Some of the spells can even be maintained permanently, provided you've set up sufficient resource income to maintain them. I found myself investing in all sorts of 'evil' knowledge tomes for my library, developing a variety of necrotic magic powers to deploy both on the world map and during active combat scenarios. As part of the game's research tree, you can add deep customization to your empire's gameplay and thematic style. Indeed, you can pick from a decent selection of races, from rat people to regular old' humans, and then customize their color themes, alignments, and gameplay style to fit within a range of typical fantasy tropes.įor my initial attempt, I figured I'd try to recreate my undead warlock from World of Warcraft and build him up as an evil overlord of a massive undead goblin army. Your cities and associated provinces with grow in complexity dynamically over the course of the game as you build new facilities, growing towering arcane spires and thematically-consistent gothic ramparts, depending on the way you design your starting race.

It's hexagonal grid serves as the game's primary overlay for developing your empire. It's difficult to overlook the comparisons to Civilization, because it does sport many of the same ideas. Tutorial panels in the game's introductory campaign scenario made it easy to get to grips with the gameplay loop, while view button tooltips gave me access to more in-depth explanations. That's essentially the boat I'm here, as someone who has enjoyed games like Stellaris and Civilization in offline play, Age of Wonders 4 felt incredibly welcoming as a newcomer to the franchise.

However, if you're a casual strategy enjoyer who has played games like Gears Tactics or XCOM and feel as though you might like to branch out, do read on.

I should preface this by saying I'm by no means a hardcore 4X player, so if you're looking for something that goes super in-depth perhaps you'd be better served elsewhere. Age of Wonders 4 is, indeed, pretty triumphant. It's unusual that a game can dive into several genres simultaneously and hope to emerge with something coherent, but Triumph Studios have lived up to their namesake here. There's also an impressive effort to bring some authentic RPG depth to proceedings too, with a lore-heavy campaign with surprisingly high-quality narration, a-top mini boss battle events and light dungeoneering. Age of Wonders 4 is an ambitious fusion of several genres, incorporating XCOM-style turn-based strategic battles, with Civ-like empire management.

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