I've been looking forward to this release for over a year. I was expecting the fun and ease of playability that the original game plus Caster of Magic's improvements. I was hoping for just better graphics and maybe some new spells/units/magicians - something. Instead it is the same original game with different graphics and poorer game controls/interface. Overall, the game was given a hex map in place of squares. The game graphics were updated. The game controls were changed to the detriment of gameplay - I actually only played for about 20 minutes before giving up on this game. Caster of Magic is a great game; I'll play CoM over this version unless there is a major update. Please get Seravy involved with directing the game. The game controls were altered. - There is no mouse pointer scrolling for the map. The game uses arrow keys or WASD keys to move the map view. - The hotkeys were changed. Enter is used to end turn (which is on the same side of the keyboard as my mouse hand); next turn or spacebar would be preferable (like the original game). - You have to manually go from one unit to the next by pressing the spacebar. The original game automatically moved to the next unit when a unit was out of moves - the original control is far far preferable. - The town and map interface are not as clear/easy to use as the original. I'll take MoM/CoM graphics any day over this thing. Very sad.
This looks like it wasn't ready for release. The interface looks worse than the original from '94. Why is it more pixelated? I wanted to like this game and play for the new features, but I keep shutting it off because the of the interface. The color scheme is changed, pixelation is bad, some of the shortcut keys were changed (example: typing C no longer centers on a unit). I hope this will be revised soon. When it is, I will come back for a revised review.
