Goodies

Milk of Amnesia

You’d have to be prone to amnesia yourself to appreciate the presentation values in Warlords IV. Infinite seems to have forgotten all about the many technological advances made in gaming over the past few years. Warlord portraits look pretty modern, but visuals are dated overall, hampered by 2D maps that are sparsely decorated. Some of the desert maps have nothing but sand stretching in all directions, which may be geographically interesting but is hardly eye-catching. Forest maps are better designed, although there are just a few types of trees and mountains.

Battles feature warriors squaring off in the center of the screen, in front of a backdrop that roughly represents the terrain and location of the scrap. So in castle sieges in the desert, for instance, you get a line of sand along with a tower wall. It’s rough but serviceable. Even rougher are the warriors themselves. They’re made of old-fashioned sprites and come complete with such terrible animation that they come off like rock-em, sock-em robots when they fight. Many units look nothing like their much-better painted portraits. Especially the humanoids. Humans, Elves, and Dwarves are colored blobs so poorly realized that it’s hard to tell the foot soldiers from the bowmen. Monsters typically look better, and the Treant and Golem are actually fairly well done, as are most of the Undead. The Daemons, however, all look like Hot Stuff from the old Harvey comic book.

Shine on

Audio is really all over the place. Voiceovers during cutscenes in the campaign are well done, as is the flimsy choral music. But the comments given to units have been done for laughs, and get really annoying over the long haul. Sure, you’ll chuckle a bit the first time that the Treant says “Oh, my aching limbs!” before attacking. It isn’t quite so funny a few hours down the road into a campaign. There is some variety to these catchphrases, but there isn’t enough, and all are grating in one way or another. The humanoid characters are the most irritating, as they tend to spout off poncey aphorisms like “Taste elven steel!” and “My blade is sharp!”

Warlords IV does shine in terms of game modes. In addition to the story-driven single-player campaign where you have to conquer ten provinces, there are individual scenario options featuring standard skirmish play and a similar choice with a randomly chosen map. Multiplayer is quite impressive and full featured. There, the fast-paced, stripped-down focus on combat works pretty well, courtesy of the basic impatience that we all instantly develop whenever we’re playing another human being. Also, there are a lot of options. You can play with up to eight players via hotseat on the same machine, local network, internet, ubi.com, or email. An editor and random map generator are also included to keep things fresh. They’re very easy to use, if a little bit limited in terms of terrain, scenery, and items, so expect to see some user-created maps showing up shortly online.