First, I've played the card game version, and am well versed on its game mechanics. Having said that, I'll get on with this review. Atari, who published this game, has always produced decent titles in the past. This isn't one of them. OK, let's narrow that down a bit and say, not for your personal computer. This is one of those that would be better played on a game console. The design and how it's handled, even the play style screams game console which would be okay if you were playing the Xbox version and not this PC one.

The idea behind the game seems to be an attempt to bridge the gap between card playing and actual magicians dueling. For those who've played the card game, you'll be in for a big surprise! Character generation is quite simple, create a name and head to the menu screen. This consists of a quest and duels between the computer or online. The first thing one should do is the quest. It's a tutorial on how your mage moves using the keyboard and joystick/gamepad movements. You'll be assigned the red side representing chaos. There are five different colors. They represent nature, death, chaos, etc. Each part of the quest steps you through from movement to more intricate casting techniques. When you've done the quest portion and are familiar with everything, then you can move on to the duels.

The game arena requires you to stay in your half of the playing field. If you step over onto your opponent's side you begin to receive damage. Considering that you both start at twenty health, it can go down fast. The only thing I saw a need for doing this was to steal your opponent's mana crystals. Health depletion versus crystal stealing wasn't worth it in my opinion. Another thing to keep in mind is that you can only have ten spell types in play during a duel, so you need to be familiar with how the spells interact if you want to win. This is it in a nutshell. There's no lore, no questing, nothing other then setting up your book of spells, and dueling.

At this point everything just went downhill. First is game control. A yellow warning label telling you that a gamepad is a must should be slapped on the box! Try juggling a joystick and keyboard at the same time without being stressed. Games shouldn't be stressful. This one was begging me to destroy my monitor! I'm a mouse person which means click this, click that. I'm not a gamepad person and feel any game on a PC that needs one should never exist, but that's my opinion. I've a Sidewinder Pro and that was a disaster as it wouldn't operate correctly when it came to movement.

I've the dexterity of a dyslexic monkey when trying to use the keyboard and joystick at the same time. You can't set up your keyboard like you want due to the small matter of the game setting it for two players on one keyboard. Maybe against a real opponent, and praying that internet lag would slow things down, you just might have enough time to plan out your moves. Against the computer it amounted to a race to see how fast you could toss creatures to kill the controlled opponent. And if you tried to cast an enhancement spell with no creatures on your side then throw in the towel. I couldn't figure out a way to back out of the spell, and you can bet I was mashing buttons frenziedly. The real time use really hurts when trying to plan out your moves, as the computer is just too fast!

Other then the beautiful graphics, I finally tossed in the towel half way through the quest portion and gave up. For those of you looking for a challenge in frustration, good luck and hope you get better enjoyment out of this game then I did.