Eador: Genesis

Since I played Master of Magic I hoped for a similar game that I would love as much. All the other tries somehow didn't catch my interest as much (the last one being Warlock). This one, despite dated graphics, managed to keep me playing for turns and turns. Positive: I love turn based combat and this has become increasingly rare. Also, this game isn't afraid of confronting the player with complex choices and depth. It takes a bit to learn everything, but after that it provides a deep gameplay that keeps the game interesting. The learning curve is well designed. Negative: If you need fancy graphics you won't like this. The technics are rather dated and on my highend pc the sound crackles every now and then. Bottom line: If you can live with the drawbacks and liked games like Heroes of Might and Magic and Master of Magic you should give this a try. Chances are high you will like it.

A friend of mine said to me, "that Eador: Genesis looks pretty good." I had never heard of it, but after reading the brief description of the game given on GOG, I was definitely intrigued. That friend and myself are avid fans of the turn-based strategy genre. We spent our teenage nights gathering friends (some willing, some unwilling) around his PC to play Warlords III until the early hours of the morning. Since those days we must have played just about every TBS available, from the well known Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic (my personal favourite), to the more obscure Warlock: Master of the Arcane. I say this to make clear that I'm no stranger to the genre, and so when I say that I've been playing Eador: Genesis almost non-stop since I bought it, you know it has to be offering something pretty special. In this review I want to mention the aspects of the game that I wanted to know about before I bought it. Personalisation is very important to my friends and I. We always loved naming our heroes in Warlords III. Lets face it, you care more about heroes when they're named after your friends. I'm not sure why this simple feature is absent from so many TBS games (even the mighty Age of Wonders), but it is absent here too. Instead, you create a "profile" when you first begin the game in which you choose your name, the name of the place you came from, and design a very basic flag for yourself. You do not appear in the game yourself (like in Warlords IV), but the name you chose as your home will be the name of your starting province. In that starting province you can recruit heroes, soldiers, and construct buildings from a technology tree so vast that it's hard to know where to begin. What's interesting is that you could spend hours of gameplay even just in your starting province, since each province can be explored and all manner of encounters are waiting for you. When you lead a hero and his troops into a new province, you claim it after the initial battle, but until you've explored it to a decent extent, your people will find it difficult to settle there, and thus expansion will be slow. You need heroes to both explore and lead armies anywhere, and there are four types: warrior, wizard, ranger and commander. Their names and starting gear are randomly generated, and each have their own strengths and weaknesses. I think this is one of my favourite aspects of the game, because the heroes really are good at what they're meant to be. Ever played a game and been like, "WTF, this guy is meant to be a warrior but he dies to a giant spider!" Well, that doesn't happen here. Warriors really are warriors, and will frequently be the ones that save the day, wizards really are powerful magic users, and so on. They will level up, allowing you to develop their abilities in the way that you see fit, and at level ten you get to choose a secondary "profession" for them. For example my current warrior became a "Holy Knight" at level ten, opening up all kinds of new possibilities. Heroes get increasingly expensive the more you buy, even more so if you're recruiting more of the same type. You have to keep a close eye on your them, because as they advance they're allowed larger armies to accompany them, and their weapons and items will also degrade through use. When this happens you'll need to return home to get them repaired. Not doing so can be disastrous. There are other things to be done in home provinces too, like maybe you better send your wizard to the library to learn all of those juicy spells he found from raiding that tomb. The tactical battles are very basic, graphically speaking. There aren't even any movement animations, but you soon forget about that as the mechanics involved in conflict mean you really have to focus on your approach. Morale, vitality and terrain are subtle but important things to consider along with the usual strength and speed. Individual troops can also gain experience and new abilities. You can even bestow them with medals if they do particularly well, which enhances their performance but also increases their upkeep cost. The battlefields you'll come upon aren't incredibly varied, but this is something else that will cease to bother you after a time. With all the exploring, conquering, appeasing unhappy populations, hero management, random events, moral choices, and settlement development, it can be very easy to forget that somewhere on the map are AI opponents that you also have to contend with. Needless to say, there is no such thing as a quick game of Eador: Genesis. No matter how small a custom map you might ask it to generate (and there are lots of customisation options), you're going to be there for a good few hours. Eador: Genesis is one of those games that seems incomprehensible at first glance, but before you know it ten hours have passed and you're dealing with the latest slug infestation as adeptly as if you'd been doing it for your whole life. I definitely prefer it to the Warlords and Heroes of Might and Magic series, but I think its indie origins mean that it can't quite come up to the epic standard of Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. On the other hand, they are very different games in many respects, and I can see myself switching back and forth between them. Sometimes a rather obscure game will get a new lease of life and you wonder what all the fuss is about. That definitely isn't the case here. Eador: Genesis is an utterly absorbing game that is packed with gameplay, and if you're a fan of these kind of games, you might as well cancel all the events on your calender before you start playing.

For the strategy / turn based purist a completely overdose of endorphin. For anyone else, hell on earth administered in tiny shards. If you like turn based games with solid mechanics and on a large scale this game is great. It's sleek, polished and efficient and uses its few resources perfectly. Minimalist graphics, very fun dialogues, good sense of freedom and choice but almost no animation and other sparkling effects. No save options, not really an option turning back... It's not too difficult but still it's mostly not learning by doing but rather learning by dying. 4 out of 5 stars because I miss the savescumming reload button and because of minimalist visual

I know this game has been around for years, just not available in English. However, with its now becoming available now through GOG, I would vote for it as best new game of 2012, hands down. In fact, for all my fellow Master of Magic fans, I dare you to go back and play that for an afternoon, and then play this game. You'll never play Master of Magic (or HOMM3) again. Truly, it has everything, to my eye it does not look particularly dated, and it is essentially bug free. The game gets an A+ on both the tactical map and the strategic map. Battles are very interesting and can be tough, especially when you rush in over your head, which you really need to do -- turtling does not pay off. Strategic map decisions are deep and consequential, with many RPG-style decisions which turn out to matter later on. (Think Dragon Pass) Resource gathering is central to the game, but brilliantly conceived such that lack of resources does not stop you cold, just raises prices gradually for units and buildings. Some will be thrown by the inability to save games. But there is a turn back time feature built in, which costs you some game score but allows a re-do. And, unless you are a very good gamer, you will want to start on one of the lowest two levels. Only the very lowest level could be called anything like easy. This year has been an awesome year for new games, but this guy, available for a few bucks, has made me forget all about those $40 and $50 games I had been enjoying.