Hands On: Eye Of Judgement
Okay, so going into my hands-on with Eye of Judgement I was about as skeptical as everyone else - and while I quickly learned that the game has a rather specific target audience, in the end I was impressed by both the technology and the easy-to-learn-but-difficult-to-master card gameplay. While I don't see Eye of Judgement just dominating the mainstream game market, I think most who play it will be impressed by the end result. Trading card game fans may wish Sony had gone with an existing franchise, but as someone who's only dipped his feet into the card battling world I didn't find the learning curve to be steep at all.
The setup is definitely funny - the PlayStation eye suspended above a cloth map that appears onscreen overlaid with the semi-opaque graphics filling each square of the 3x3 map with one of five elemental tiles. But take a card and hold in beneath the camera and you'll see your hand come alive onscreen with an artfully-designed 3D model of whatever beasty you might be holding. I tilted my card and watched the female water elemental I'd drawn rotate on screen (we even looked down her cleavage).
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The gameplay itself was easy to apprehend. Every card belongs to one of five elements: one neutral (biolith) and two pairs of opposing elements (fire and water; desert and earth). Every card also lists its health and its attack power, as well as how many mana it costs to play. In addition to those three numbers, there's a diagram showing in which direction(s) the card attacks (eg, the tile in front of it, or both tiles on either side, etc) and from what directions it can defend the attacks of other cards.
There are nine squares on the board - the first player to fill and hold five wins. Every tile, like every card, has an elemental affiliation. Play a water card on a water tile to increase its strength; play it on a fire card and its stats will suffer.
Eye of Judgement lets you lay your cards in any orientation, which I liked - in other words, not all the cards on the grid need to be aligned the same way: turn that forward-shooting fortress card 90 degrees clockwise to attack your enemy in the direction you want to battle, and voila.
The Eye reads the cards by scanning black blocks on both ends of the cards, but I didn't find my club-like man hands getting in the way of the process as much as I'd feared - although you do have to keep that in mind. Once thrown down on the mat, the cards come alive on-screen and duke it out in a graphically dazzling performance nearly worthy of a Final Fantasy summon. With precisely that analogy in mind, I asked and was reassured that the battle animation can be turned off, for the hardcore or impatient (me) player.
The only thing that stuck out as particularly cumbersome (given the sort of whimsical redefinition of "cumbersome" you'll have to be willing to embrace to really enjoy EoJ) were the "action cards," - four cards you keep on hand at all times to give the game special instructions such as ending or skipping a turn, undoing a move, etc. It's designed so that once you're set up, you never have to use the SIXAXIS, but I suspect waving one of four static cards in front of a freaking camera may take more getting used to than the rest of the card play, in which the camera keeps a surprisingly low profile. For a camera on a stand. On a table.
You've got to keep a sense of humor about Eye of Judgement, I think. It's wonderfully ridiculous, and there are whole categories of people who won't even entertain the notion of buying this game. On the other hand, it's pretty cool for what it is.
Every copy of the game comes with the same 30 card starter deck, although booster packs will be available, stretching the card count to 110. The game also ships with the stand, the cloth mat, and the PlayStation Eye camera - which can be used for other PS3 games, like SingStar. So from that perspective alone, Eye of Judgement may appeal to card gamers and a wider fringe group who'll see it as a fun way to pick up the Eye.
So when Eye of Judgement drops on October 23rd, be kind, won't you? Give a weird, gangly, probably-overcomplicated game a chance, fella. It'll surprise you - one way or the other!
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 31 August 2007
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: eye of judgement, playstation eye, ps3, sony
Now I just need a cloak and cowl! =]
Sounds like it would be fun to play....but I have the BIG problem of not having a PS3 to try it out with.