This game has great representation, atmosphere, even lore and interesting world building. The art style also looks great, the soundtrack gives this dark tension and mystery. I really wanted to like Rage of Mages. You may ask why 3 stars then? The horrible flawed designs of the battle system. There are altogether 28 missions(Main Quest Missions +Side missions). I was patient enough and forgiving of the game for the story and the good sides but overtime during playing it became too fustrating to continue. I gave up after Mission 16 the Hostage, where you rescue the daugther of the weapon trader from a group of kidnapper mages. It supposed to be an RPG with RTS combat but your heroes move and act your command with a delay! After you order one hero it takes the hero seconds of delay to start to react to each of your commands! In case attack and move command it takes 1 second delay. However when you cast spells with your mage heroes it is even worse! When you order to cast a spell your mage takes 2 seconds delay before he/she cast any spell. Because of this horrible design choice my characters died so many times. Does not matter the game speed what you play on there is always those delays timers on your commands... During the mentioned 'Hostage' mission the enemy AI mages were able to cast 2-3 more spells then me everytime because they seem to have no delay on order unlike the player-controlled characters. Sometimes your characters even become unresponsive. The 'Formation' feature also does not work despite it is turned on. Also there is even in the manual: 'SAVE, ALWAYS SAVE!' Constant Save and Load is not the solution to overcome the poor design choices of the creators. It just becomes tedious and annoying so you will see more and more problems as the difficulty keeps increasing after every mission.
