BattleForge Review of Moneygrubbing +1

BattleForge is a PC game that blends so many genres and games into on big-assed acronym your head will spin.  So get your neck brace ready to find out if the world’s first MMORPGRTSCCG is as awesome as the letters make them sound, or is EA just a genius at figuring out ways to steal your money while you thank them for it. Make like Sam Beckett and hit the jump.

Okay, maybe Sam Beckett didn’t jump so much as leap, but you get the idea.  I would have said Hayden Christensen but you all would have thought it was a Star Wars reference or something.

Enough with explaining the bad jokes…  On with the review!

Battleforge, as explained above, is a genre mishmash that, while seemingly original, is more like a ripoff of the free-to-play Saga, though obviously with more of a budget behind the venture than the aforementioned Saga has going for it.

Basically, Battleforge is a real-time strategy game taking place in a persistent world and uses cards to determine what forces you can bring into battle, all under the control of your Skylord.

At first, the game sounds awesome, and even the first couple of minutes going through the tutorial and the like are really enjoyable.  They do a pretty decent job of explaining how the RTS side of the game works through the tutorial, though to be honest anyone who’s ever played a RTS game on the PC probably won’t have much of a problem with that aspect of the game.

Basically, you start at the Forge, sort of a floating island haven in the sky for all your fellow Skylords.  Here, you can customize your deck, upgrade your cards, and even plop down units to see what they look like and how they work, even having them fight other units at your disposal.  It all seems really cool, but then you actually start playing the game and realize that nothing is changing.  The missions all seem pretty much the same, with the exception of the occasional timed goal of some kind, but then that’s just the same thing only with a stopwatch to pay attention to.

So, maybe the cards are where all the fun is. I mean, people still have plenty of enjoyment these days just playing CCGs like Magic and the like, right?  Well, this is really one of the best and worst things about the game.  See, while Battleforge has no monthly fee like a lot of MMOs, you have to use a micro transaction system similar to Microsoft Points to buy new booster packs. 

You really don’t seem to get any cards at all playing through the game, only upgrades to cards you may or may not have or even want.  So if you want to get certain cards, you either have to get booster packs or trade for them.  This sounds like it wouldn’t be a problem except for two things:  A, The auction house system is just terrible and 2, it all still uses the BF coins which are like MS points on XBL… they’re purchased with REAL MONEY.

As far as point A goes, it’s really sad to see this thing in action.  First of all, no matter how many of an item you search for are found, the auction house will only ever show you 50 items.  This is bad for buyers and sellers because it’s not like it only shows the most expensive or cheapest… I don’t know how they determine what to show.  IF you’re looking for more Deepcoil Worm cards, it may find 2,458 of them, but you’ll only ever see 50, ten pages with five on a page.  That means, as a seller, people may never even see your listing and as a buyer, you may be missing out on a really good price.

Point 2 sort of works with this also, being that since the auction house is so terrible it may end up costing you real money.  See, if you list something, it may only cost you, like, three BF coins, but that’s three coins you paid real cash money for that go absolutely nowhere if the auction doesn’t sell, which is irritating because it might not have sold just because no one ever saw the damned thing.  It’s also irritating because you’ll have a very hard time in PvP duels if you’re not willing to go out and either find the cards you want to fill out a good deck or keep buying booster packs to (hopefully) get the cards you want.

As far as the deck building and card collecting goes, this can be sort of fun, but some of the enjoyment is taken out because of the fact that the developers seemed to make it so you’re almost forced to pick a school for your whole deck.  See, there are four types of cards; Shadow, Frost, Fire, and Nature, and they all sort of have their own style.  Shadow is all sorts of undead type stuff that can sacrifice units to deal big damage while Frost tends to have more of a defense oriented lean to it.  It would be cool to make a deck that uses the defensive nature of Frost with the healing power of Nature to make a really strong-lived army, but the way the system works it almost punishes you for this.

See, each card requires a certain number of orbs to be controlled in order to call them into play.  All cards require you have at least one in their school, and then up to three more (for a total of four for you math illiterate out there).  There are a good number of cards that have “blank” orbs as part of their requirement, so you could have one shadow orb and the rest wouldn’t matter, as long as you had that number of orbs.  This makes it possible to put different schools in the same deck, but generally the more powerful units have much stricter requirements.  You could take a few low level guys, but it’s going to be near impossible to get a frost oriented Battleship into play if you’re not focusing entirely on getting frost orbs.

Another problem with the cards is that there really isn’t a good explanation of them in the game or in the book.  I had to look on fan sites to figure out how to tell the rarity of a card and what other cryptic symbols on the cards meant that were never explained anywhere.  They do tell you the basics of what the cards are and what they do, but only enough to make the game playable, not enough to know what you’re dealing with beyond how many orbs the cards take and how much power they cost.

The multiplayer is okay, and sometimes quite enjoyable.  Besides the single player story arch the player can follow, there are two- and four-player games you can get into as well.  It’s not too different than what you do in the single player missions, but there is some fun to be had.  It is sort of frustrating that the colors of the different player teams are so similar, though it’s not enough to ruin the game if you’re enjoying it. 

There are also massive 12-player missions you can do, which can be spectacular fun and, besides PvP dueling, is probably one of the most unique and enjoyable things about this game.  It’s basically three four-player games going on at the same time, but the other “teams” are on other maps and what they do affects players on other maps.  For instance, one of the teams might have to get a gate open so that players on another map can progress.  It’s intense at times and would be much more enjoyable if the chat wasn’t so hard to read.

There are also a startling number of German speaking folk on the servers, which says something for the server localization at the least, but it does make planning a team strategy a little difficult when some of the players are not speaking the same language.  Maybe you won’t notice it if you play, or maybe you speak German, but it did seem a little strange.

Overall, I’d say Battleforge is a pretty solid letdown.  There was a lot of potential there, combining some pretty popular and engaging genres into one, but frankly the game doesn’t do any of them really well at all.  The fact that you’re going to have to invest some real money into the game is off putting as well, but I guess that’s part of what makes CCGs what they are anyway, so I guess some people can accept that.  Hell, depending on what cards you get or what deck you decide to make, an investment of a couple bucks could get you what you need and you wouldn’t have to worry about it for a while, unlike traditional subscription-based MMOs. 

Really, though, it just didn’t seem like it would be worth it to me.  The potential is there, and maybe some update in the future will make the game a bit better somehow…  Even just making the auction house a little better would probably raise my opinion enough to give another point, but as it stands now, I just don’t see it.

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  • http://intensedebate.com/people/Namehasnospaces Dan Landis

    You have to pay for SAGA booster packs too, don't you?

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/JonathanZungre JonathanZungre

    man that's unfortunate, this game looked really good.

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/KrispyDemon John Landis

    Yes, you pay for SAGA boosters also, but you pay real money for them and not through some micro-transaction garbage. With Saga, you can go and buy a single booster pack for something like $2.75 or something, but in BF, you have to get either 1000 or 2250 points for $9.99 and $19.99 respectively and THEN get the boosters for 250 points.

  • Sam

    How embarrassing to read this reviewer cry a flood of tears over the fact that you have to pay for cards. He must really be a big fan of torrents then and can’t remember the last time he payed for a real game.

    Funny, I’m trying to think of a single Magic The Gathering kind of game where you can walk into a store and pick up a starter deck with booster packs for completely free… Nope, nothing comes to mind. You have to pay for it.

    What makes Battleforge better is how you can play for free. You start with a decent selection of cards. Enough to successfully make it through the earlier ranks of random PVE, PVP, and even – entirely through the campaign on normal. That’s a lot of free play time.

    If you don’t like the random upgrades “That you may or may not of wanted” then you can do the rPVE maps that give excellent return on “points” that you can what cards to spend on. These can also be played with many other players.

    if you do decide that you like the game then $20 (most games cost closer to $50), gives enough BP points to buy about 7-10 booster packs (that’s alot, really.), or much better – to buy a very solid deck of 2 colors at least.

    Of course by playing a pure element you get access to the strongest cards. No SH#$*! genius. By doing so the player sacrifices the flexibility offered from mixed colors. It’s a very important part of gameplay.

    Out of all of the whining and crying from this review, that was what irritated me the most. Battleforges biggest strong point is the extreme amount of choices the player has in designing a deck (or many) to suite their playing styles. No other card game I have ever seen, even without the upgrades, gives this kind of customization and abilities to mix and match.

    Only one whinny point the reviewer made was actually real. The Auction system is a clunky system that needs improvement. It now shows more than 50 cards (250 I think) but you wouldn’t want to click through 10 pages anyways. It’s glitchy and slow. I hope it gets redesigned in the future.

    A second improvement would be to make the rPVE more detailed like the random dungeons from Diablo or multiple other games. It seems as if very game designers put a very high emphasis on the aesthetics of level design any more. The same old formulas makes it so the player can get away with using the same strategies repeatedly, with the exeption of being able to turn up the difficulty. None the less, how hard would it be to make the spawn points take place inside urban landscapes with temples, waterfalls, and other features?

    Next topic: The Battleforge arena gives the player all the opportunity in the world to play around with the more subtle abilities of the cards (another thing the reviewer whined about), while fan sites – like any online MMORPG with any level of significant depth, will help the player along their way.

    I think it’s great the reviewer thinks video games should be made out the kindness of artists, game designers, musicians, etc. heart – and that they shouldn’t make any profits at all, except for maybe from advertising.

    Go play WOW. The village is missing their idiot.