Marvel Trading Card Game

"If you’re reading this review, you don’t want this game."

If you're not sure about whether you want this game based on the simple knowledge that it is a portable video form of the VS card game, you probably won't find it worth playing.

The flow of the game is roughly similar to most CCGs (collectible card games). You play resources; you spend those resources to play characters; the characters fight; as the game goes on you acquire more resources and thus access to more powerful characters; you reduce your opponent's life to 0; you win.

It is obvious that the VS card game was designed to be exciting and briskly paced, and it succeeds. Because you draw two cards each turn rather than one, you very rarely run completely out of options for cards to play. Also, plot twist cards do not require you to spend any resources (rather they simply have a “threshold cost” that requires you to have at least that many resource cards out), so it is not uncommon to see a flurry of them played in response to a single attack. Additionally, the “power curve” for characters is exponential. That is, the difference between a 1-cost character and a 2-cost character is rather minor, while the difference between a 7-cost character and an 8-cost character is huge. This gives the flow of each game a crescendo effect where it starts out slow and calm and builds gradually to an explosive conclusion. Overall it is a very deep, very unpredictable card game. Those familiar with CCGs understand that since the designers can essentially print whatever abilities they want on the cards, the possibilities are endless, and part of the strategy always lies in adapting to the wildly changing circumstances.

Now on to the actual video game. The game's main mode is Story Mode, in which you do battle against various enemies one after another. Along the way, you are rewarded with special cards as well as points that you can spend to buy “booster packs” to add to your collection and thus add to the possibilities for your deck(s). It's an obvious method of progression, but it works. Since your collection starts out small, you're not overwhelmed with how to put together a deck. As you acquire more cards, you can simply modify and improve your deck, until at some point you decide you have enough different cards that you can scrap what you've got and build another deck based on an entirely different concept. The difficulty of Story Mode is much too easy. At one point, because I felt like improving my deck seemed pointless, I decided to see how far I could get without spending any points or changing my deck. It did not become too difficult until many, many hours of play later. The A.I. is also very unrealistically stupid at times. It seems to lack the ability to look at the cards on the table. It can react just fine to abilities you've played or attacks you've made, but it fails to foresee even the most obvious of your potential responses to their actions. This can make it feel like you're just going through the motions of winning each game, with no real strategy actually required.

But the crippling downfall to this game is the flavor and the presentation, or lack thereof. To begin with, playing the games themselves does not hold any of the excitement that one might associate with battles between superheroes. The illustrations on the cards while they rest on the table or in your hand are so tiny you probably won't even be able to make them out. If you move your cursor over a card, you get a blow-up of the image on the side of the screen. There you can at least tell what the card really looks like, but it is still very small. When the characters attack one another, you might hope that the game would provide some sort of cool animation of a fight. Nope! Instead what you get is a screen in which little square images of the cards each shoot some kind of attack beam at the other. (I think the appearance of the beam can change based on what type of attack that character uses in the comics, but who really cares? There can't be more than five or six possible “beam” animations.)

You could make the argument that the games themselves aren't really the place for extensive flavor, since after a while it would just get in the way of the game, anyway. Unfortunately, not even the introductory “cut-scenes” provide any real interest. All you get are short, laughably generic scenes in the form of comic book panels accompanied by music. Here's my attempt at writing an intro scene: “Hey, I do not like you! Eat fist!” Okay, done. I think that would fit well in this game. Make no mistake. There is no story in Story Mode.

When you open a new pack, you might hope to get a neat screen where you see your new cards and get to flip through them, like in real life. Nope! Instead you get a pack-opening sound effect accompanied by no visual component at all. To look at your cards, you have to go to your collection list, then change the view to “new cards.” Careful, though! If you wait too long to read them all, they won't be considered new anymore, and they'll disappear from this screen, leaving you to rifle through your entire collection of hundreds of cards to try to figure out what you just opened! Sound like fun?

By the way, did I mention that the entire game is accompanied by the same “heroic” music, looping over and over? I literally cannot remember a time playing this game when any other music was playing. It's not even that compelling or memorable, nor appropriate for a rather slow-paced, strategic card game.

The interface can also be annoying. Because of the nature of the rules of the game, you often have to “click through” phases of the turn in which nothing occurs, waiting for the game to load the next step in which nothing occurs, until you finally get to start attacking. Also, there are the little annoyances that make you wonder how the designers could have overlooked them. For instance, the cursor that you use to highlight cards in your hand or on the table cannot be moved quickly by holding in a directional button. Instead, you often have to hit the same direction six, seven, eight times in a row in order to select a card on the other end of the table.

One extra feature I enjoyed was a puzzle mode in which you are presented with a game situation and you are challenged to win the game in one turn. This mode does not resemble normal gameplay; rather, the situations are built so that there is always one solution. (The opponent's hand is always empty.) It's not very useful for helping your game, since the puzzle situations are so bizarre that they could never actually come up in play. However, it's a nice twist on the normal method of play, and the puzzles are very clever and well designed (beware of red herrings), with a full range of difficulty from easy to seemingly impossible.

In short, if you think you might like this game because you like Marvel comics or because you like card games in general, don't buy it. It is a terrible video game that enables you to play a great card game. Only buy it if you have a PSP and you simply must have a portable method of playing this game, no matter how flavorless and clunky the video game itself is. But in that case, you don't really need to be reading this, now do you?

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/07/08

Game Release: Marvel Trading Card Game (US, 02/27/07)