Culdcept Saga

Culdcept Saga is the newest incarnation of a very strange subculture based around the board/card game you would achieve by taking a Muppets Monopoly Set and some Magic the Gathering cards and slamming them together in CERN’s giant particle accelerator. Like High Energy Physics, it is a game that very few want to attempt, even fewer understand, and only the most misanthropic and probably malformed lurching shut-ins whom You’ve Never Met have the intense fanaticism required to achieve full mastery thereof. This being said, it is an endlessly deep and well-developed pastime, and even gazing from the periphery can be fascinating in the same way that other obscure hobbies like Civil War Reenactment or Orchid Cultivation achieve. Just be careful not to get drawn in yourself!

First Impressions by Tanx
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Culdcept Saga
Platform: XBOX 360
Played For: about 30 hours

Not to get too mathematical (yes, I’m one of those lurching misanthropes, just not as smart as the ones in Physics) but the perplexing Culdcept Saga experience can be reduced to three basic badly set parameters… luck, game duration and card availability. With the first two variables set very high, and the third quite low, it quickly becomes apparent that this game has one of the steepest learning curves on the planet. The very first level, a simple square-shaped board, takes about an hour to play. You are given a deck of 60 cards to begin with, but unless you are very lucky, you are likely to lose to the computer opponent’s superior deck. You cannot surrender in mid-game… you have to wait through the full hour for them to win, so that you can take your loser prize of 5 new cards. Feel free to swap these cards into your deck and try again… and again… and again. It could take quite a few hours to gain enough cards for a reasonable deck selection and some control over your fate. If you persevere and finally beat the first level… congrats, your hard work has just earned you a lowly 5 out of 1000 achievement points.

Of course, neither my cousin Cotangentx nor I are into hard work in our gaming, so we quickly devised a cheap alternative strategy for card collection. While you can’t swap cards online (a pity, as there are something like 500 different cards available featuring a lot of very solid art) we did discover that you can set a custom online match to a ten move maximum duration. While this doesn’t make for an entertaining game… it often ends before you make it around the board even once, it does allow you to finish within 7 – 10 minutes, and thus earn some new cards, regardless of whether you win or lose. So Cotangentx and I played about 15 quick games in a row to accrue some cards (a process I highly recommend if you want to get into this title) and thus newly equipped I returned to single player to see how far I could advance.

Which brings us to the second small issue… the amount of luck involved. Starting with the second board, it can now take a few hours to finish a single game. While you can save your position midway and finish later, this makes you ineligible to unlock hidden items for your avatar… which I guess you want for some reason. Regardless, Culdcept Saga is a game of luck… and I mean wildly capricious luck at that. Even after you’ve played enough to have some idea what the cards do (it is total guesswork for the first ten hours or so), the game is such that you can be beating your opponent into smithereens for two and a half hours, be very near victory, and then have one unlucky occurrence reverse the whole thing and make you lose in the last ten minutes. Perhaps it was just me, but this seems to happen a lot… I think the computer cheats.

This gets really bad with the third board, when suddenly you are playing against two computer controlled, horrible voice-acted opponents. Now they vary between both lobbing obstacles unilaterally at you or one being stupid and giving all of their points to the other granting an easy CPU win… even with deep strategy based on solid mathematical principles (yeah!) you’re pretty much stuck at a 1 in 3 chance to win each time you plunk down and devote your 3 – 4 hours on the silly thing.

Okay, so the good. If you get into it, this game can pretty much be the only one you need for the next ten years. After that third stage there’s another… and another… the single player is unfathomably immense. Collecting all the cards would take more determination than it does to strike oil, getting enough duplicates of the good ones to go against the competition online is like building a fortune out of pennies on the street. The game appears balanced and once you have a lot of cards, the strategy becomes more interesting, although luck still plays a very large part. But I salute those who have fully embraced this game and gotten more than my humble 15/1000 gamer points. Culdcept Saga is sure to provide everything they need for their new obsessive and all-encompassing hobby.