Who would have thought, many years ago, that a simple card game involving gathering mana, summoning a range of creatures, and firing off spells at almost any number of opponents would have snowballed into a huge series of card sets with a immense fan following. Well, Wizards of the Coast obviously did. Magic: The Gathering has probably made more money then any other long running card game, with the possible exception of those naughty nude woman card packs every good school kid has…. Or was that just me? Magic: The Gathering (Or M:TG) is now also played online by many enthusiasts, and only once in the past has a video game been based around it. Before even opening the box my thoughts get thrown back to some of the people I’ve played M:TG with. Yes, I freely admit playing this game regularly with friends. However I’m one of those M:TG players who do so for the enjoyment of the game, my worse tactic is almost always playing with a supply of beer located near by. Although, saying that, I’ve played many others who take the game far FAR too seriously. As such, they would probably despise what the guys at Secret Level have done to their beloved addiction. So, during the review I’ll make points as both a gamer, and a M:TG player. After a mere few hours play I realised I was actually feeling drained by this game. This is like playing M:TG, on acid. Where the card game is turn based, with set rules on mana build up and summoning, the video game has taking the M:TG in it’s barest form, made it real time strategy, with a load of action and as many pretty effects as can be squeezed on to one DVD. Each game is a duel, you against one other player. You both start up with a single point of mana. Mana itself slowly builds itself up, or you can run around picking up mana shards. The actual amount of mana you can have stored up depends on how mana orbs you have. Throughout the match mana orbs will pop up, the quicker you run around and pick them up, the quicker the next one will spawn. Small spells and small creatures cost relatively little, but the really big beasts and nasty spells cost much more, so mana build up is essential. The duelling area is a rectangle, with a line down the middle. You’re free to run across the line into your opponent’s territory to, say, steal one of their orbs if they’re too slow, however if you stay there for too long you take a hit to your health pool. As in the card game, each duellist begins with twenty health points, first one to zero loses. A big difference is the limits in place in the video game. The card game has no limits to the amount of creatures and spells, the video game will only allow you to have control over five creatures at any one time, you can also only start battle with a mere ten spells in your spell book. At first I thought that was pretty limiting, after playing for a while I’m thinking anymore would have given me seizures. Another nice touch is being able to defend yourself. You can slap things with whatever weapon your chosen wizard is wielding for a point of damage. Sometimes this enough to defend yourself form a horde of annoying little goblins, however timing is essential, and the concept of timing goes right out of the window when your firing off spells and running round like a loon for mana! As every good Magic player knows, there are five colours of spells; these are red, green, white, blue and black. Each colour has its own personality if you will. Red is small nasty things like goblins, and lots of spells involving fire. Green is nature, lots of regenerating creatures and lots of mana production. White is pure and defensive with lots of life giving spells. Blue is confusing, lots of countering and un-summoning spells, possibly the most annoying to play against, but most fun to play with. Black is evil, life drain and sometimes hurts the caster too. It must have been an utter nightmare for the developers to decide which spells for each colour should be included in the game. The back of the box boasts over 70 spells, M:TG must be close to being in it’s thousands of spells by now. A main attraction of this title is that it’s Xbox Live enabled, personally I feel that every Xbox game with a possible multiplayer option should be Xbox Live enabled, but alas, this isn’t so. Now my main gripe about this game and the multiplayer option is that you HAVE to play through almost the entire single player quest mode to stand a chance online. Or even to have a vaguely interesting multiplayer game without Live. There are six chapters to the quest mode, within the chapter there’s a load of missions to complete. Almost every chapter feels like one long tutorial, the storyline is confusing and rather unoriginal. After each little section you’ll unlock yourself a new spell to add to your spell book. This is the problem, the set multiplayer characters have a pitiful selection of spells, there is an option to use your own spell book, but unless you are a truly amazing gamer, you won’t unlock a variety of spells for sometime. So, we have a multiplayer card game that’s been converted into a very fun heavily multiplayer based video game, yet you have no choice but to play single player for a rather long time before you can enjoy the multiplayer. How irritating. The AI isn’t fantastic, after a while you’ll notice the same reactions form the AI for each spell you cast, the difficulty curve during the single player can sometimes take an almighty curve upwards now and again. The graphics are extremely nice, though when the action is at it’s highest I do notice twitching similar to that which plagued Knight Of The Old Republic, I’m wondering if people are pushing the Xbox a little to far, or perhaps Justin the wrong direction for graphics. Sounds is average, and sometimes the computers voice can get a little irritating, admittedly it’s most irritating just before it kills me. I can see many areas that the serious M:TG player would pick holes at, moan and probably go back to cataloguing his thousands of cards without a second thought. I personally feel Secret Level and Atari have taken a very fun but ageing card game, given it a slap about, an outrageous hairstyle, an injection of adrenalin and shoved it onto one of the most powerful consoles out there! Great fast paced fun despite it's minor irritations.