Without a doubt, Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 faces a number of a major challenges right from the start in making a game that can 1) draw in new players unfamiliar with the series, 2) recapture old Magic the Gathering card players that have drifted from the game, and 3) satisfy the lofty expectations of its hardcore fan base. At the same time, Wizards is trying to bridge the gap between the card game and the video game communities. Impressively, they have done a good job with most of these goals by implementing solid tutorials, lots of decks to battle, and a good set of new puzzles.

The game starts out with a beautiful cinematic that creates a storyline that was missing from previous versions of the game. This opening movie promises a story that will unfold as you progress through the game, but unfortunately, this is one of the few places where the game fails to deliver. As you play through the campaign, you face more challenging matches and gameplay, but there is no more storyline to follow to give you a sense of progress towards some ultimate ending.

Despite the shortcomings in the storytelling, the game has an excellent UI that is fairly easy to navigate. For new players, there is a "How to Play" section that lays out the basics of the game, and for those that don't want to spend time learning, you can jump right into the campaign mode where the game is explained as you play with tips that will keep showing up until you tell them to stop. While this is a minor annoyance for more advanced players, you can turn off these help features.

The cards themselves are dead-on true to the long-running Magic the Gathering card game, with beautiful art and interesting text in high detail that can make you stop just to admire a card in the middle of a game. This same art is also brought to the still images in the loading screen, the game management interface, and the opening cinematic, making for a great visual experience as you play. It's an even more immersive visual experience than the original Duels of the Planeswalkers game.

GAMEPLAY: The game interface is quite different from the original Duels of the Planeswalker game, with a fair bit of thought put into an improved user interface. They've made it easier to tell which player's turn it currently is, and the "Continue" and "Stop Timer" buttons are more strategically placed on the game board so that they don't overlap and conflict with your cards. The cards are just a little bit smaller, so you may find yourself zooming in on them more frequently to understand what they do. But as you become familiar with each card, you'll be able to recognize it from the card art and zoom in less frequently. Unlike the physical card game, there are several points at which you can't play cards: during upkeep, draw phase, or end of turn. The Wizards team has done this to keep the game more accessible to newer players. While this may be frustrating for hardcore fans of Magic, the options to play cards during the two main phases, and the attack and block phases, still makes for an exciting game. You'll start with just access to just two decks, but when you've unlocked everything, you'll have 10 different decks to play with and 16 cards to unlock for each deck. You'll find that sometimes you'll unlock multiple copies of the same card with victory, so it takes far less than 16 matches to fully unlock a deck.

Sumber : http://www.gamepro.com/article/reviews/220413/review-magic-the-gathering-duels-of-the-planeswalkers-2012/