Hello everyone, I am the wonderful Gordoth Enodious, a slav wannabe who has been fattened over my childhood with Heroes of Might and Magic 3Hello everyone, I am the wonderful Gordoth Enodious, a slav wannabe who has been fattened over my childhood with Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and I am talking about Age of Wonders.
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it. Also, I am a gameplay designer and a writer so I got the credentials to talk smack.
Gameplay
Age of Wonders is a top down, turn based strategy that utilizes two different modes of play. The first play-mode is the world-map mope (dubbed so by me) and the second is the battle-map mode (dubbed so by, you guessed it, your mom).
The world-map mode utilizes only the mouse, as does the battle-map mode, for movement and other actions. There are a few hotkeys but I did not use them in my adventures through the game, but for maximum efficiency, it would be a decently good idea to make oneself acquainted with these… And quick.
The world-map mode involves controlling different units to go about from hex to hex (as there is a hex grid in place) and interact with creatures and objects. Creatures could be neutral parties of units roaming about or simply standing still, or enemy parties of units moving with their own purpose. Upon interacting with a creature, the player is asked if they would like to resolve the battle, if there would be one, manually or automatically.
As it is known, ladies and gentlemen, resolving the battle automatically saves between 10 and 60 minutes, but yields a result that is not as good as what might happen were the player to take control and deal with the situation manually. The AI that is used to make decisions in the automatic battles is quite stupid, but that can be somewhat excused as the game was made in the year of 1999.
Units have unique abilities, but, most of the time, said abilities are chance-based or simply passive, and so they are relatively interesting, but they are not exciting. Sure, I might find it cool that the leprechaun had 3 attacks against him miss, in a row, no less, but it is not exciting in the same way clicking the “big fire” skill of a unit and throwing a massive ball of flame at the enemy is.
On top of that, there appears to be an incredible discrepancy between the quality of units. Some units are stupendously grand, while others are miserably weak, even though both share the same upgrade level requirement for their recruitment.
The hero unit is the great fun of the game, both because it offers RPG elements, and because of its ability to cast spells.
The hero unit is a great contributor to the lack of balance, mainly due to the fact that the player can pick to level up the hero unit’s stats, defense, resistance and health, and then produce an incredibly hard to kill goon that can take out between 1 and 16 enemies by itself. I’ve done it, and it’s incredible. The way defense and attack works in this game is very weird, and so it makes very little sense.
The only issue that exists in the world-map mode, alas, is a major one. When the player ends their turn, if they have EVER seen an area, that area is permanently uncovered (unless a specific condition is met), and any enemy that moves through areas EVER seen by the player have their movement simulated. That really slows down the game, but it allows the player to see what their enemies are doing.
There is the option of having the turns be played simultaneously, although the game is still turn-based, but in those situations it is much harder to keep track of what the enemy is doing, not only because the player does not have their camera pinned to the moving units, but also because of the fact that the event system is very bare-bones and provides very little information to the player.
The player is always at a disadvantage, because the AI is very simple and barren, thus that is the only difficulty that the game designers could think of to implement into the game. Artificial difficulty, which is not about overcoming an enemy through outsmarting them or outplaying them, but is about slowly whittling down their armies until the player has more cities than the enemy does.
Overall, the game is quite wonderful when it comes to some aspects of its gameplay, and quite lacking in wonder when it comes to others. Alas, its issues make it become quite tedious after a while, and so I cannot, in good conscience, give it that high a Gameplay score. 1/3
Presentation
Age of Wonders looks quite good. The sprite-work is spectacular, the detail on some battle-maps is awesome, the hexes on the world-map are well crafted into something that looks quite good.
The sound effects are a mixed bag. The music of the game is average. 2/3
Story
More on that on muh tumblr, 5k word limit, bby mode metacritic can't handle actual criticism
3/3
Legendary Point
No
Conclusion
6/10. Age of Wonders is above average in quality. Go play it if you like strats… Expand
