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Magic Stones

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Developer: Winter Wolves Game Studio
Publisher: Winter Wolves Game Studio
Genre: RPG > General
Released: Oct 25, 2005
Players: 1

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- Magic Stones Review

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What first struck me when I saw screenshots of Magic Stones were the absolutely, stunningly gorgeous characters used as illustrations for the various game screens. In fact, even if the graphics are just static renders, the artists of indie developer studio Winter Wolves did an amazing job setting up the 3D characters for their scenes.

Magic Stones is a computerized version of a fantasy collectible-trading-card game (a fictional one that has no real world print & card stock counterpart), augmented with some RPG elements and, if you count the recent free add-on "Bone Lord", a single player campaign.

You play the role of a druid using magic rune stones and artifacts for his or her magic, and the game usually begins with you venturing out into the wilderness, trying to gather experience points and artifacts from slain foes. This happens in a neat, static map where you get to pick your fights. The game reveals the kinds of monsters and their XP value for each fight, as well as possible artifacts or additional spells to be claimed by the victor.

Once you decide which group of monsters to fight, the game switches into its actual play mode. Each side has five spots for so-called avatars, which are basically creatures summoned to fight for one side. In these predefined battles, no new monsters will pop up, though you can �€“ provided you have enough magical energy left �€“ summon new ones to replace those slain.

Avatars may be small, weak entities such as the Sea Nymph or the Swarm, they may be very powerful beasts such as a Fire Drake or a Beholder, or they may be anything in between, like a Vampire Lord or a Witch. Each monster has an individual casting cost, an attack stat, a defense stat, two different standard attacks and a one-time special move for each combat. Special moves are what makes the individual avatars interesting �€“ the beholder can stun several foes with its magic gaze, while the vampire lord can steal hit points from an enemy. These moves are many-fold and add versatility to the criteria you follow when selecting which avatars to summon. A Fire Drake may dish out a lot of damage against multiple targets, but a cheap (in terms of mana cost) Death Crow can dart in and paralyze it for three crucial turns, rendering it useless and vulnerable to attack.

You spend your turns telling your avatars to attack the others, summoning reinforcements or casting useful spells to protect or strengthen your forces. This is very basic CCG stuff and may be a bit simplistic for experienced Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh players, but it's actually quite enjoyable and the general pace of play is very relaxed.

After winning your first couple of battles, you may choose to participate in the annual druids' tournament where you will face other druids with quite individual skills in a simple single-elimination tournament. Magical items you won while fighting mobs in the wilderness will greatly increase your chances of winning here, and strategically selecting the right ones is the road to success. Usually, you focus on a special kind of avatar and a special discipline of magic and improve those two with the right items.

After winning or losing the tournament, you must go out into the wilderness again and wait until the next year before competing again.

The game offers, in its free add-on, a special campaign mode that is very challenging but will allow you to earn some magical items that are unavailable in the wilderness questing mode. Other than that, it's pretty much the same.

Graphics: 9
Someone put their 3D character suite to good use! Excellently posed and beautifully rendered characters make up a lot of the screen space in Magic Stones. The avatar pictures, too, are of very high quality. Some of the participants in the tournament look a bit odd, and nothing ever moves in the game, but still, the graphics are very beautiful.

Sound: 7
The Game has great music in the main and character menus, though little or no ambient sound effects elsewhere in the game. The avatars make more or less appropriate sounds when using their specials or when attacking each other, but this is quite standard and tends to get monotonous after a while. A calm female voice for the tutorial or the tournament would have helped.

Game Play: 6
Magic Stones is for beginners, save the frustratingly difficult campaign mode. I was able to beat the tournament twelve times in a row on the highest difficulty setting with the first character I ever built. The game is only difficult in the first three or four battles, until you understand the strategic side behind avatar and spell selection. But this is not bad! The game is great fun for casual play, and I still launch it every now and then to win the tournament once again with flying colours. And that is not to say that there aren't any challenges waiting for you in the tournament, it's just that more often than not, you'll get a weaker opponent in the final match than you did in the first.

Value: 7
The add-on really improves the game in terms of value. It provides new classes of magic spells, as well as some new avatars which are pretty interesting in low-level play. The main game, including the tournament, is too easy and maybe too superficial to justify the game's price, though. Most of all, Magic Stones is lacking a multi-player mode (which I'm sure was initially planned and may be implemented in the future). Multi-player duels could easily increase Magic Stones' value rating by two points. An important notation is that Magic Stones has quite a few bugs, mostly in the user interface and rarely with serious implications. But they are noticeable.

Concept: 7
For a while I believed that CCGs couldn't be done on a computer. Well, they can, and there have been several excellent proofs of this concept in the past, and Magic Stones is one of them. It is difficult to incorporate and balance the sheer amount of cards that the big ones like Magic: The Gathering offer, but the achievements of Winter Wolves are pretty good. The add-ons are particularly interesting, and I'll keep an eye out for new releases.

Fun: 8
You know, pushing cards onto other cards, hearing a dull thud and seeing a few numbers change may sound boring. But it isn't! In fact, it's quite entertaining to devise a new strategy and experiment with it. Can I beat a Beholder just using Treants? Can the enemy's Fire Drake be tricked into killing all his other avatars using my Sea Nymph's charm skill? The nice music and design of the game, as well as the allusions to ancient Germanic tribal druid cults make Magic Stones a very pleasant and fun game to play.

Overall: 7
Even if it's not for everybody, Magic Stones is a welcome distraction from all those Solitaire and Poker variants out there. The learning curve is not very steep, so if you always wanted to check out CCGs or Computer-CCGs, magic Stones is the perfect place to start. I, for one, was taken in by the beautiful fantasy setting and the nice flavor texts on the avatar cards. Because you need to remember �€“ �€œthe Timber Wolves never kill for pleasure, only for need.�€?

By: Moritz Voss
Posted: Friday February 03, 2006