Rage of Mages
Nival Entertainment / Monolith Productions

Point, click, point, click, etc:

Oh no, the long time dilemma of RTS games, the single element that not one game has ever got right, the A.I. What is wrong with it here, well let’s put it like this, there isn’t any. The enemies are good enough doing what most have done before (see you, then charge at you). However you will not believe how stupid your units are, especially the Mages, now as usual Mages are weak in close quarter combat, the mages in this automatically heal your own units if they are close enough. Now this doesn’t work the way they intended, what normally happens is the Mage will normally start attacking a enemy as soon as he lays his so called eyes on one, this normally results in the death of your Mage. Here comes major screw up number 2, you lose one unit and the mission ends in failure par this to the fact that you die very often thanks to the limited A.I of your units and you have one major irritation.

Other irritations of the A.I vary from long range units attacking at close range instead of staying back or running away and the pitiful path finding routines. There is one thing that annoys more than all of these together though, the fact that the idea behind the game is so damn good. This game has the only really good bit from Diablo (character development, unique weapons) and increases your options ten fold, plus to round it all of allows you to hire an entire army to control. I truly hope they make a sequel to this game damn fast and this time get the other things right, if they do this then we could have one of the best games we’ve ever seen. To go along with this, a bigger game world with the ability to go where you choose would be nice also, instead of the little quest/missions we have here. Another big fault is multiplayer, which is totally wasted here, we were hoping for a game whereupon you could complete all the quests with each other, in co-op. However what we got was a choice of level, no character development and alot of monsters to kill, turning it into Get Medieval except more boring, what a waste.

It isn’t a bad game overall, Henrik was positively captivated by it when we got it (we have had it for quite a while now). He was so lost in it that it took me two weeks to get the damn game off him and then he insisted that I give it back to him when I was done.

to the next page...