Like most modern TBS, it at long last delivers the vast scale of virtual worlds we all dreamed of inhabiting while playing the first HoMM, Civ or MoO titles back in the eighties and nineties. Unfortunately its resource and economic systems are still bare-bones gold farming and its political system nowhere near approaches the much more seriously developed Stellaris, for instance, rendering political decisions largely irrelevant. Moreover, its randomly generated maps dedicate too few tiles to every geographic location and lack any coherent determinants for terrain like latitude, altitude, humidity, etc., resulting in an unimpressive hodgepodge of ice bordering deserts bordering jungles.
I won't speak as to its campaign. I play TBS games (especially fantasy-based ones) to build my own empire, not to be built up by someone else's imagination. For all I know, AoW might boast the most enthralling storytelling in the history of gaming... but I doubt it. Its flavor text, while not terrible, deliberately sticks to utility while cautiously avoiding flamboyance.
Its greatest inspiration seems Heroes of Might and Magic 4*,what with the heroes on the battlefield, line of sight blocking, four-tier unit system, units roaming free of their heroes around the map and so forth. But compaaring it favorably to the HoMM games or Elemental: Fallen Enchantress would be unfair in itself. While less immersive, AoW3 brings so many gameplay improvements to older fantasy TBS formulae that in terms of round-by-round pugilism it truly does incomparably outshine its competitors. Look at this:
(The green dwarvish druid side's mine.) Five minutes into my first game I was ready to trash AoW3 for limiting its army size to six units. It more than compensates for this with its adjacent hex rule. Any armies bordering the tile being attacked participate in the fight. The mechanic kills two old roc-sized TBS birds with one stone. First, it allows for much more scalable battles, from 2-3 unit skirmishes to... well, that clusterfuck above, without just building up a single massive steamroller stack in HoMM fashion. Second, for truly epic fights it allows you to jockey for advantageous positioning to split your enemy's forces while maintaining your own army's numerical superiority. Here's the same exact fight from a different angle:
Even better, the AI can at times be jaw-droppingly ruthless in exploiting this mechanic to its own advantage, hunting down your flimsy exploration parties with multiple stacks of top-tier units.
Combat mechanics seem to have been refined from earlier games in the series:
Units have up to three attacks per round, with movement eating into these gradually instead of an all or nothing range game. The flanking system actually flanks your target making it turn to retaliate in addition to merely slapping a numeric damage bonus on the attacker. Tactical options like first strike or defense debuffs or disengagement attacks are all implemented to at least the quality of other TBS or tactical RPGs. Heroes are pleasantly customizable from a wide array of class-based (or not) abilities, with weapons adding even more relevant in-combat options. Morale bonuses, summoning magic, magic damage and resistances ranging up to total immunities, the combat system manages to incorporate almost all the old favorites of its genre nearly seamlessly.
Though I'm still frustrated by the odd minor interface inconsistency (e.g. right-clicking versus left clicking for spells vs attacks, or negotiation window clunkiness) most all of these have been smoothed out to a satisfactory degree and the game's very easy to get into and make one's own. At long last, I can applaud Age of Wonders for outdoing its competitors at the tactical level, and from here I can easily see it Finally! taking HoMM's place as our go-to reference for fantasy TBS. In fact, being pleasantly impressed by its basics I decided to shill out another $15 for its expansions, and "building up" seems to be exactly what they've been doing, shoring up their weaker elements of immersion. A couple of the new music tracks are real humdingers, and new units show a true eye for artistic detail:
Cadavers are just skeletons, zombies, the basic, dime-a-dozen necromantic unit all too familiar to fantasy roleplayers. AoW3's version stands out by... crawling. Simple as that. They stuck more individuals into the unit, visually, than for other types, to get the undead swarm angle across, and instead of clattering or shambling, their idle animation has them crawling around in their filthy rags, a writhing mass of the wretched damned occasionally lifting a bony hand in feeble supplication... or hunger? Beautiful little piece of work, whoever worked on them. As I mentioned vis-a-vis Pillars of Eternity, once your product gets its basics right, it's these sorts of little details which will make or break your success as a truly memorable series.
I've already bought their next game, Planetfall, though I'm giving it a few months for the more obvious bugs to get fixed. Really hoping to see these games gain the strategic, roleplaying and immersive elements to match their very promising tactical side.
______________________________________________
* (or possibly Master of Magic, which I should really get around to playing)
No comments:
Post a Comment