Review: Marvel Trading Card Game (PSP)

Marvel Trading Card Game (PSP) is perfect for TCG fans but a tough prospect for newcomers

For: Ideal portable strategy game; Marvel license; well balanced; Art work

Against: Fiddly user interface; tiny icons; annoying music

Marvel TCG is a good strategy game that anyone familiar with TCG will enjoy. It makes very good use of the Marvel license and includes various team based bonuses: for instance The Fantastic Four and Friends of Spiderman. The gameplay is pretty standard TCG, with cards for characters, locations, equipment and plot-twists (events). Cards are draw from a custom deck, and combat is played out through a card stack.

Enjoyable as the game is, it does suffer from a number of flaws. Firstly, the tutorials, although welcome, are not easy to follow and in fact can be quite confusing for newcomers to TCGs. The user interface is also pretty cluttered, with the cards in play reduced to tiny icons. Thankfully you can highlight cards to view a larger image.

The campaign mode features a story and comic art from Marvel itself, and adds some context for the card battles vs the AI. Marvel TCG also features multiplayer battles via local WiFi or the online gaming service Gamespy. In a novel twist, you can also play PC players via Gamespy

Despite its weaknesses, Marvel TCG is a good game and a perfect title for portable gaming.

3/5