Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic

It’s been an age, and Chris Booker has yet to find any wonders.

Wizards are the people to know. They can do house chores with a click of their fingers or rain flaming death on your neighbours by doing nothing more than stringing together a bunch of random letters. Sometimes however, they'll put on a show and draw circles on the ground, throw stuff in the air and call on dark gods to separate the recycling.

Age of Wonders (AoW) is of the latter persuasion. It looks great at first glance, as the colours and lights dance to the crowd’s delight, but after a few weeks of having to go through the same ritual over and over, you’ll start to wish they'd go back to clicking their fingers.

The easiest way to describe AoW is a cross between Heroes of Might and Magic and Masters of Magic -- for those of you old enough to remember SSI’s fantasy strategy.

You move your units around the game world, searching ruins and claiming structures such as mines, which produce gold to fuel your war machine, and towers that increase your view. While your heroes and their followers are doing this, you’re at your tower researching and casting spells to help them, or hinder your foes. Holding onto your structures while capturing your enemies is the crux of the game, and you must balance between expanding too slowly and getting outstripped by the opposition, or spreading too fast and leaving yourself spread thin, though in this turn-based strategy, it's more about how many units you have, rather than how strong they are. You could have a huge army that walks over anything that stands in its way, but a bunch of smaller, more mobile armies will ultimately win the day.

One such resource is gold, which is used to purchase units and city upgrades.
Cities are another focus of the game, as they provide you with gold and mana.

Each wizard’s spells are restricted to the school of magic they study. There are a number to cast, but in combat the differences between them are slight; a water spell cast against a fire creature will inflict extra damage -- and that’s about it. You can also gain skills that will allow you to decrease the delays associated with production and research. The magical effects will demand the most from your video card -- not that it's much -- as you set fire to enemy units and watch them burn, or cast blue lights that cause the lands around your tower to flood. The unit graphics seem a little out of place in this day and age, though there are a few touches that make them look nice.

The awkward interface makes itself apparent from the word go, as it requires very precise clicking. One mis-click and your unit will march past its intended destination, wasting a precious turn, or cancel your production, putting yourself a few turns behind schedule.

Trying to get your groups to move to an exact spot is tricky, as it’s sometimes difficult to tell which hex your target is on, and as far as we could tell there’s no way to make the hexes visible.

Shadow Magic also demands that you continue to move your units manually each turn; that is, you can’t set a final destination and expect them to make their way there turn by turn. In a game where unit movement is pivotal, it quickly becomes tedious.

The ‘Quick combat’ system is also flawed. Out of every 10 quick combats we entered, our hero died in about every four, even when we had overwhelming forces. This requires you to manually do every battle (to assure a victory), which drags out the game even more.

As for game types, there’s the traditional campaign, skirmish and multiplayer modes, though the campaign mode feels more like a bunch of scenarios, with a story that you follow rather than it carrying you away. The story doesn't proceed until you meet a certain condition, like going to a map point, and because you may take an hour getting there, plot developments are detached.

Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic is an average turn-based strategy. It’s fun to play, but doesn't flow as easily as Heroes of Might and Magic. If you’re a fan of the genre, then it might be worth checking out, though there isn't really anything new, except that it looks nicer graphics-wise than its predecessors. It won't keep you up until 3am, but it will burn some hours on a Saturday afternoon.