Lords of Magic: Special Edition

One of the most forgotten gems of pc gaming. Urak is magical world ravaged by a war between eight faiths. Each faith has a mortal enemy directly opposite of it's alignment; for instance: Order/Chaos, Water/Fire, Life/Death, Earth/Air. The main plot follows Golgoth, the terrible god of Death, and his most trusted disciple Balkoth as he attempts to scour the land of all other faiths and life so that Death may reign supreme. Each faith has it's own strengths and weaknesses, it's own unique spells, and units. This title is held in high regard for it's excellent high fantasy tale. Not to mention a wonderfully orchestrated score worthy of any music collection.

The original release of the game aside, the Special Edition of Lords of Magic is one of the best games ever released by Sierra, and that's saying something given their track record. There are plenty of great reviews already on this game so I won't repeat what's already been said. I bought this game new in '99 and still have my original copy. It's a game I install at once every couple of years and then spend disgusting amounts of time playing. It's that good. My favorite starting champion is a Life Thief. Elven archers are insanely overpowered, but it's still great fun. This is definitely in the "Must Play At Least Once Before You Die" category.

I remember that I loved this when I was a kid and I was very happy to play it again. The gameplay is original and very interesting, with all the races, heroes and the experience system. Nevertheless, I also found it quite unpolished as there are a number of things that don't work well. Among other things, most magic spells are essentially unreachable because of their crazy development times, moving throughout the map also takes too much time (and there are no shortcuts), the way conquering other races works isn't really enjoyable, some tactics/units/items are unbalanced. The game misses a decent tutorial, and the main campaign scenario isn't very interesting because the AI is abolutely terrible at strategy. Overall I liked discovering the gameplay very much, but the game soon started to be tiresome. I'd only recommend this game for people who played it in their youth and for hardcore turn-based strategy fans.

I am admittedly biased in favor of this game, having played hundreds of hours of it over the past 2 decades. It's occasionally clunky; having to deal out your artifacts to champions, the party formation, boarding ships... But I still feel anyone who enjoys fantasy/RPG strategy needs to give this a shot. The game got replay value. Out the wahzoo. 8 faiths to choose from, each with their own units and spell trees; and enough differentiation between them you that WILL want to try them all. A large map with randomized dungeons where you find epic gear or spells for your champions; the true endgame, and collecting all the artifacts will be a lengthy journey. And you have to do this while fending off the Lord of Death, who glides around the world, slaughtering the other Lords. The bad is dated animation, clunky interface, a middling balance between Faiths, exploits... The good is dated animation(it's hilarious) the voice acting (quote-worthy) and the heroic feel of the game. And the city-building mechanic is the same for all Faiths- so you easily retain the fundamentals for your many replays. One of my favorites and I wish there were more like it.

I remember playing this a lot many years ago and was nostalgic to try to again. After playing it for a couple hours, I think I some old games are just better left as memories. The game is very slow placed, but not in a good way. Most of the game is spent walking around (it takes forever just to move from one capital to another), waiting on resources (even the most basic units are incredibly expensive), waiting on healing, and babysitting your territory against the true enemy of the game; the marauders and the terrible UI. Unless you're playing on hard, the other nations don't do much. They mainly just sit around and await you or Death to come take them over. The marauders on the other hand keep spawning out of nowhere, constantly take over anything you don't leave garrisoned, and the UI doesn't tell when they've gotten into your unit production buildings. This is a constant aggravation when you have 3-4 capitals and you keep losing a barracks (setting you back 10 turns of troop training) because you missed the very tiny grey flag before hitting Next Turn. Most of the game is spent trundling around with a Doom Stack of units until you can afford a super unit and a bunch of high level mages (attack magic always does fixed damage), then you go stomp on the Death leader and get declared the winner. Despite their being 8 nations to play as, there's little replay value because the game plays out the same every time. Since the start is always racing to take over the other friendly nations, giving you access to all their unit production, you're never actually just playing the nation to chose to start with. There are some special scenarios that are a bit more interesting since there some actual story, but suffer the same annoyances (slow movement, slow healing, always waiting on resources). Ultimately I think LoM was good in its time, but has not aged well at all. Other more modern strategy games simply offer better UI, more depth, and much better game flow.