One of the big problems I've always had as a game reviewer is finding time to actually play the game I have to review. Ignoring all the time spent learning the rules, becoming familiar with the card mechanics, building a deck of average strength, and of course finding adequate opponents, Trading Card Games on the whole still take a lot of time to play. If you are familiar with TCGs at all, you know that quick games can last 15-30 minutes while the more complicated strategic games can sometimes take hours on end! Normally games require at LEAST a whole day of testing before I can write anything about them, so imagine my surprise when I set out to review “Urban Rivals” and an hour after I had started I already had 50 matches under my belt and more than enough experience to write this review. Not only that, imagine my further surprise when the game's fun and addictive nature kept me playing for hours and hours more!
Urban Rivals is a shockwave based massively multiplayer collectible trading card game available at
http://www.urban-rivals.com/. The basic premise of the game is simple. You are a gang leader in the city of Clint, a fictional locale where gang warfare rules, and where combatants from all over the world come to show their stuff. The gangs that inhabit Clint range from the mundane to the bizarre, stretching from preps, jocks, nerds, and thugs on one side to ninjas, robots, zombies, and aliens on the other and everything in between. It is up to you to gather up gang members from all the gangs in the city to become the number one city boss. That's about it. It's corny and cheesey and kind of cartoony and that is great because it meshes perfectly with Urbal Rivals's corny cheesey kind of 80's Saturday morning cartoony feel. After all, you can't really see a space cowboy fight against a zombie pirate without a taking it with a smirk and grain of salt.
There is only one type of card in Urban Rivals, and that's the Character card. Character cards have 4 important traits to take note of: Power, Damage, Character Ability, and Clan Ability. Power reflects how likely a character is going to win in combat, Damage is how much damage will be done to an opposing player if that character wins in combat, Character abilities are static abilities that aid you simply by having that character in play, and Clan abilities are static abilities that aid you if you have at least one other member of that characters Clan or Gang in play at the same time.
To play a game, you simply build a deck with a minimum of 8 characters that conforms to the rules of one of the four Urban Rivals formats. When a game starts 4 of your characters are randomly selected and automatically played to the field. You and your opponent then take turns choosing characters to send into combat. Players get to see each other's character choices when they are made, so choosing second has a bit of an advantage but the first picker alternates each round. Characters can only fight once per battle, so be sure not to send your major fighters to bat right at the start or you will be weak late game.
When you send a character into combat you may use “Pillz” to augment its stats. Spending pillz on power multiplies that character's power value by the amount of pillz you spent plus 1. Therefore if a character has a power of five, spending 1 pill makes it ten, 2 makes it fifteen and so on. You can also spend 3 pillz once per character to increase that character's damage by 2. Your chance of winning any particular character battle is your character's final power compared to the total power of both combatants. So let's say your character has a power of 7 and your opponent's character has a power of 9. Your chance of winning the battle is 7 out of 16 and your opponent's is 9 out of 16. However, if your character enters battle with a power total more than twice the opposing character's, he automatically wins the fight. When a character wins a battle it takes a chunk out of the opponent's life points equal to the character's damage rating. You start each game with 12 pillz and 12 life. First player to reduce their opponent to 0 life, or the player with the most life at the end of 4 battles wins. Simple enough right?
After a battle, all of your participating characters gain experience and when they gain enough they level up increasing their stats and abilities. More importantly though, when a character levels up their art changes to reflect their cool, new, stronger, badassitude, and this is extremely satisfying. In fact, you may find yourself playing with horrible cards just to see what their character art looks like when they gain a level.
You as a player also gain experience leveling up your “respect” level, which is used to determine what formats you can play, and what other players can challenge you (so veterans don't squash newbies). You do this over and over again trying to claw your way to the top of the Clint City ladder and that's it. That's the entirety of the game. Some of you might be thinking that a game this basic is stupid, but it's exactly the opposite! Urban Rivals is genius in its simplicity. Whole games are extremely short to play out, and especially quick lag free players can finish games in less than a minute. Since you get a tangible benefit of XP after every battle, even if you lose, you may find yourself playing game after game until hours have passed without even realizing it.
Each time you win a game you get “clintz” which are basically in game currency which you can use to buy single cards from other players. You can also post your own offers to sell unneeded cards on the market so the game does a good job of keeping a completely functioning in game economy. Complete boosters of 8 random characters have to be bought with actual money however, and if you are large into the game that might be the way to go. The rarer and more powerful characters that could simply open in a booster pack have “clintz” price tags that are so exorbitantly huge you'd end up playing for months and months before you could even come close to affording them.
I'm not going to give Urban Rivals big marks off because it's a shockwave game, as it's a very well put together shockwave game. Its not something many people would want to dump a lot of money into, and that's good because Urban Rivals is basically free to play. You can sign up easily by simply putting in a name, password, and e-mail, and then BAM you're playing, not even a confirmation e-mail to read. You automatically get your first booster of 8 characters and you can start battling right away.
There are two gripes I have with the game however but they are minor at best. One, because of the way the battle system works you can get literally get into battles you can't win if your opponent has much better cards than you. Luckily unless you are wandering the “free battle” rooms, challenges are kept to players of similar level, so more often than not this situation is avoided. Two, the interface is just a bit shoddy. For example, the button to “challenge” someone else cuts the word off at “Challe”. This doesn't cause the game to be any less playable as each of the in game buttons are pretty obvious in their function, but the whole thing just feels somewhat sloppy in the end.
Luckily Urban Rivals more than makes up for it through its astounding support. The Urban Rivals metagame is constantly analyzed under the proverbial electron microscope. When a card is too powerful the Urban Rivals team is quick to ban it in tournaments or even set it out of print to keep the metagame balanced. In addition all customer service questions are answered in mere minutes after they are asked, and tournaments are held several times daily for people who want to devote a bit more time to the game. The site is constantly updated and new cards are added all the time with new characters and gangs to start building up. Between you and me, there is just something amusing about a main page news update informing you that a gang of evil clowns has joined the ongoing war in Clint City.
Urban Rivals's cartoony atmosphere really helps to add to the playability of the game. You are essentially pitting badass cartoon character stereotypes against other badass cartoon character stereotypes and this gives the whole game a very “kiddy” feel to it that goes hand in hand with the simplicity of it all. Something tells me if they tried to bill the game as more realistic, something would feel off. A game like this really does want surfers on rocket powered skateboards fighting against lounge singers with laser eyes and luckily it has all that and more.
Urban Rivals really has to be appreciated for how simple it is. The community is welcoming, the shop and deck editors are simple but powerful, and the tournaments feel very epic. It has all of the traits of a good online TCG, it's just short and I don't find a problem with that. If I were to add my two cents into the mix, I would say that Urban Rivals is a good secondary game to play; a quick TCG fix when you don't have the time to devote to another more complicated system.
Urban Rivals was never really meant to be a game with multiple levels of strategy. It was meant to be a shockwave game that people could play between bouts of inactivity at work, and in this goal it greatly succeeds. The gameplay is simple, the art is well drawn, and the interface runs smooth on any browser. I mean the game won't be winning any game of the year awards any time soon, but it is a collectible trading card game at heart, and it is a massively multiplayer online game in practice, so if you are a fan of either of those genres but don't have time for a deeper commitment, Urban Rivals might be the game for you.
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Presentation Rating = 7.0
The shoddy interface can get annoying sometimes and you can only issue or be issued one challenge at a time. This makes finding opponents in Urban Rivals slower than it should be for a game that plays so quick.
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Gameplay Rating = 8.5
The gameplay feels a lot like a grade school game of War or Old Maid or Crazy Eights but with XP, and that's pretty cool! The gameplay and rules are all pretty simple and can be learned in a few minutes flat. Everything else simply comes naturally. The dedicated player will be making calculations to figure out what his best move is while the casual gamer will just toss some pillz into the mix and see what happens. Thankfully no matter what way you play the game it stays fun.
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Support Rating = 8.5
The Urban Rivals team is always at work adding new content to the game and banning old broken content. Heck wait a week and an entire new gang might arrive for some war in Clint city. Unfortunately, there's only so much they can do with a game this simple, but they certainly do as much as they can.
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Innovation Rating = 6.0
There is nothing really new and innovative about Urban Rivals but that dosen't make it a bad game, not in the least bit. Don't go into this game expecting the next big TCG because you'll let yourself down. Instead, go into it with the mindset of “I have five minutes to kill before my lunch break” or “I have some time before I'm picked up for the movies”, because honestly, it's just casual gaming, but it's good casual gaming.
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