Bandai recently released beta test for their new collectible card game dubbed ‘Gundam Duel Company’. While the game is officially released this Friday, I’ve been playing the Beta Test for the last two weeks, and here’s my impressions and review of the game.
The premise
You can opt to purchase a starter deck based on four themes, which are E.F.S.F., Zeon, SEED or Gundam 00. Each deck comes with 6 MS and 2 pilots from their respective series. The idea is that you can purchase these real cards and register them onto your DC account with the serial number and use them in the online game.
Since I’m building the four stolen GAT-X Gundams at the moment, I went ahead and purchased the SEED starter pack:
Each card comes with a serial number which you can enter online at the Gundam DC site. This lets you use your real cards in the online battle game. These starter packs are apparently classified as ‘Release 0’, so they might get phased out when the real game comes into play. You can purchase a booster pack which contains three random cards when the game is finally released.
The rules
Here’s where things start going a bit south. I’ll try my best to explain how the game works.
Your deck consists of three platoons of mobile suits arranged in a 3×3 grid. Each platoon can have up to 3-5 MS depending on which game mode you are playing. MS have five stats associated with them, these are:
- HP – Hitpoints
- Armour – Damage reduction from enemy attacks
- Speed – Used for calculating which MS move first in combat and evading
- Attack – Damage caused by the MS’ attacks
- Cost – Indicates how much of your life gauge is drained when the MS is destroyed
Each row in the formation is designated ‘Front’, ‘Middle’, and ‘Rear’. Every mobile suit has a particular primary weapon which can only be used if it’s placed in the corresponding row.
Comparison of MS weapons. Duel is ideally placed on the front row while the Guncannon is a back line unit.
Doing battle
If you’ve played Gundam EXVS, then you’re familiar with the concept of a ‘cost gauge’. This is essentially your life bar, and depletes each time one of your MS is destroyed, the deduction based on the cost of that MS. Basically destroying a rare MS like a Gundam is worth (slightly) more than a grunt suit like a Zaku. It should be noted that named prototype MS such as the Gundam, Exia, Strike etc are classified as ‘Custom MS’, meaning you can only ever own one copy of those cards.
Based on your platoons, the first platoon of each deck will do battle, then depending on what the retreat orders set to, each platoon will retreat and will be substituted by the next one. This continues until the cost gauge of either player has been reduced to zero.
The problems
The rules are confusing and unbalanced – Does the game sound complicated? It sure as hell is. Five stats, formations, defense & attack decks, platoons, orders, retreating, and positioning; there is a helluva lot of stuff you need to take into account when playing. The scary thing is, there’s probably even more that I’ve missed. There is a tutorial mode, but it’s rather brief and doesn’t really ease you into the game or completely explain all the items I mentioned above either.
Does ‘attack frontal’ mean attack the MS directly in front, or in the closest row? How does a ‘Cost 5’ MS translate to the Cost Gauge which is out of 2000 points? Arbitrary descriptions are also given for MS weapon damages making it hard to really gauge on the tradeoffs on where you should place them. These key pieces of information is not explained and will likely frustrate new players as they discover things through trial and error.
The ‘SPD’ stat is rather unbalanced and the entire game hinges on it at the moment. The order of action is determined by the SPD of the slowest MS in each line. In the above picture, the enemy placed their fast Unicorn with the slower Gouf, slowing the entire middle row down, and I countered the their formations by using units faster than theirs. As a result, all of my team went first, and my platoon wiped out two of the enemy MS (including the Unicorn) before they could even counterattack.
It wouldn’t be a problem if stats were properly balanced, eg if high speed mobile suits had low HP or ATK, but generally rarer cards and Custom MS have high stats across the board. This means players with rare cards (eg with high SPD stat) will totally crush their opponents before they have a chance to move. The solution would be either to have limits on the number of Custom MS per deck, and using the average SPD of the line instead of the slowest, but the way it is now, slow MS are a real liability.
Gameplay is too passive – The entire game is designed on on the idea that interactions with other players continue even when you’re not actively playing the game. This means that at no point are you actually playing a human opponent live, only the set formations and strategies they’ve set for defending against player attacks.
Once you actually enter battle, the game pretty much plays itself. There’s actually very little input from the player, except for the occasional selection of pilot abilities. The AI will also occasionally make dubious targeting choices, which can cause massive grief when it decides to attack that full HP unit instead of finishing off the weaker one which would’ve guaranteed you the victory.
Because of this, most of the important decisions are made before each battle, so there’s little to no opportunity to outplay your opponent. You’re actually able to see the opponent’s formation prior to each battle, so assuming that you actually have some decent cards, you could actually re-plan your formation to completely counter your opponent’s. However this is a pretty frustrating experience because…
The UI is clunky – There are five or so important stats which you need to consider while planning your formations, unfortunately there’s no way to view all of these stats for all of your cards at once. If you’re the kind of player that wants to win, you’ll most likely want to plan your formation to counter the opponent’s defense, but thanks to the design of the UI, doing this is a complete chore.
Furthermore, you’ll need to maintain both an offense and a defense deck. You have to do this for each game mode (three modes so six formations in total), and there’s no way to save or transfer your formations between each game mode!
So much waiting – Watching the online battle play out was pretty interesting at first, but it gets old real fast. There’s no way to skip or even fast forward the labourous animations/UI playing, which means you’ll have to wait on average five or more minutes for each battle to play out. Since there’s very little player input, it amounts to watching a long unskippable cutscene, which I found extremely frustrating as I just wanted to move on. Worse, the game pauses unless the window is visible, so you can’t just minimize it and return later. If you’re going to limit choices during battle, at least let me skip right to the results dammit!
In Practice Missions, you can get pick or get matched with a random player to do battle, but winning these matches don’t award you with anything. The two main game modes also have sizeable waiting periods between actually being able to play the game. In battle mode, you’re given an opponent to battle every hour or so. The other remaining modes, Battle Mission and Conquest have time restrictions based on when you are allowed to play. For example in Battle Mission, you may be tasked to attack three players, but you can only attack one person per hour. In Conquest mode, the game alternates between attacking and defending each hour, where you’re only allowed five moves on the map. This kind of design doesn’t exactly lend itself to a game which can be easily picked up and played when you want to.
Pay to win – This is yet another case of ‘free-to-play’ with strings attached. Sure you get free cards, but it’s clear very early that a pecking order is established – those who invest money into purchasing cards will win. The first problem is that unlike MtG or Hearthstone, the game is resourceless. There are no ‘mana’ costs to speak of when playing cards, so the more common and free cards are quickly outclassed by the rarer cards. Then there’s the actual stats of the cards. You’d expect that cards would be balanced in the sense that a speedy MS would have low HP, but the rarer cards have high stats across the board.
Also note that those who purchase more than one starter pack are granted a special code which gives them Casval’s Gundam and the Strike Rouge, which further compounds this problem.
In the example above, my squad is totally outclassed by the sheer number of Custom MS. The opponent has a Strike Rouge, Johnny Ridden Zaku, Guncannon, and Exia, which are faster than most of my units. As a result, I was soundly defeated.
Since you can’t actually make snap choices during battle, players with the superior cards have a significant advantage. With my starter pack, I was easily able to demolish opponents who only had free cards, similarly enough, I was soundly beaten by those who had bought more than one starter pack and had more quality cards at their disposal. The game is horribly unbalanced in this aspect.
Getting extra free cards is a real hassle too. You’re allowed to draw one card every 12 or so hours, but the free pool is limited to only some of the more common cards. You can also undertake certain missions that reward cards, unfortunately these require you to actually win against other players, compounding the problem.
Verdict
It will be interesting to see if these problems are addressed or if there are better free cards when the game goes live on the 25th July. With some balance changes, the strategy element could be enjoyable, but at this point, it’s pretty hard to recommend the game to anyone.
While the game is advertised as free-to-play, there are clearly designs in place force people into spending money. Acquiring free cards is a very slow and painful process, so those who actually spend money to actually purchase cards or boosters have a colossal advantage over those who just utilize free cards. That itself is a huge problem because it’s hard to entice new players to try out the game if they simply can’t compete. I did find the occasional bout where I had a relatively even matched opponent, but more often than not I found myself outclassed by decks full of Custom MS which destroyed my platoons before I had a chance to move.
If you’re a card collecting enthusiast, you may enjoy this game, but be warned – if you’re a hardcore competitive type of gamer, it will cost you.
Gundam Duel Company will be officially released on 25th July.
