Master of Magic is a combination of an RPG and a strategy game, a remake of a classic from the 90s.
In Master of Magic you take up the role of one of 14 unique and diverse great wizards who compete with each other to dominate the worlds of Arcanus and Myrror.
Choose from different schools of magic...
Master of Magic is a combination of an RPG and a strategy game, a remake of a classic from the 90s.
In Master of Magic you take up the role of one of 14 unique and diverse great wizards who compete with each other to dominate the worlds of Arcanus and Myrror.
Choose from different schools of magic and fantasy races to command, then lead your minions and expand your influence and power across the land.
Recruit and command mighty armies of elves, dragons, dwarves, orcs and many more. Support them with powerful spells. Fight tactical turn-based battles and affect the outcome with your magic.
Research new spells, engage in alchemy, perform rituals and use your arcane powers to change the world around you.
Always beware of the machinations of your rival wizards, who seek to reach your same goals. But in the end, remember: there can be only one Master of Magic.
Features:
14 unique playable powerful wizards
5 schools of magic and 18 traits to customize your wizard
Over 60 special abilities
Over 200 spells to research
14 fantasy races to command, including elves, dwarves, trolls, draconians, orcs, klackons, gnolls and many more
196 unique unit types
Over 250 unique magical items, as well as custom crafting
Two parallel dimensional planes, Arcanus and Myrror
Included content
A completely free update called “Through the Myrror” brings a host of new challenges, opportunities, and new Wizards.
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.
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.
I bought the original when it first came out and although I never scored very high on it's rating scale, I came back again and again and had LOTS of fun. The new version did a lot right, but managed to install several fatal flaws and failed to correct problems with the original game that would have made it better.
The first two games i played one or two enemy wizards had mana leak, which in the original game was mostly ineffectual. In this one it completely incapacitates your armies. You can't attack or defend. What's the point in that? If I wanted to engage in a hopeless activity, I'd just face reality (lol). Third game I played was going well till I found an enemy hero who was immune to all forms of attack except archery. The default hero is B'Shan, an archer, and I took a female archer, so I took a full complement of archers to fill out my stack of 9. well, the regular archers couldn't hurt him at all, even though he had ZERO defense against it. the female archer did like ONE POINT, and B'shan would do pretty good with his first shot, but the rest all failed to do hardly any damage at all. How am I supposed to defeat an undefeatable opponent? Maddening.
they even got rid of what little diplomacy the original game had. It's like one transgression and forget it, war! no truces EVER. Then they made trading spells have a gold value, so instead of getting good spells easily I could NEVER afford any spell I wanted. EVER. By the time I might have 4000 gold to buy a spell (assuming they would even talk to me, which they don't) I wouldn't NEED them at that point.