Age of Wonders

Despite its age, the original Age of Wonders holds up fantastically, even compared to its successors. The setting is the standard Tolkienesque fantasy, and the gameplay is what you would expect from a TBS of the kind - a complex magic system, diverse races with different bonuses and drawbacks, hero customization with lots of options. It doesn't excel at at any one, but does each one robustly well. (Except the heroes, who are quite unbalanced, sadly.) What makes it truly exceptional, however, is the atmosphere. Each little part of the game world is beautifully and carefully drawn, with subtle tones that stand in stark contrasst to the vividly colored world that HOMM3 popularized. Add to that the beautiful music, and AoW manages to make such a stereotypical fantasy world look and feel truly unique.

I would have adored this game as a child, the artwork is stunning! The music is great! I've spent the entire weekend absolutely hooked on this retro gem. I had issues with crashing after starting the campaign but found the fix within GOG support, link if you need it: https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020012933-Age-of-Wonders-exception-during-MapViewer-ShowScene?product=gog If you like turn-based strategy with beautiful pixel art, this is it. 5/5 from me.

As a long time RTS fan, Age of Wonders was my first foray into TBS games,and it truly was a wonderful discovery. Age of Wonders seamlessly blends a traditional Fantasy Turn Based Strategy with a complex Magic system allowing players to explore strategies that would otherwise be completely impractical. There is nothing as satisfying to teleport a small strike force into your enemies backlands, drawing away his army, only to blitz in and take his strongest position. This fantastical element allows players to be amazingly creative and spontaneous, particularly when playing online against other human players, which keeps the game fresh and tense. With a branching story driven campaign and an endlessly replayable skirmish and multiplayer mode Age of Wonders manages to hold a gamers attention for an astoundingly long time (particularly considering it's measly 157mb size). The AI in both the campaign and skirmish modes can range from polite and accommodating to brutally challenging. The music present in this game is beautiful and does an excellent job of creating the Tolkeinesque atmosphere of the Age of Wonders world. This game has aged beautifully and the sound and graphics, though in many ways more simple than more modern games, can still draw the player into the world of the game; Age of Wonders is no less enthralling in 2011 than in 1999. This game would make an excellent addition to any strategy fan's collection. Age of Wonders is an excellent example of why we as gamers really appreciate GoG, because good games do not stop being good when they get old, they just become Good Old Games.

There is not any ‘nostalgia factor’ at all in my review. I’m honestly a mere beginner in the Age of Wonders series. Installation on Linux (Wine) was somewhat tricky. Followed a tip from a Winehq report and unchecked window manager decoration and control for AoW in Winecfg. Then the game is playable windowed and you can drag the window to your screen resolution still the UI does not scale accordingly and Alt+tab does not behave as it should. Not a biggie but then I came across endless error messages, crashes to desktop and forced reboots. The problems thankfully were solved thanks to the unofficial patch made by this good fellow ‘Int19h’ (see Age of Wonder series discussion here on GOG forum). Early on in the Keepers campaign I was pleasantly surprised by the competitive AI on default difficulty settings. I had to think ‘strategically’, carefully explore the map, adjust my army composition to enemy units in the easiest of all maps! Subsequent maps became daunting always in disadvantage against the rival clans and challenged by sneaky attacks in my rare lines the moment the bulk of your armies advance on a remote location on the map. The what-it-seemed obvious for me choice lore-wise, to ally Elves, Dwarves and Halflings turned the very last map to a nearly impossible feat. Of course AI is perfect. Diplomacy is just cosmetic in single-player. The 2D graphics have aged well though. Story / lore are admittedly decent despite the generic tolkienesque high-fantasy setting. I can only compare it to Civ3, HoMM3 from this era but those were great ones and AoW emerges victorious. It is a solid strategy game 20 years after its release and my very best 2 or 3-euro investment in gaming so far. It just cries for a game engine re-implementation for greater compatibility with modern systems.

For some reason I keep coming back to this game. I know Shadow Magic is a better game technically, but the original just has a charm to it that's been lost in successive titles. Sure, gameplay is engaging, the soundtrack is wonderful, the artwork is brilliant, and it holds up well on modern machines. But for me, the reason I'm always drawn back are the sound effects. God they are hilariously stupid - but that's what makes it so damn good.