Previews// Eye of Judgement

Just in case you either don’t want to bother with a PS3 or want to know what you’re throwing on the battlefield every card has parameters. These include: Summon Value (the number of points you need to actually place the card on the mat); HP and Attack values, along with its attack and defence reach and particular special attributes. For the collectors out there, there are also four different rarities of card, which are displayed using icons on the side.

Strategy extends to the actual fields on the mat, as every card is given a special Element. Kind of like Rock, Paper, Scissors. Elements make your creatures stronger than some and weaker against others – a Fire Element would be totally knackered against Water creature for instance. There are also Earth, Wood and Biolith Elements, the latter is your obligatory ‘ultimate’ Element, which can’t be affected by the others.

Because each field is assigned an Element too, placing a card becomes a matter of matching your card’s Element to the field on the game mat. As you would expect, Fire on Fire will increase your stats while Fire on Water will decrease them. As squares begin to run out and players battle for ownership of the fields, you might end up getting the poor man’s square, so it’s all about making sure you select the right card for the situation.

As well as Creature cards you can also use Spell cards, which can invoke magic attacks on opponents or various fields on the map. This can give you an edge in the heat of battle. There are pretty much two modes of play in The Eye of Judgment: one being the regular mode and the other being ‘Judgment’ which is a more simplified version of the game for younger players. This follows the aforementioned Rock, Paper, Scissors-style much more faithfully to win the game.

Online options form a big part of the game too – you can battle with other players over the PlayStation Network and go up in league tables. If a much better deck has beaten you, you can study the arrangement of decks and how they can play out using a preview mode, and you can even download famous decks in the future – Watanabe-san bandied about the idea of offering tournament-winning decks for players as an example.

In practice, The Eye of Judgment is a very impressive visual affair, but me being the anti-clutter type, I can’t see myself getting out the mat, PlayStation Eye and a bunch of cards every time I want to play. I just wouldn’t have the effort to do it and simply pick up a controller instead. But where the game really shouts ‘winner’ to me is in the online options, and the potential that it has. Online Tournaments against the world? Check. Downloading new decks and being able to learn new strategies? Why not!?

Hasbro may well be making around 100 unique CyberCode cards, but I would assume there’s nothing stopping Sony from manufacturing more series of cards if the game really takes off, with downloadable content for the PS3 to allow new cards to be read. I asked Watanabe-san if we might see any extension of the game to something like the PSP but were met with an abrasive ‘no comment’ from PRs around him, so it’s quite possibly something Sony are thinking about in the long term. And they should – The Eye of Judgement has the potential to add a new dimension to trading card games and make them cool again, using all this ‘Game 3.0’ talk we keep hearing about.