Most reviews (and I assume, players) are on the mobile platforms, thus leaving free real estate on the PC version to leave a review.Most reviews (and I assume, players) are on the mobile platforms, thus leaving free real estate on the PC version to leave a review.
Yu-gi-oh! (YGO) Duel Links is an adaptation of the popular trading card game of the same name, designed with mobile devices in mind, but ported over to the PC (with cross-platform play enabled). Instead of the regular YGO format, the game uses a simplified one, more preferable for mobile devices, called "speed dueling" with a smaller play area (for example, 3 spots to place your monster cards instead of 5), reduced health total and smaller deck size (20 instead of 40). This leads to duels that often end very quickly, between 1 and 3 turns usually (this is not unusual for the physical game too). Further more, every player is represented by a certain character from the YGO anime, refered to as "Legendary Duelists" in the game, who each possess abilities that you can use in-game, such as starting with a higher health pool, playing a certain card at the start of the duel and so on. These changes make it very friendly with small times to spare, as Hearthstone (and especially MtG games if Arena makes it to mobile) take significantly longer to close out matches, while in Duel Links it's very quick.
The way this game (along with, well, being YGO) makes itself stand out is play modes and events. Instead of only being able to play against people and awful bots, the game features a massive Single-player focused side of gameplay, where you duel AI opponents with a large variety of decks (which improve as you level-up your account). These duelists can be random characters or iconic characters from the anime, and playing against them gives you resources that you use to get cards, such as gold and materials (for crafting, refered to as "card trading" in the game), keys to duel specific legendary duelists for their cards (for instance, dueling Yugi gives you a chance to get Dark Magician as a reward). You can sink dozens of hours into the game just dueling AI opponents, since once they start being high level, they field strong decks and know how to use them often optimally, which can make them a challenge at best, and a good time-sink at worst. You can also duel versus them automatically, to speed up the grind.
There's always a number of events going on, that allow you to speed up progression and unlock exclusive rewards in the meantime, like getting special cards, otherwise unobtainable playable characters, card sleeves and mats, and so on. This is an incentive to keep you logging in at least every once in a while to see what event is running, and to see if the rewards interest you.
The important question is whether or not you can be competitive without paying. The answer is yes, you can. When you start off, you'll get rewarded with a bunch of gems (the f2p currency in the game), with which you can obtain a lot of packs. However, it's easy to burn through them on packs you don't need, so it's highly reccomended to look up budget decks to be competitive early, unless you're a YGO fan going in and already know what you want to play ("I'm for sure playing a Blue-Eyes deck" and such). If one wants to push high spots in ranked, shelling out will become a requirement, since new cards come out all the time, and you often will want to stock up on them to be able to use the new strong decks first.
Overall, It's an easy game to recommend for people who already like YGO, but it's also good for those who want a game to sink a few minutes or hours into every once in a while to pass time, since there's always new things to get, new events to see, and playing versus AI takes off a lot of the pressure associated with card games, while still getting good rewards out of it (for instance Hearthstone, where going on a losing streak hampers your gold acquisition considerably)… Expand
