I applaud the attempt, at long last, to make a MoM-alike that keeps the most important features of the original: You are the big wizard in the tower, too big to be a unit on the map, and your choices about magic and magical resources are the most important choices in the game.
I am among the many folks who would be ecstatic with a simple remake of the original with just higherI applaud the attempt, at long last, to make a MoM-alike that keeps the most important features of the original: You are the big wizard in the tower, too big to be a unit on the map, and your choices about magic and magical resources are the most important choices in the game.
I am among the many folks who would be ecstatic with a simple remake of the original with just higher resolution graphics and the bugs fixed. For years we have continued to play the original using DOSbox, and seen various attempts at the genre fail to remember what made it great.
And on that front, this is a good game. The setup screens had me nearly jumping up and down in my seat, calling my wife (who plays nothing but MoM and Solitaire) over to share the excitement. Basically the same rules, presented nicely at a higher (if still not modern) resolution, with the slightly more sophisticated overlapping spell schools lifted from Sorcerer King and its predecessors.
But sadly, the game is just not playable because of two crucially bad design decisions.
Merely annoying (if you save before every turn) is the bad choice of touch-centric mouse/touch UI. There are no tooltips; to get information on a square you must double-click/tap *with no army selected*. To move an army, you must double-click/tap *with it selected*. This virtually guarantees that you will end up wasting two turns of an army's movement racing off toward some square you just wanted to get info on, and then moving back. The sad thing is, there are many examples of doing this right, where the first tap shows info and a path, and the second tap (not required to be fast enough for a double-tap) confirms the move.
But what really kills the game is the grotesque choice of a busy, not even that pretty and poorly thought out 3D main map display. There is far too much visual clutter and it's hard to tell which objects are significant and which are just decorative or are terrain. This would only be annoying if the view angle were close to vertical, so you could still understand the geography, and so you could confidently know which square you were clicking/tapping. But at the shallow angle they chose, the clutter makes it hard to understand the layout of the terrain and things like borders, and makes it all too easy to click on the square "in front of" the one you want (and i shudder to think how much worse this would be with a tapping finger).
If Wastelands were to re-work this game with a sensible click/touch screen and a simple 2D main map interface (or a 3D one with a high viewing angle and the option to zoom further out), this might be a really great game. But the current horrible UI choices make it unplayable.… Expand
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