Battle for Atluma is a video game based on a collectible card game based on a tabletop game. Hence, there's a discernible disconnection between the PSP title and its original inspiration. As a literal translation of the Warhammer WarCry card game, Atluma is mildly successful. But as a video game, it's frigid and unappealing, thanks to a lack of personality and a dreary campaign.
The mechanics themselves are familiar enough for anyone experienced with trading-card games. You take your deck into battle, muster your troops onto the battlefield, duke it out with your opponent, and then clean up the leftovers before the next battle. The value of each unit is calculated on the basis of strength, tactics, leadership, spell points, and other abilities. Once you select an attack card and a defender, battle commences, and you play action cards to further bolster your troops. Once each player is finished, the die is cast and a winner is chosen based on the final strength of each base unit.
Features like rout checks and blocking add strategic depth, but even if you're new to WarCry, Battle for Atluma is pretty easy to pick up after an hour or two. But there's more to a decent video game than a direct translation of card-game mechanics, yet that's all that it really delivers. A story may have helped matters, but what you get is a flimsy scenario regarding the recovery of the Atluma Crystal. The campaign is simply a bunch of progressively harder battles as you take on champions of the various factions. Warhammer fans may enjoy the presence of the orcs and high elves they love so much, but nothing feels at stake--it's just a group of disconnected encounters.
The rest of the presentation is a collection of missed opportunities. The cards are exact representations of their physical counterparts, featuring plenty of beautiful fantasy artwork. In fact, they look like scanned images and are certainly not tailor-made for the platform. In the midst of the playfield, you can't read the cards, and even if you view a card more closely, you still can't make out many details. You can view a full-screen version, which requires you to flip your PSP horizontally, but it's all a lot of trouble just to see the printed details. And even this version is blurry, not the crisp depiction you'd hope to see.
