Posted on: November 22, 2020
wilkan
Verified ownerGames: 509 Reviews: 155
All-Seeing AI and Zero Upkeep CPU
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.
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