Age of Wonders (review)

When Heroes of Might and Magic [HoMM] first appeared, everyone was caught by surprise. The gaming scene simply wasn't expecting a turn based game, as all products were trying hard to have plenty of simultaneous stuff happening...

HoMM is set in mystical lands, Tolkien and D&D inspired. You decide what some knights / heroes should do, for the benefit of your Realm. Heroes have to move, learn and fight, and everything they can accomplish requires a fixed number of turns... when you run out of turns for all your heroes, you must pass the game to your adversary, who will then manage his troops. When he is finished, you get to play again.

There is nothing new nor wrong with turn-based games, but they did / do go against the flow. Surprisingly, or maybe not, the formula works beautifully with strategy games, allowing the player to think and plan every move, and cutting some of the stress that the real time strategy [RTS] genre imposes. I guess that many people appreciate that, even if just for a change.

HoMM introduces this Age of Wonders [AoW] review, because AoW is "just" a more sophisticated HoMM, with a few tech novelties, like the revised turn based system that reduces A LOT the waiting time between turns.

More: you can now set the game's resolution, up to any hardware supported resolution, but I advise you not go past 1024x768, unless if using a 50 inch monitor: your heroes and all other graphics on screen, are too small for high resolutions.

As always, you can have "quick" (always a matter of hours...) single player games, or dive deep into the "campaigns", which are my favorite candy.

Maybe the greatest novelty for hardcore gamers, is the much stronger Dungeon & Dragons [D&D] rules. You can choose your alignment, from good to evil, and you can also build a custom hero, who will be able to cast spells, according to the circles of his / her alignment (earth, air, fire, water, life and death), up to 3 different circles.

The primary effect of your options is on the spells you'll be able to use, but there are many indirect consequences, such as what creatures that will be willing to join your party, and how diplomatic will be your relations with other races.

Towns now require greater strategy. You can no longer enter a town and just "buy" creatures - you must set a demographics politic, and queue the production of units. On the same trend, you can NOT just "upgrade" the city - you must queue resources for that purpose. Queues have capacity for 5 orders, but you can check to "loop" them. Wise.

Fights are now on (fixed isometric) 3D perspective. As always, combat can be automatic or manual, but I noticed that the automatic choice isn't producing the always brilliant results, it did on HoMM.

Another novelty is how you bring more troops to your hero's army. In prior turn-based similar games, you would have to drive the hero to a castle, then transport troops from the castle to the hero; now, everything is much more natural: troops can reside and move outside the castle, and can be commanded to travel towards any hero.

The big question that remains unanswered is: is it more fun? Well... yes and no... IF you are looking for a strategy game that relies on few variables, the original HoMM might be better; but if you are looking for something that is wider on choices and thus differentiates gamers better, you surely will prefer AoW. I prefer AoW.

100% compatible with Windows 2000. No bugs found.

Top Gear video - coming tomorrow

Today's Top Gear (a BBC World program), tested a specially prepared Porsche... I had such a fun, watching Andy throttling it up, that I didn't resist doing a stream of real media video, that I will upload tomorrow.

Just for your information, the car was pushed up to 180 mph... (290 kph) during the test... cough cough...

So, the videos section will be updated (finally!).