Master of Magic

I love the updated graphics and expanded options, but it takes 3-4 minutes between turns for the enemy moves even though it's set to instant. Once you're a few dozen turns into the game it turns it into a boring sleeper waiting for your next turm.

Once I mastered the mechanics and learned to decipher the visuals, I found the game to be fun to play with enough Master of Magic goodness to keep me in that one-more-turn frame of mind that all good strategy titles inspire. The updated production values are much appreciated, the game play is engaging, the music is pleasant and the rules e-book is well put together and worth a look. It’s priced about midway between a Triple A publisher game and a budget title and that seems to be good value for the money especially when I think of some of the painfully under cooked big budget titles I’ve wasted money on in recent years. As with any game I enjoy enough to play for many hours, I did accumulate a ‘wish list’. A lot of it came under the headings of wanting things to look better (such as jazzing up the dreary place-holder screen going in to battles or ditching the baseball card look of the Spell Discovered screen (I want to see Kali’s bod). There were a few game play issues like more building options for settlements, terrain having a tactical effect on battles and speeding up the slug-like load times. Maybe some of these things will come with patches, or more likely in DLC, if Slitherene numbers crunchers decide game sales warrant additional content. I bought the original MoM when it first came out way back in the Nineties and was hooked in spite of its game crashing bugs. I kept playing every day while I waited for the floppy disk with the fix-it patch to arrive in the mail (ah, the ‘good old days’). I have never stopped playing the game. I still have my 462 page Prima Strategy Guide from 1995. I’ve purchased plenty of titles since then with claims or at least hints of being MoM’s spiritual successor only for the games to be some combination of disappointing, underwhelming or pretty good but missing the level of ‘lose yourself in the game’ that MoM provided. This one is good, it’s immersive and it’s MoM.

Master of Magic is one of the few fantasy strategy games to stick around. This remake has been particularly close to the spirit of the original. With new DLC being added onto the old through easy module menu, the game has been given new life. I highly recommend this for any fantasy strategy player. My biggest critique is that the art, though well done, seems to be missing the same heart in many scenes.

I played the Origanal Master of Magic and this is a good remake BUT it has it flaws IMO. Some good points are: Loads of wizards to pick from/portrats. Lots of skills to pick from. Humor. More detales on races. Better looking Some bad points are: Casting a lot of spells should line up but it just kind of holds the spell in a side bar. Heros no longer count to keeping happy. New units will auto be grouped togeather and if in guard mode so will the new units (like settlers). Cam auto follows units. Can be hit and miss if the units will have a path when you end the turn All in all I'd say the game is 95% good

So I tried to hold off on leaving a review to see if they fix "the little things". I gave them my recommendations to help make this more like the original Master Of Magic but they didn't take it to heart. Here are my gripes: 1) In the original MOM, if a town increased in population, if a building was complete, you would get a pop up notification on screen. On New MOM, there is no pop up notification, and as far as when a building is complete, it appears in the bottom right corner as a footnote. This makes it easy to miss so you just continue turns while your town is making housing. 2) When a unit is built in a town, it automatically guards, so if a town builds a unit and, going back to #1, you miss the little footnote in the corner that the unit is done, you miss turns when you could have been giving the unit orders. 3) Lets say designate a unit to move to the north west from the south, and another unit to the northeast from the south, and the units manage to intercept each other, OK, now one of the units touches the other, it will ignore where you were sending it and instead automatically join the unit it merged with and start following that unit. 4) With as incredible as Caster Of Magic is, I am shocked that they didn't make New MOM more like Caster. Instead they made it LESS like the original MOM.