Platform: PSP

Genre: Strategy

Number of Players: 1 (2 via AdHoc Infrastructure)

My good friend Mike Lewis, Keeper of All Things to be Reviewed for our little space on this here interweb thing, told me he was sending me a card battle game for PSP to review. He knows I don’t much care for card battle video games, as my unending complaining about Metal Gear Acid made evident. He also told me it was Yu-Gi-Oh!, something else I really can’t stomach.

When the box arrived, I did indeed find a card battle game for the PSP, but it was not Yu-Gi-Oh!. It was in fact Warhammer: Battle for Atluma. Card battle games are cool, Warhammer is very cool, card battle video games are not cool at all.

Mike Lewis has a unique sense of humor.

At least it wasn’t Yu-Gi-Oh!. I figured that since it was Warhammer, I might actually get some enjoyment out of this game, based on the WarCry collectable card game, which is in turn based on the Warhammer table top miniatures game. So I popped the UMD into my PSP and had a go.

Let’s talk about the look of the game. I rather nice pre-rendered scene (I still find myself amazed at what this little machine is capable of) takes you through the “story” of the campaign mode of the game, after which you can play a game, build your deck, see tutorials, and the like. Once you have chosen a game, you pick one of the various battlefields (a rendered background with some minor animation that looks anywhere from very nice to kind of dull, depending on the battlefield) and muster your forces from your deck. Here we see the cards themselves. They are the same cards you find in the CCG, as I understand it, and they look like scans. That is, they are almost impossible to read. Fortunately, the vital info is displayed next to the card on the screen as well, so you don’t actually have to read the card itself, but as this is a card game, being able to actually use the card would have been a better way to immerse the player in the game, I think. There is an option to view the card full screen, requiring you to turn your PSP sideways to see it properly, but this really isn’t any better for viewing the cards. I checked this option out a couple times, and then never used it again. Throw down your cards on the battlefield, and begin the battle.

Never having played the CCG, I went in cold. I went through the non interactive tutorials that explained the basics, and then played a single battle game as a trial run through. I lost that first game, but as it was for learning, I really didn’t expect to win. One more trial run to get a better grasp of things, and it started out bad, but by the end, I won. Then I played one three battle game as my first “true” game. I won almost every hand, winning the three battle game easily. Then, I moved on to the “campaign” mode, and won most every battle there, as well. The difficulty increases as you progress, but ultimately, I found that as long as I had tactics points to spend juicing up my army on the field, I almost always won the roll afterward. Of course, if you don’t have tactics points available, or don’t have the right cards, you can expect to get hammered, which happened just often enough to make me unsure of the outcome, but never really left me feeling like I was in too much of a bind.

I had been expecting that, since this is simply a computerized version of a card game, there would be some kind of character animations, perhaps some nifty little cut scenes bringing the battles to life, but there was not. Aside from your cards getting shot up or sliced and diced when you lose, there was no animated representation of the battle at all. Winning battles earns you gold, which in turn lets you buy cards to make your own custom deck, but I felt little incentive to do so, as the basic decks seemed to work fine. The music that plays in the background is suitably fantasy sounding, but gets repetitive after a while.

All of this left me wondering who exactly this game is for. Overall, the presentation is a bit dull, and ultimately all you are left with is a video version of a card game. If you are crazy about the card game, but have no one to play with, then Battle for Atluma would be an ideal solution. However, if you are crazy about the card game, you probably got that way by playing it, which would mean that you already have someone to play against, and the thought of you and all your buddies shelling out $40 a pop for a video version of what you already have seems unlikely, and that is assuming you all already have the $200 plus game machine required to play it.

Read that last paragraph again, and then decide which category you fall into. If you are one of those crazy about the game, or are basically looking for the ultimate game of solitaire, then Warhammer: Battle for Atluma will make you very happy, indeed. If, on the other hand, you already have card decks and friends to play against, your $40 would probably be better spent buying more cards, as half the fun of a collectable card game is actually collecting the cards themselves.

-Ed-