keeping track of everything, even going as far as announcing when you have to draw a card. It allows the game to be a little more complicated and therefore more strategic and clever. It’s an appealing game, and if you’re into this kind of game then you’ll find Eye of Judgement to be a superb technological enhancement to the standard genre.

Graphics are as complex as they need to be with optional battle animations showing off but taking a back seat to the statistics and layout of the game for your assistance. The sound effects are noticeably cheesy, especially with the announcement of all of the cards you’re playing, but you may find the repetitive heavy rock music worth turning off after a few games. It’s a shame that there wasn’t more made of the single player mode vs your PS3, as it takes guts to take your first steps online, so whether unlocking more decks for your machine to beat you with is a better plan than going online will come down to your own personal choice.

Ultimately, the technology being shown off here seems quite advanced, and couldn’t have been implemented more originally as far as I’m concerned. (It even works perfectly in my badly lit room). For the cost of the package you’re getting a lot of stuff (especially if you consider importing a foreign copy), and as a way of getting the next generation Eye Toy Camera it’s a hard offer to resist. I’m sure it won’t appeal to everyone, but go on, admit it; you kind of want to try it.