Blizzard has always been a purveyor of finely detailed, artisanal videogames. The dance animation of a World of Warcraft character, the vocal affirmation of a StarCraft unit, the shower of gold flowing from a successful kill in Diablo; each a simple touch that makes an enormous project feel delicate and handcrafted.
Hearthstone, Blizzard’s free-to-play collectable card game, even in its closed beta, goes even further. Perhaps it’s because the action takes place on a single screen – your character at the bottom, your opponent at the top, and the cards you’ve deployed lying in between – but there’s not a millimeter of space that hasn’t been laboured over under the hand of a good artist.
Click on a card, and it hovers below your mouse pointer, tilting and turning along with your movements. Drop it on the board and it glows with magic, before a coin representing the unit pounds into the board. Launch an attack and cards whack against one another with a thud, or cast fireballs across the screen, before the defeated opponent shatters into a thousand pieces. Card games like Magic: The Gathering, an obvious influence, long ago abstracted magical combat into pieces of cardboard. Hearthstone abstracts those pieces of card back onto a computer and makes them feel both physical like card and alive like a videogame.
Every board your battles take place upon has incidental details in its corners which are no less delightful. While you wait for your opponent to take his or her turn, you can be popping vegetables, toying with a watchful gryphon, turning off the lights inside a building. Everything can be poked and prodded, everything feels solid, and when you win, fireworks explode as your character’s triumphant banner unfurls.
Blizzard has borrowed a page from PopCap’s book, dressing up its game with the pomp and fanfare of the casually addictive Peggle. All it needs is Ode to Joy and slow-motion replays.
This is a good thing. The colourful antics are a salve to a game that otherwise relies on deep concentration and tactical mastery. If you’re one of those lucky enough to find a beta key – or daft enough to buy one for $70, the current going rate on eBay – then you’ll be introduced to the game’s core concepts by a swift series of tutorial battles.
If you’re a player of card battling games, they’ll sound familiar. Each player begins with a single crystal, which acts as your energy. Each card in your deck, which you can customise yourself and pull randomly during play, costs a certain number of crystals. Your crystals replenish and grow by one each turn, making you progressively more powerful. Those cards are usually minions, each familiar to players of any prior WarCraft game. You’ll play Murlocs, then Crocolisks, and advance through the fantasy ranks. Along with its cost, each unit also has health and attack stats, and may have a special ability, like “Taunt”, which forces enemy attacks to focus on the unit.
As you play, you level, and as you level, you unlock new cards. This is where the microtransactions come in, as you’ll be able to buy new packs of cards with cash money.
For now, you’ll begin with a basic hand, and start playing matches against the computer and living opponents. In either case, you’ll be getting defeated. A lot. This is partly because, if you’re playing against the computer, you’ll be playing against classes you’re unfamiliar with. You need to defeat each of the game’s Warcraft archetypes – Mage, Hunter, Warrior, Shaman, Druid, Priest, Rogue, Paladin and Warlock – before you can play as them. There’s a lot of trial and error, or a lot of watching YouTube Let’s Plays, necessary before you learn the quirks particular to each, and how to exploit those even in the hands of an AI that’s going easy on you.
You’re obviously supposed to end up in matches against real opponents, but these are even harder, layered with the added complexity of user-built hands, and a time pressure to make your move without wasting anyone’s time. The matchmaking, such an integral part of other Blizzard games like StarCraft II, seems to struggle to find similarly inexperienced rookies to pair you against, though that’s likely a consequence of the game’s closed beta.
For seasoned card gamers who understand the strategic concepts at work, the game is easier to get into, and difficulty suggests the considerable depth and competitive future for a game Blizzard says it’s been working on privately for years. But if you’re taking days off work to camp websites offering free key giveaways, or worse, hovering over an eBay Buy It Now button, then slow down. Hearthstone is already beautiful to look at and tactically rich, but it has a long, better future ahead of it.
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