Fills the entire Magic: the Gathering experience, including the sinking sensation over time that you cannot compete in the scene without shoveling more and more money into cards instead of just relying on what you can get free. 3/5
Very nice concept game ruined by very bad physics engine. While I appreciate the effort, the poetry of both the words and the idea are both dimly expressed, and mangled by an engine that seems to want to interpret various taps of the keys as either "make character take a step" or "fling character across screen." 2/5
Like many Berzerk Studios games, overwhelming amounts of filler content that isn't even particularly fun to engage with - slashy slash slash through map zone after map zone.
Repetitive level design and no need to advance very quickly save impatience mean that this game isn't really that great. If the special abilities were more interesting I would have enjoyed completing this game more. As-is, I feel the game could have been half as long and I would've enjoyed it more because I would've been blasting through less sheer filler.
Completed all the badges with only one redo attempt. Seriously, 12 minute survival is not that hard. Just have a Reaper patrolling around, bring Earthquake to wipe out massive minion waves/slow the building, Polymorph to take out annoying prophets/champions, Curse to slow down the massive speedy waves helped by multiple overseers, and the final spells are your choice. On observation it probably is Locust Swarm that would be the best, but I managed to go over 13 minutes with Desert Wind and Lightning Bolt (to get the "mid air lightning" achievement). I killed two Sun Kings on the way, and almost none of my spells were maxed out aside from Curse and Lightning.
There's also no plot or time pressure or other goal of any kind to the game, something which is not normally an annoyance except for how there are endless lines of dialogue and other quips in the game. I do like being able to play a game to completion, not just to the last achievement. Nevermind the sudden and radical difficulty jumps towards the end of the game.
I'm a bit annoyed that the characters in your latest series of games are invariably emo boys. There is no option to select a distinctly female-looking character, and honestly none of them look like particularly interesting boys either. If you're going to bother letting me customize an avatar, let me do so in the most basic ways that are of some importance. It's understandable that in your other games the gender of the "protagonist" is fixed to some degree because it is, essentially, a boy-raising sim, but not nearly as much in this one, where you actually seem to be playing the character. This wouldn't bother me if it wasn't for how I was given the option to customize a character, either.
For someone who normally makes very high quality games, this seems incredibly phoned in. For one, there's no ending sequence, just the achievement. For two, several spells are buggy (Timewarp especially), and it is possible when using gem-altering or gem-destroying effects to screw up the game's ability to recognize and remove matches(!), something that happened to me once after a Midas Touch, if I recall correctly. Further, as someone who played the original Puzzle Quest, half the point of that game was that the enemies took turns on the board. In this, the enemies merely feel like countdown timers to how long you have to finish the area. Also, it's non-intuitive but extremely annoying that whenever you beat an enemy, if you didn't do so on the end of your turn, you risk losing actions.
One of the best strategies for beating the majority of the levels of the game with a perfect score, except possibly the ones with gas demons (in great numbers, not survival - too few are there to matter), is to lay down magma blocks and sticky blocks in alternation (either entire stacks or in a single stack) to create a "maze of fire" which demons have to plow through bit by bit, taking fire damage all the way. Topshot blocks on the bottom as they slowly crawl up and a poison block here or there also help to drain away health from demons. Essentially, the name of the game is patience, and if you have the stun upgrade it helps, but I got 5/5 on all levels except survival without any upgrades using mostly this tactic. For finishing off bosses, consider digestion blocks if you have access.
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