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Warlords IV Review November 11, 2003 Brett Todd |
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Summary: Warlords IV? Like 4 calories, right? A mere 4 calories of entertainment value, says Brett. Don't believe me? Read on!
 Overview | Page:: ( 1 / 5 ) |
Counting the changes
A lot has changed since 1997. Six years ago, we’d yet to hear the name of Monica Lewinsky or Osama bin Laden. Tech stocks were riding so high that AOL was positioning itself to merge with TimeWarner. I was just getting started in this crazy-cuckoo game reviewing biz that keeps me chained to my desk for 25 hours every day, so recent years haven’t been kind to my waistline or my once brown hair (hello, Grecian Formula).
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The past six years haven’t exactly done wonders for the Warlords franchise, either. When last we looked, Warlords III: Reign of Heroes and its standalone expansion Warlords III: Darklords Rising represented the very best that gaming had to offer. They raised turn-based, elf-oriented strategizing to a new level and added enough detail to satisfy even the most diehard follower of fantasy fiction. Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria is a completely different beast. Where Strategic Studies Group (SSG) did a masterful job at bringing a complex style of game to the masses, the resurrected series has been stripped to its bare elements by developer Infinite Interactive (a spinoff from SSG, which now concentrates on military strategy games such as recent critical fave Korsun Pocket) and new publisher Ubi Soft.
Think blitzkrieg
Depth is the biggest concern. Where the Warlords III games had loads of it, from the huge, castle-strewn maps to the detailed painted art reminiscent of old Frank Frazetta calendars, Warlords IV has removed everything not essential to building armies and fighting. Diplomacy has been dumped. Completely. There’s no more ganging up on a mutual threat. Resources are down to the gold generated automatically by conquered towns and the magic-creating mana generated by some heroes and artifacts. Armies cost nothing to create, though you do need gold to keep them adequately supplied. So there really isn’t a working economy.
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Combat has been simplified. Your objective is simply to conquer your way across the map. You plunder towers and ruins, take on quests (essentially linked castles, towers, and such) for big rewards, and besiege both neutral cities and those aligned with enemies, gaining more gold and building more armed forces as time goes by. The absence of diplomacy means that you start on a war footing with everybody and must race around at great speed trying to beat your foes to the punch.
While there is still some strategy involved in building armies, most of your planning never goes very far. You see a city, you have to attack it ASAP. Think blitzkrieg or you will lose the game, because the computer warlords aren’t just sitting around the campfire with their generals. On the contrary, the AI is so punishing at Prince and up (there are four difficulty levels in all—Knight, Prince, King, and Emperor) that you have to be very conservative with your movement points. Fail to take the shortest route to your objective each and every time and you’ll soon find yourself falling well behind your computer-controlled opposition. Aggressive, intelligent AI is a good thing, particularly if you’re an old hand at turn-based gaming, though it also shoeboxes you into one style of play.
SIDEBAR: I’ve still got a copy of Warlords III: Darlords Rising, but it’s lost somewhere in my Forbidden Closet of Mystery (Old Games and Junk). It was last sighted six months ago, near a stack of X-Men comics and a Dreamcast box.
| Gameplay | Page:: ( 2 / 5 ) |
Send in the Wyverns!
Your most important strategic consideration involves the order of cities that you will attack. This is vital, because you are limited in what you can do with a conquered city. Restrictions are placed on what you can do with the enemy populace. Race and alignment matter. A sidewheel provided on the information card lays out the relationship between each faction. If you’re too far away from the defeated enemy, conquering options are limited to pillaging or sacking the city in question, or even razing it to the ground in the case for mortal enemies like the Knights and the Undead. More closely aligned peoples, however, can be conquered and most of their units produced for your own army. For example, my Elves gained the Axeman and Golem of the Dwarves whenever they took a city owned by the little bearded guys, but they couldn’t acquire the ability to produce the Orcs’ Wolfrider and Goblin Thrower when they conquered a city held by their scaly mortal enemies. I guess we can’t all just get along after all.
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Battles themselves remain superficially unchanged from how they were structured in the Warlords III games. There have been a couple of significant improvements, though even as Infinite gives, it takes away. Most importantly, you can now choose the order of attack rather than letting the computer play things out automatically in order, in terms of unit strength (as in the earlier Warlords games). There’s no more waiting for your footsoldiers to scrap; now you can dispense with the pleasantries right away and send in a heavy hitter such as a Fire Dragon or Wyvern. This causes some potential worries, though, as experience points are dished out to the unit that does the most damage. You have to think about the order of battle, both in order to maximize chances of survival and to make sure the most needy parties get the lion’s share of the experience.
A necromancer in shining armor
Incidentally, Warlords are now more diverse as well. You choose a class based on a single major and a single minor ability selected from the Combat, Divine Magic, Rune Magic, Nature Magic, Summoning, and Necromancy skills, so there is quite a bit of room for customization. Cross categories and you get interesting titles, such as Death Knight for someone majoring in Combat and minoring in Necromancy, or Templar for someone majoring in Combat and minoring in Divine Magic. Also, there are no racial restrictions during games. Although it’s a little bizarre, you can place a Elven Warlord big on Necromancy in charge of the Knights, or have a Dwarven specialist in Divine Magic oversee the Undead. Evil units will often offer to join good forces, and vice versa. This is more than a touch odd, especially if you’re playing snow-white good guys like the Elves and you’re approached by a bunch of Daemons looking for work.
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Warlords can also now be taken out of the games in which they were originally created and used in subsequent campaigns, so you have a character to constantly work at leveling up. That’s a good thing, especially when you consider the fast pace of gameplay. Units are so throwaway here, since battles leave no survivors, that it’s nice to have something to get attached to and carry over from one scenario to the next. What isn’t so good is Infinite’s decision to force Warlords to relearn spells in each new scenario. This makes sense, as otherwise you would become so powerful that this component of the game would be rendered useless, though the repetition is simply annoying. And it doesn’t make you feel like you’re guiding the same Warlord, unless your pal is prone to amnesia.
SIDEBAR: Let’s face it, games have to look good. We can talk all we want about how pretty pictures aren’t necessary, but nobody wants to waste their $300 Radeon 9800 Pro on something that looks like it’s three years old.
| Goodies | Page:: ( 3 / 5 ) |
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.
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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!”
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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.
SIDEBAR: Harvey’s Hot Stuff was published way back in the 1970s by the same people who did Richie Rich and Casper (Hot Stuff was really just a red Casper in a diaper, with devil horns). Harvey Comics (http://www.harvey.com/) hasn’t published books since the 1980s.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 4 / 5 ) |
Pros
Keep it simple, stupid
Straightforward gameplay is a breeze for newbies who want to try their first fantasy-based strategy game
Cool and catchy
There is something to be said for a turn-based strategy game where you can sit down and immediately go at the aggressive computer AI without ever feeling lost or overwhelmed
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Cons
Where did the depth go?
It was a bad idea to jettison a lot of the little and not-so-little touches that fantasy strategy game fans want
Ups and downs
Graphic and sound quality ranges from very poor to poor
SIDEBAR: Why are so many games being simplified these days? I wonder if the recent focus on console development has almost institutionalized a “less is more” mindset brought about by marketing concerns and the need to keep all controls on a 10-button gamepad.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 5 / 5 ) |