Worlds of Magic Review (PC)

Master of Magic is a cult classic 4X fantasy game that pretty much every turn-based strategy lover knows, so when Wastelands Interactive presented Worlds of Magic, a remake / spiritual successor to Microprose's 1994 hit, I was pretty excited.

Granted, Master of Magic received nowhere near the attention that Master of Orion, the space colonization and conquest game, did, which means that people who like a bit of fantasy in their world domination experience have fewer options to choose from nowadays.

As much as I like space exploration, whenever I see a fantasy-themed 4X title, I immediately get excited, mainly because they introduce several paradigm shifts from the relative sameyness of space-themed ones.

In addition to the usual mix of exploration, colonization, research, diplomacy, trade, and the design and construction of cities / planets and armies, fantasy titles usually incorporate some role-playing elements, in the form of heroes and progression systems, and have more connected and detailed maps to explore, as opposed to star systems floating around disconnected in the void.

Furthermore, fantasy also means magic, which always manages to make things more exciting, mainly because it is extremely cool and impossible, which only makes my brain desire it more.

Explore the realm

A small preamble

Unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed in Worlds of Magic. I'm not too keen on Master of Magic either, because its age really shows, but its numerous design flaws are excusable as people were still pioneers back in the day.

The game was obviously released before completion, and I encountered countless glitches, freezes, and errors while playing it. Overall, my impression is that the game still needs a ton of work and that there are some design issues that will probably never be solved.

However, there are some extenuating circumstances surrounding Wastelands Interactive's effort. First of all, the game was only made possible through a modest crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

This means that the team didn't really have all the resources and time needed to create a game on par with Endless Legend, Fallen Enchantress, or Age of Wonders III. Together with the team's relative inexperience, the project was bound to run into some trouble.

The good thing is that, although the developer bit off more than it could chew and released it pretty broken, Worlds of Magic has been receiving constant updates since launch, which solved many of its most glaring problems, and the studio has been pretty open in communicating its intentions and taking in feedback from the pretty active community involved with the game.

This means that, with a new fix coming out every couple of days, the experience is bound to improve by a rather large factor in the near future. And since the game is almost a carbon copy of Master of Magic, if you're a big fan of the classic, you can already have tons of fun with Worlds of Magic right now.

A tactical battle

Setting up your game

The game has no story for you to follow, you just jump in and play a match of world domination against the artificial intelligence or in hotseat mode against human opponents.

Right off the bat, you can see that there are a lot of options to customize your 4X experience even before jumping into the game.

You can select how big your map is by including or excluding up to seven different planes of existence, each of them coming with different points of interest, visuals, and influencing your population growth and food and industry output.

There are unique locations to visit in each of them, and you can customize the size and layout of the landmass of each one separately, translating into a pretty varied experience in-game.

After you select the size and particularities of the map or maps you are going to play on, you then pick your faction out of a total of eight, each one coming with various twists and unique abilities, as well as distinct visuals, military units, and special buildings.

Then, it's off to select a Sorcerer Lord, and you can choose from the pre-made ones or customize your own. You can invest points into various schools of magic, and pick positive and negative traits, with a pretty good range of combinations.

All the customization options offered to you translate into an experience that is custom-tailored to your own tastes. If you like to build brutish armies and wage a constant war against the world, forever expanding your empire through battle, Worlds of Magic has you covered.

If you're the kind of player who prefers to turtle, and to invest in research and defense until the late game, when victory can come more easily through the use of superior technology, magic and abilities, you can do that as well.

The city screen doesn't offer much information

Starting out

After you take care of your pre-game options, you jump into the action, and are presented with your future empire, consisting of a single city and a few military units, for now.

You'll be randomly placed on one of the available planes, and you start your world domination plan. Unfortunately, there is only one way to achieve victory, wiping out all enemy cities, so if you're not the combative style, you're going to be disappointed.

You're also going to be disappointed if you expect to find an in-game compendium regarding the base rules and strategies in the game. There is no information on anything aside from the tooltip, and the biggest impact of that is during combat, as the tactical battles use the D20 OGL Rule Set, developed by Wizards of the Coast.

While that means that things are tried and tested and that there are a bunch of interesting mechanics and interactions taking place, all the while keeping things pretty balanced, it also means that there will be numerous occasions when you simply won't know what's going on, if you're unfamiliar with the system.

That is also the case when it comes to expanding your city and getting new resources. The way things are, the initial positioning of a settlement seals its fate, as you can only get gold, production and food bonuses from the resources in your initial range.

Cities don't grow over time, as your population increases, and there is no way to connect nearby resources to your settlements. This means that resources that are beyond your cities' reach will remain so for the entirety of the game.

It also means that the random nature of their placement will play a pretty big role on how you expand and how much your cities can grow or produce. Fortunately, there are plenty of buildings that you can erect in your cities in order to grant various bonuses, in addition to the ones required for the training of military units.

However, there are many design flaws when it comes to the way cities behave, the first of them being the fact that you don't know what makes population grow. It seems like you have no hand in adjusting how fast your cities grow, no way to influence it, and worst of all, you don't know that there is a cap on city size until you reach it and notice that your growth is zero.

Also, the infrastructure buildings feel like they're mandatory in each and every city that you build, due to the fact that you need to have excess gold and food in order to maintain a sizable army. Furthermore, managing the population's unrest level requires troops garrisoned in cities, which means that each city can only provide a minute amount of extra resources.

The best way to go about fielding a mobile army is to constantly spam the map with new settlements, as they start with a bonus from nearby resources, and once you have enough cities, those small bonuses can support a mobile unit of a more considerable size.

“Unfortunately, there is only one way to achieve victory, wiping out all enemy cities, so if you're not the combative style, you're going to be disappointed.”

However, managing all those superfluous cities tends to become a pretty big chore. It's also an unavoidable one, due to the fact that you need the base population growth each city gets (and that still remains a mystery to this day) in order to be able to grow your power.

In addition to building prosperous cities, you also have to research and use new spells, as well as level up your overall magical prowess, which in turn will make you more efficient both in combat and outside of it.

There is a pretty big variety of spells, ranging from ones that can bestow a temporary or permanent bonus to your cities to magic that can enhance your troops and destroy your enemies' forces on the field of battle.

Magic is also the main way to terraform your environment, and you can also use it to inflict penalties on your nearby opponents' settlements. The bad thing, however, is that you never have a full picture of what's going on and that casting is pretty unwieldy, no matter how much mana you have.

You don't have a library with all the possible spells you can learn, and there is no way to select the spells you can research, aside from researching a spell that resets your available options.

This means that, although magic could have had a pretty big impact on how the game plays out, both economically and during encounters, it ends up feeling unsatisfying.

There are a lot of pre-game options

Combat and conquest

The administrative side of the game is only one of Worlds of Magic's facets, so once you get a decent economy and military going, you're free to explore the map using your units and heroes.

Exploration is a crucial aspect of the game, just like in Heroes of Might and Magic, because there are a ton of locations that hold mysterious and potentially game-changing bounties. The rewards usually consist of gold, mana, items and spells, but if you get lucky, you can also gain levels in a certain school of magic, new powerful units, and even new heroes.

The locations are usually pretty well guarded, and when you interact with them, you can see the full lineup of units you will face, and get an assessment of the difficulty of the battle.

That difficulty, however, feels many times very dependent on luck, as the D20 System relies heavily on dice rolls for everything from damage to inflicting special effects or avoiding them. Even when you empower your spells, there is a chance that it can be completely resisted, which feels very disappointing and out of place in a strategy game.

However, that is offset by the lackluster artificial intelligence, and as always, you can turn battles in your favor due to the reckless way in which the computer fights. It also means that you can receive unnecessary casualties when choosing to auto resolve battles, so if you don't want anything to go to waste (especially already wounded units), you will have to micromanage even the lowliest of battles.

All this tedium can end up really hurting your experience, as every little thing adds up, and together with the bare-bones diplomacy system, providing no context for decisions, no reports, no account of previous deeds or anything, it makes the game feel pretty unsatisfying.

Basically, it all boils down to the fact that you have to exterminate everyone, complete with the tedium of clearing a map full of low tier units that present no challenge but only bog the game down. You can abuse the AI by attacking a city, taking it over and then declaring peace, and there are a lot of other such things, like the computers sending the same stack of units to die attacking one of your cities over and over, without the slightest chance to actually cause some damage.

The game is only difficult because it is obtuse. If you don't expand fast enough or prepare for the first few attacks, you're going to lose. If you, however, learn from your first couple of games and succeed in putting together an army able to withstand the first couple of enemy waves, you're pretty much set for the remainder of the game, as the AI won't step up its game in any way.

Play Video

Visuals and sound

The game looks great in screenshots, but when you get up close and personal with it, it tells a different story.

There is plenty of detail in the environments, a lot of unique resources and locations, the city screens have a different kind of architecture for each of the factions, and when you build something, you can immediately see it pop up.

The combat maps look okay for the most part, only a little bland, and units are varied enough that it doesn't feel like you're playing chess, but that you're actually involved in a fantasy war between completely different factions.

The spells and effects, from fog and smoke to sparks and lightning, add a ton of extra oomph to the visual side of things, but unfortunately, some things are just unfinished.

From units sharing the same sounds or lacking an appropriate animation when you activate an ability, to event pop ups that lead to nowhere and spells fizzling, glitching or missing sound files, the game still requires a lot of work before it can be considered completed.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion