Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds Updated Impressions

Gen Con LLC's Indianapolis show is under way, and Atari is in attendance with the Xbox version of Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds. Though only the Xbox version of the game is on display here at the show, the game will also come to the PC later this year. However, though each version of the game will be playable online (the Xbox version will be available on Xbox Live, the PC version will be playable with a regular Internet connection), the two versions themselves will not be compatible, as was previously planned--so unfortunately, Xbox players will not be able to directly challenge PC players online.

The Xbox version of the game seems to be coming along well, and it looks more polished than it did at this year's E3. The first few levels in the game's single-player story mode (which will consist of about 70 different levels) have already been implemented. These include a few tutorial missions, a full-on battle mission, and a limited form of the game's "quick game" mode--an instant-action mode that will let you quickly jump into a game with a prebuilt "deck" of spells designed for quick-and-dirty play.

Like the card game it's based on, Battlegrounds will let you play as a wizard with 20 health points and a limited pool of magic energy, known as mana. Mana will spawn on either side of the playfield, which resembles nothing so much as a colorful, high-fantasy version of a dodgeball court separated into two halves with a boundary line. You control your wizard directly in the game, and you can use your mana to summon monsters and cast one-shot sorcery spells and persistent enchantment spells (you can pull up available sorceries, creatures, and enchantments by pressing the X, A, and B buttons on the Xbox controller, respectively). As you might expect, more-powerful spells and creatures require more mana to summon, and the faster you use your wizard to grab mana crystals, the faster new ones will spawn. However, if you adopt an aggressive play style, you'll also generally want to make sure that you summon your creatures at or just across the center line, because when summoned monsters are slain, they'll usually respawn where they were summoned. Like in the collectible-card game, creatures have two major ratings: power (the amount of damage a creature can inflict) and toughness (the amount of damage a creature can sustain before it dies). These ratings are represented by a series of red and yellow dots at each creature's feet.

Like at E3, the only two playable colors on display were red (which is traditionally characterized by low-casting-cost creatures, such as goblins, and damaging spells, such as fireball) and green (which is traditionally characterized by large creatures and additional means to generate bonus mana). Though, we did see some spells based on actual magic cards in action, such as llanowar elves, goblin kings, and giant spiders, which, just like in the collectible-card game, can block flying creatures.

The game is still a work in progress, and we were informed that the development team at Secret Level is currently attempting to include some new cards and spells from new expansion sets of the collectible-card game, and is also performing closed network testing for Xbox Live starting this week. Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds is scheduled for release later this year for the Xbox and the PC.