Age of Wonders

Surpassed my expectations

6 of 5 must play. 5 of 5 great story great gameplay. 4 of 5 great story average gameplay. 3 of 5 average story average gameplay. 2 of 5 play only if it's your favorite genre. 1 of 5 play if you have nothing better to do. 0 of 5 play if you're a masochist. -1 of 5 avoid. Age of Wonders score is 2 of 5.

There's a reason GoG was giving this away. AoW isn't even worth considering. I'll go so far as to declare it unplayable. Like every other dysfunctional 'strategy' game with obscene 'challenge' AoW pummels you with overwhelming odds and AI that doesn't abide by the same limitations as you. Resource management is horribly bungled. You simply can't take in enough income to amass units quickly enough and the AI will swarm you within a few turns with superior numbers that it couldn't have reasonably acquired were it playing by the rules. The game doesn't offer any worthwhile strategic options. AoW's main feature - spellcasting - is too limited to be of any use. This is not a thinking man's game as it simply doesn't offer enough options. The fog of war is too dense and doesn't provide enough of a comprehensive view of the state of play for you to make any informed decisions, and the sporatic means by which the AI will randomly throw itself at you with little rhyme or reason makes the opposition too random to prepare any sort of careful defense. A game this horribly designed doesn't even warrant mention of its atrocious interface - one of the worst I have ever seen. - Unbalanced to the point of unplayability - Mechanical design so poor it breaks everything, especially in regards to resource management and production - Shallow: AoW is 'dumb' and doesn't afford any worthwhile strategic or tactical options to make use of - AI that prevails through sheer force of numbers and by ignoring the mechanics by which players must abide - Underwhelming, even useless spellcasting. - Atrocious interface Give this one a pass

NOT RECOMMENDED. The AI enemy will ruthlessly crush you ruthlessly with multiple army stacks while you are economically and time-wise crushed trying to maintain even one. All this by turn 5. On Easy. On first campaign mission. Is this kind of "balanced" experience what you want to pay for? Usually the excessive difficulty is a lazy-ass ploy to difficulty-pad to compensate for lacking content. But no, the campaigns are about 15 levels. Provided that you consider the repetitive kill-all-levels in a slow-ass turn-based game good time. Apparently the devs incorporated multiple modes of AI from do-nothing to spamming-fliers-to-cap-your-remote-towns-as-the-upkeep-system-instantly-kneecaps-you-for-trying-to-defend-anything. Why have a difficulty option for easy if you are not gonna provide that? Also, a lot technical glitches with the game. 1. If you ALT+TAB from the game, your colors get messed up and your screen split in half with the halves being visual copies. 2. There is no options / settings menu to set up sound volumes or anything else in-game. There is some "Settings" executable, though it is the usual game launcher. For me, it gives the options "Install" and "Exit." If I choose Install, it demands an installation media ("Please insert the Age of Wonders CD"). That's the last thing you want to see with a digital copy of software with the retail discs nowhere in sight. 3. The worst game save screen ever. After extensive trial-and-erroring, I found out that clicking on the file name selection descriptor line in the bottom half of the screen actually lets you edit it and create your own save file names. Because saving on that "autosave" might not be useful as it most likely gets overwritten as soon as you press End Turn. Overall, AOW is a design downgrade even from the first HoMM game, with a worst aspects of unit and city managing taken from Civilizations and Master of Magic. Paradox publishes it bc the original one had issues.

Friendly word of advice skip this game and play the rest in The Age Of Wonders series; given how awful its outdated graphics now are, compared to its successors.