I've been playing Magic on and off for the better part of my life - Something in or around eighteen years, in fact. Magic computer games are generally overly complex, crash prone and fun through the pure delight of Magic the Gathering itself. The game's core system is largely really fun, and DOTP 2012 manages to hold onto that.
I still play online "real" magic, and as such, never played DOTP as a multiplayer game. I honestly can't imagine doing so, as multiplayer comes in two varieties - duels, which the game is poorly suited to for reasons I'll get into and then big "group" games, which the game might be suited to but inversely lacks basically all the reasons and is terribly slow for anyway.
As a basic magic game it offers some grounding in the setting, which helps build the single player some personality. It's not bad, though the art assets and deck designs for the various planeswalkers who act as opposing AIs does leave you a little annoyed sometimes. The various decks might be based around core themes, or honestly maybe they're not. It's certainly easier to simply imagine them as poorly conceived piles that don't really act on a theme. The art for the various planeswalkers offers a generally stiff reminder as to the innate childishness of Magic's art. The women are all slim, buxom and largely showing off as much skin as credible. The men are all either in the 'skinny but clean cropped sauve' look or big muscle bound hulks.
There is a golem, too, I guess. Oh and a cat person - who is thankfully male.
It's not really the sort of thing that really bothers me in most games but in Magic it's been literal years of hitting the lowest possible mark that common fantasy art will allow. Now that people give zero fucks about D&D, Magic art is just slim women with big tits about half the time. I don't mind slim women with big tits at all but fantasy allows for such a huge breadth of possibility that you think you could move past sticking tits on everything.
Yeah this just in, fantasy artists: Not actually creative.
The decks, as I said, are a mess. They're fun to tool around with, but innately a bit unbalanced. Opinions vary on what beats what, but I think the game fails terrible in terms of potential. The decks often lack focus, and the unlocks rarely allow you to move towards a more focused build. I feel like the idea of having a sixty card deck with two possible themes, then unlocks allowing a focus on either. The unlocks don't do this. They generally just build towards ... Nothing in particular, with many of the decks get unlocked junk that doesn't help the deck. Some of the decks are frustrating messes that feel like could have been more focused, using cards available in the existing pool, but weren't for reasons I'm unsure of. Given the game is at its best attracting as much positive sentiment as possible I don't really know what the excuse is.
Deck building is infuriating and essentially, poorly coded. The deck builder is worse than Magic online, which is worse than a freeware program used in 2002. That's really terrible. It's slow, sticky and I don't really understand why it needs to be the way it is. The worst thing is you can't adjust the number of lands in your deck, which is never more annoying than the one multicolor deck treating its nonbasic lands as spells.
The weirdest element is, to the best of my knowledge, the complete lack of nonbasic lands. This is a weird thing to put in a review but if I was designing magic for casual to advanced level players, I would literally take every step possible to remove mana screw and develop the game from the ground up to improve player choices as they relate to mana. Allowing people to build two and three color decks with ease is a concern for developers of the real game, but it is literally irrelevant here. The designers control the metagame absolutely and these concerns are nonexistent. A deck isn't "more powerful" by using two or three colours, since the general advantage of access to a deeper pool of choices is again irrelevant. So the excuse is ... I'm not sure. Nonbasic lands can be a little weird to use for new players, but they're no more advanced than several of the goofier card choices.
Admittedly, if given reign of such a project, I wouldn't use stuff like Proliferate or Legends at all either, and would probably only use a very limited list of nonbasic lands.
Of course, this leads into another problem - the game doesn't allow you to choose how spend your mana or what lands you tap for mana. This is a tremendous issue and one that weakens several of the decks. While the weirdness of the one Angel's kicker just randomly deciding to be less powerful "because" is certainly odd, any multicolor deck struggles to predict which mana will actually be available at a given juncture. This is horrible, terrible design and really highlights the weakness of the program.
Trying to fight and plead with the game for the usage of your resources leaves a lasting impression of disgust with the game. I believe they claimed they're fixing it in the next version of the game, which is sort of not really the salve to the problem. This is sort of why I would never play this game online. While Mtgo is innately a touch stressful given the fact that, while free on the most part you're essentially betting real money, the idea of losing matches not to bad draws or making mistakes but the game just randomly deciding to tap my lands wrong is uniquely horrific.
The other issue, of course, is that rather than thinking it through and producing the decks at all roughly the same power level, some are just better so I imagine instead of a decent variety of decks you just get nothing. I'm not really excited to find out - Sure, I can log on and try it out given I own all of dotp, but I own a mtgo account with packs and tix and a zombie deck I'm borrowing.
Which isn't very good, but I did say borrowing.
Regardless, dotp is a pretty good way to introduce magic with some unfortunate weaknesses in design, some of which carry over from the main brand and some of which I wish the main brand showed up to fix. It's not a very good advanced product, which I think is the intent, but it's a little frustrating. It was something like ten dollars total though, so I'm not griping too hard on it.
Still, better development would have lead to a better game. I mean outside the crashing, which the game does a ton. And the painful performance issues, but that might be the problem with it being a port.
