Culdcept Saga (Xbox 360)

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It doesn't help that there was no effort to make the game intuitive to a new audience. ST is called "strength" in the online help, but "attack power" in the manual; HP is "hit points" in the online help, but "vitality" in the manual. Magic is represented by a capital G for some inscrutable reason. The deck building gets more and more user-hostile as you get more cards, which is when you most need a sleek deck-building interface.

Playing peek-a-boo

Perhaps the biggest sign of the developer's contempt for the fans is that Culdcept Saga is still hamstrung by its original design as a multiplayer game to be played by people in the same room. This means that players' hands occasionally flash onscreen, but there's no way to actually check his cards again, or even find out what they do. When a battle comes up, he who remembers best is guaranteed to win. It's like playing Magic: The Gathering with someone who periodically shows you the artwork on his cards, but won't let you look when you need to. There's no reason this has to be a part of playing online or against the artificial intelligence. I could perhaps live with all of Culdcept's other peccadilloes if this one glaring flaw was fixed.

Then there are issues of the game's pacing. You cannot bypass or even speed up the goofy animations of cards presenting themselves and smacking each other with animated weapons, claws and gobs of slime. Games can easily stretch out into three or more hours. You can't save and resume multiplayer games or versus games, and saving a campaign game disables any unlockables. You can't even resign a game, short of just turning off your Xbox 360.

It's a mystery why the developers let this sort of stuff happen in Culdcept's second iteration. It's disappointing and sloppy, and it seems to indicate this is just a quick and dirty sequel shoved onto the market without any attempt to improve it. Sure, the multiplayer is great and the new cards are cool. But why not try to improve the basic experience before layering in the new stuff?

Culdcept Saga has had me ping-ponging between an enthusiastic "Buy It!" and an emphatic "Fry It!" rating. While the basic game is good -- actually, it's pretty damn awesome if you're into this kind of thing -- the half-assed execution causes my nerd rage to flare with the heat of a thousand suns. Even though I'm playing the daylights out of this thing, wholly seduced by the board-gaminess, thrilled by the dramatic reversals of fortune in a single die roll, determined to try a new deck, and utterly undone by my own drive to earn new cards, I will periodically shake my fist at the screen and cry out, in all caps, "DAMN YOU, CULDCEPT SAGA! DAMN YOU TO HELL! WAAAAH! ARGHHHH! URK! MRF!"

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.