Customer Reviews

Mage Knight Destiny's Soldier

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've played the original table top WizKids' Mage Knight and it's sibling game, Heroclix, on multiple occasions in the past, and have enjoyed playing with and collecting the original sets. Both games are great strategy games. Life, however, does not always present us the opportunity to do everything we want to do as we'd like to, and my current schedule prevents me from playing these games with others in it's original form.
Enter Mage Knight DS. If you are in anyway familiar with the orignal game, then this game should not be too difficult to pick up. If not, there might be a bit of a learning curve. The game became immensely easier to play on the DS when I discovered how the help functions worked, and found there was an option to enable a grid pattern on the battle field. (Go to the options menu to find that. The game is a little difficult to understand range of movement and line of fire without).
I've now played several maps, and found this to be a great little addictive strategy game. Though not mature in content, the complexity of the game is tailored for teens - adults.
To me, the lack of a multi player option for this game is not that big a deal. If I had the time, I'd be playing the real version with others, and not rely on the DS interface. Don't get me wrong. It definitely would be better with it; but I'd rather have a stronger AI than multiplayer support.
In my humble opinion, it's a very nice addition to the Nintendo DS for those of us that enjoy a game that's a little more in depth than the average and makes you think instead of merely mashing buttons.
One slight complaint. When pieces are placed next to others, it is sometimes fairly difficult to properly face the piece in the proper direction. It can be frustrating, but it's not impossible to do.
I'm hoping that someday a Heroclix version of this game will come along for the DS, but I realize that with the licensing issues with DC and Marvel, this will probably never occur.

I'd love to have a good computer/video game version of Mage Knight; unfortunately, this isn't it.

Things I didn't like:
- No skirmish mode. Thus, the only battles you'll fight are in the poorly-scripted campaign mode. Got a favorite tabletop army you like to use? Too bad, you can't use it here.

- Overly-restrictive turn limits. Most scenarios have turn limits that force hyper-aggressive (rather than allowing for strategic and careful) gameplay, and many of these turn limits make no sense in the context of the scenario. For example, early on, you have to capture a necromatic priestess in order to win the battle. If you have wiped out her entire army and have her surrounded at the end of 20 turns (but haven't yet made the difficult "capture" roll), you lose. There's no "in game" reason for this - it would be forgivable if there were imminent enemy reinforcements arriving or something like that, but there aren't. You are thus forced to continuously "push" (and thus weaken) your troops just to get around the turn limit problems.

- Bizarre victory conditions. In early scenarios, your goal is simply to make it through a forest. Yet for these scenarios, the victory conditions require you to control flags that are frequently well off the beaten path in dead-end sections of woods. If my goal is to traverse a forest, why on earth would I want to go out of my way to explore out-of-the way sections of it? If it was a random skirmish game, I'd forgive this, but since I'm forced to play the campaign game, I'd like to have victory conditions that make sense.

- No hardcopy reference for abilities. I haven't played tabletop Mage Knight in years, and I don't have all of the abilities memorized. The manual lists exactly ZERO icons for special abilities. You can determine a unit's special abilities during combat, but the procedure to do so is undocumented.

Things I liked:
- It's better than no Mage Knight at all.
- Good touch screen support.
- Good use of top screen as a battle overview while the bottom screen is a zoomed in view of your troops.

Mage Knight Destiny's Soldier is as close as you can come to playing the figures game. The controls are simple to understand and use. The game play is challenging and enjoyable. Good story line.

The rule book could have benefited by the addition of an explanation of character abilities.

I look forward to future mage knight games, which hopefully will allow user defined armies and multi-player capability.

All in all, I highly recommend this game.