I'm practically a milennial, only two years off of it in fact, so I grew up with Game boys and the Playstation two. So I can say this review comes from the eyes of someone who's used to 3D graphics and not seeing pixels in a game. This game is amazing. Overall it plays like a Civilization game, but with magic. Really good magic. Instead of Gandhi running India it's Gandalf ruling the Hobbits, so to speak. Without magic it would play like Civ 2, albeit permenantly set in the middle ages. In this game research is on magic, so instead of going from cavemen to mechanised troops its going from summmoning skeletons to binding demons to your will. There are a variety of fantasy races ranging from human to dwarf to draconians (read: anthro-dragons). Each has a unique bonus (which isn't covered in the manual, but the wiki covers it and is quite detailed.) Hobbits make good farmers, but poor soldiers as they deal less melee damage. But they're lucky, getting a +1 to almost everything. Some races are good soldiers -trolls are amazing in that, but suck in everything else- and others are good for running an economy -dwarves and gold go hand in hand-. You may absorb other races into your empire, fielding Troll troops defending Dwarven cities, or wipe useless races from the map. Magic is divided into five branches: life, death -life and death are mutually exclusive-, chaos, sorcery and nature. You can pick up to 11 spell books in any category or buy perks like warlord which lets you unlock the highest experiance level in the game for units. The magic is balanced: No magic is superior to the others. You can summon monsters to bolster your army, curse enemy units, buff your own units, and so on. The graphics might be pixelated, but they're good. At no point do you say "I have no idea what that's supposed to be", except perhaps on Myrror - the alternative dimension in the game - but that's the point. It may be a forest, but it's a warped one. Go watch some gameplay.
