When I was at the impressionable age of 12-13, I was introduced by a friend to a card game called Magic the Gathering. Back then, the Ice Age was just introduced. Immediately, I was hooked. I can’t recall how much money I spent on the booster and theme pack. Which is to say, quite a lot. In fact, I probably have over 1000 magic cards (70% were given to me by a friend who was a bigger addict than I was). Fortunately, by the time I was in high school, that phase pass, and so my inner geekiness hid. Until a couple of months back when Sony revealed one of the most unique game of this generation.

Unique? How so? How about using a camera to point it at a card and then see the card come to life on your 50” plasma TV? That game, is of course, the Eye of Judgment. Today, we will pass judgment on this game to see whether it has the potential to appeal to all, or to those of us who love playing with cards.

Story

Well, really, this game has no story. In fact, the only story you will ever be introduced to is pg. 10 and 11 of the instruction manual. Basically, Biolith = Evil. Everyone else = dumb for fighting one another and being greedy. Now you, the player, is being called to unite with one another against the destructive machines that are the Bioliths. Too bad there’s no overarching storyline in this game like that of Magic when Tempest was released. But it’s a card game. You’re here to play some cards!

Presentation

The game comes in a sleek package that includes the Playstation Eye (PS Eye) that you need in order to play this game. Yes, that’s right. You can only play this game using the PS Eye. No, you cannot use any webcam camera. Only the PS Eye. The package itself is retailing for $69 but you might be able to find some deals for cheaper. Along with the PS Eye, you get a starter deck, which is about 30 pre-set cards, and a booster pack, which has 8 random cards.

There is also a stand for you to build to put the PS Eye, as well as a cool piece of cloth that acts as a play field where you can place down your cards. The game boot up to a pretty cool CG intro that shows how the cards function if the game was real life. Initial boot-up takes you through the setting up of the play-mat as well as your PS Eye. Everything is very simple and intuitive, and the entire setup should take no longer than 5 minutes.

A lot of people complained that if you do not have a place to set this up, and leave it, then it would get annoying to go through the entire setup every time you want to play the game. I’ll say it’s totally untrue. It takes 1 second to set up the cloth, another 5 seconds to put the camera on the cloth, and less than one minute to go through the camera configuration.

There are several modes that come with the game. The first is the single player, which has three modes in itself. One is P v C (player versus computer), C v C, and P v P. When playing against the PC, you can determine which difficulty you want. I will say, that higher difficulty AI are definitely harder to play. They tend to play more strategically and more aggressive/conservative at times.

P v P is of course, if you happen to have a friend come over and play with you. Since a deck consists of 30 cards, you would need around 60 in order to have a good and fair 1 on 1 match.

It is unfortunate that the single player mode is very…desolate. A campaign mode in which you fight different PCs that have different strategies would have been awesome in prolonging the single player mode, but unfortunately, the PC you are fighting will be using the cards you own.

Thus, you can see that this game is definitely meant to be play with other, human character, and that’s where the online component comes in. When you first sign online, you are ask to pick a continent to declare your allegiance. After that, you can either pick to play in a rank or a custom match. Picking a rank match will allow you to search for other players, and if there is none, you can elect to create a room of your own.

Again, multiplayer for right now is very lacking. There is no matchmaking that would allow players of the same deck-strength or same win/lose ratio to play one another. One moment, you can play someone who has a starter deck like you, and the next, you could be playing someone who plays 8 rare cards in a row, whose cards they may have legally or illegally obtained.

Of course, I hope that Sony continue to upgrade this game with more features and stuff, but as of now, that’s all there is to online. When you win an online match, you gain a point called honor, and honor will help place you in your continent’s ranking and your overall ranking. Winning usually net around 4-6 honor points, while losing net 1 point.

There is, regrettably, a bug in the online mode right now, which I shall not mention the details of, which would allow anyone to get thousands of honor points in a span of minutes. Yes. It is very depressing that it exists, and there are already people taking advantage of it. I shall not name names, but let’s just say they are within the top 5.

Besides online and single player, there are a few other modes. One is a card profile, which lets you see your card and its various stats (although everything you need to know about a card is usually on the car itself). The card profile does give some cool quotes though. Next is the deck builder, which you will have to use to fine-tune your deck. Then there is Judgment, where you place 2 monster cards, and they will duel, and you can see which one would win in the end. Finally, there is a guidance video tutorial which will tell you on all the intricacy of playing this game.

Everything is presented through slick presentation menu that’s not annoying to the eye after long playtime. The game-play screen is bright, detailed, and you are never really lost as long as pay attention to the tutorials.

Graphics & Sounds

The sounds is a hit or miss to probably a lot of people. It uses both instrumental violin but also uses a lot of tribal drums and guitar rock. The voice of the person that commands the field is very nice though. I’ve played the game for a while now, and he still hasn’t gotten annoying yet. A lot of cards have their own varying unique sound. For example, dragons will roar, and machines will sound like machines. I wouldn’t say it’s first rate, but for a card game, it will do.

The graphics is very bright and colorful. Indeed, when playing the game, you can’t help but how colorful and bright the game is. You have got to give props to the designer of this game though. Each card is wonderfully drawn, and when portrayed in game, they are insanely detail. Ships rumble back and forth. Smokes would trail from fire monster. I would say, it’s more realistic cartoony, than realistic real like Call of Duty 4.

Gameplay

Of course, the meat of any card game is the gameplay, and it is here where Eye of Judgment excels over a lot of other game. If I can ever give a comparison as to the gameplay of this game, I would say it’s a lot like the Guitar Hero franchise. How so? It is a very simple game that is very easy to pick up and play, but extremely hard to master. Indeed, when first looking at it, you would think it’s just a simple card game, but the depth of this game is ridiculous.

Simple gameplay: It is very simple to play this game. All you have to do is control 5 of the 9 spaces on the game field. Simple ain’t it? When you have 4, you have your opponent in check, and when you place your 5^th card, if it survives, you win. There are two types of cards. Monster and magic. You are only allowed to summon 1 monster per turn, but a lot magic cards can be used as many time as you want (There are some where you used them, your turn ends). Every turn, you draw a card, and get 2 mana. Consider mana as points. You need points to cast monsters and magic. There are plenty of ways to get mana.

Each turn you get 2, whenever a monster die you get 1, and some monsters have the abilities to give you more mana under the right conditions, and certain cards allow you to gain more mana by doing something, like discarding a creature. There are 5 elements in this game: Water, wood, fire, earth, and biolith. Each creature belong to one of the 5 (while there are others that do not belong to any). Each element has an opposite. Fire: Water, Wood: Earth. Biolith does not have an opposite. Placing a creature on the same element space gives them +2 to their overall health, while placing it on an opposite gives them a -2 to their overall health. Placing it on a non-opposite, non-same element does not affect the card positively or negatively.

Okay. So simple right? Just put a monster on the same color as the card, and put 5 of them on the field, and you win. Now comes the depth I mentioned earlier.

Deep gameplay: This is a strategy game. Indeed, it is a very positional game. If two players play one another with the same deck, the one who wins is the one who can think 2-3 steps ahead of his current turn. Of course, as with all card games, a reasonable expectation of luck is needed to win, but I would say, 15% is luck, 40% is the cards in your deck, and 45% is the ability to think far ahead.

For example, your opponent controls 4 fields already. You only control 3. You’re in check, it’s your turn. All the cards you have is not strong enough to beat his monster head on. But hold on, you have a card that can turn the direction of the cards. Back attack nets a +1 to the creature’s attack. So you use Beguiling Fog, turn your opponent’s card in the other direction, and deal 2 damage with your weakling of a monster, and his creature cannot counterattack.

Well, that card still has 4 HP left. Hold on, you have a card that can switch the fields. So you use the Call of the Timeless Juno, and switch the fields in play. Ground goes to forest, forest goes to ground. Because of the effect, your opponent’s monster on those field loses a total of 4 HP (-2 for losing the same field, and another -2 for being on the opposite field). The spell kill both cards, and all of the sudden, you have the upper hand.

And that’s how most game of EoJ plays when there are two highly skilled opponents. The best player is the one that has the right deck, knows the in and outs of his creature’s strength and weaknesses, and can think 2-3 steps ahead of their turn.

Unfortunately, the game’s strength also becomes its weakness. For those who cannot invest the amount of time to build a good deck, or learn the ins and out of their card, their chance of winning at an online game is going to be purely based on luck of the draw. Added to that is the fact that there are people who are printing out the rare cards online and using it, and the PS Eye actually recognizing it.

Already, I’ve played a certain person who seems to have a deck composed of entirely rare and ultra rare cards. If they had obtained those cards legally, good for them, but if they had done it by printing, I wonder how the community, or in fact, how Sony would react to this in the future.

Which leads to the final question, is the Eye of Judgment a niche game? Yes…and no. Yes in that, you have to be somewhat interested in the gameplay. Meaning, if sitting in front of a table, and playing with cards does not interest you in the slightest of bit, you will probably be wasting your time and money on the Eye of Judgment.

However, if it does in fact interest you, or if you don’t mind, then this game should be a consideration for your PS3 library. It is unique. It is simple game on the surface, but offers more depth than a lot of the games that are out there right now. Heck, gameplay for gameplay wise, it does have more depth than a lot of the games out there where all you do is press a button and fire bullets from different guns the entire time. The last game I’ve seen this much depth from is probably Civilization 4. So that’s saying something.

A word of warning though. When playing in daytime, the PS Eye recognize the cards pretty easily, but if you’re playing at night, make sure you have an even array of light over your playfield. I would suggest when setting up the game, to use 50mhz. The PS Eye seems to have a hard time reading the cards at night, so play somewhere like under a bright white light. I also suggest buying sleeve jackets to protect your cards from fingerprints and other worldly accidents. You don’t want to ruin your cards so much that the PS Eye can’t recognize it anymore.

Replayability

Replayability will probably vary from people to this people on this. If you are willing to shell out $3.99 per booster pack, or $14.99 per theme deck, then this game’s replayability is infinite for you. With all the cards out there (and probably more on the way), there is probably an infinite number of ways you can mix and match your card to create the ultimate deck. See, I used ultimate instead of perfect, because there’s no way to have a perfect deck. Because there is no single, all powerful card, and all of them have a weakness to them, sometimes, even the smallest of card, the weakest, can take out the strongest with resilience and strategy.

However, if you aren’t willing to shell out another $20 or $30 in booster packs, then replayability will be moderate for you. Playing with the starter deck that the game comes with will still give you plenty of opportunities to play this game both off and online. Heck, I’m still finding out more about my starter deck cards to this day. Unfortunately, until matchmaking is instilled into this game, you might be playing a few matches against opponents whose deck are just superior over you.

But that shouldn’t matter. Winning and rank maybe important to a few, but at least for me, the joy of playing the game takes the highest precedent. I love playing people whose cards are just overpowering me, and I’m just hanging on with my lowly starter deck to prove a point. The point that even the biggest giants can fall, and when they do, it’s a hard fall.

The Good: Easy to learn and play, extremely difficult to master. Has more depth and strategy than most games on the console market. Highly detailed character models. Engaging gameplay. Has infinite replayability.

The Bad: Questionable music selection. Lack of single-player campaign/depth. Simplistic online functions. No real way to match players on either their deck strength or win/loss ratio. An online-bug that allows people to rack up thousands of honor points in a short span of time.

The Ugly: Players printing out cards online and using them as their deck. For those that really want to compete with the best of the best, you’re gonna have to be willing to shell out at least an additional $30-$50 in additional booster and theme pack. Having your friends or affection other make fun of you while you play.

Final Score: 14/20