Age of Wonders

The detail and love the creators put into this game charmed me so much that to this day I have a nostalgic sense of playfulness & well-being just looking at the cover. Sooo many hours & days put into this. It also cursed me into judging other games too harshly before giving them a decent chance. For instance, HoMM; I bought HoMM #5 box set and was too disapointed to continue playing it after an hour or 2. The battle screen just had the units standing there facing each other zapping each other until one side won. No charging, taking cover, setting up your flanks, etc. No turning the battlefield to mud to slow down their speedsters or or sending a dragon around their backside to wipe out their ballista thats now out of the protective range of their big dudes. And that's just the battle map, the main map is just as strategically fun. Anyway, when HoMM just had them standing there without any maneuvering necessary I just shut it down. Not fair I know, when I see all the devoted fans it has but I was spoiled by AoW. Here's the thing, In all my playing, I've never completed the main campaign that comes with the game. Yep, never! That's because I stated downloading maps (scenarios) online from the thousands of submissions by other users. Even made a few of my own. The only other game that has taken as much of my time as this has been CivIII Complete.

I used to play AOW2 and AOW3 for years. I had no idea how awesome the original AOW was.

I'm still fairly new to 4X TBS games, and this one has deepened by enjoyment for the genre. I played the campaign mode which was challenging and fun. I deducted one star because I feel the campaign could be one or two scenarios shorter for an overall better experience, but it was well worth the time spent.

Older strategy gamer who owned these on CD. Tough getting the hang of the strategy but very rewarding once you do.

A very interesting and addictive game, with a great core system that mixes ideas from Master of Magic and HoMM, but sadly it lacks the polish and creativity that made games like HoMM 3 so endlessly fun. Having finished the Cult of Storms campaign, I can say I enjoyed a lot the first half of the game, but around the middle your hero gets ridiculously overpowered while your enemies seem to get infinite troop resources to the point the best (and only) strategy is simply to beeline to the enemies’ main hero and punch it to death so their whole faction dies. And basically all maps play like this at that point. Another issue that prevents it from reaching HoMM3 levels of greatness is how similar the factions are. Despite the game having a bunch of different races, they all share a lot of the same units, and most of the truly unique ones are locked behind late-game buildings that you only really get to use in the later maps, which ironically don’t feel that important either, since you’ll mostly be relying on overpowered heroes at that point. Add to this the fact that the different campaigns share many maps, and there isn’t much reason to play the other campaign paths. The maps themselves are mostly fine, but could have used more variety, at times I felt like the few maps that tried anything different were copy pasted ideas of the HoMM campaigns. Also, the AI really sucks. In most battles, if you let the auto-resolve handle things, you’ll lose way more units than necessary, spellcasting units waste their mana on nothing and units die without doing anything useful. So you’re basically forced to play out every single fight manually, even the easy ones, just to avoid dumb losses. That gets extremely annoying, especially on big maps where enemies will summon endless hordes if you try a turtle approach. Overall this game shows lots of potential, but it feels like it needed more time in the oven.