Age of Wonders 2: The Wizard's Throne

AOW 2 is a really nice games, the graphical environment is all shiny and well made, there's a lot of variety and the campaign is long enough to keep you entertained despite it's story begin unnoticeable. The gameplay is efficient and the races are quite different despite they all field the regular Footman + Ranged Fighter + Wizard scheme in the early games. The strategical part of the games plays exactly like civilisation, except that you can cast very powerful spells that can transform the land or cause climatic disturbances in some aeras if not the entire map, no other game I met, perhaps with the exception of populous or magic carpet had such a powerful magic to play with, and that's fun. Battles are deadly and could be said to be "realistic" as they can turn into a total bloodbath for both sides, leaving you with only a few troops alive far away from any base so keep some reinforcements close as you advance. No units are too powerful or impossible to crush, I've managed to kill a red dragon with a bunch of hobbit slingers and some luck ^^. Because luck is quite an important factor in combats, some of your most powerful units can be wasted against inferior units. That means you want to spare them and take risks accordingly, because you can't rebuild them so easily as your basic footmen. However the game has also it's flaws : The first and the most common about games is the AI. As opposed to a human player the AI never build cities are rarely field armies that are able to match the player forces, not that it's bad during battle but it lacks strategic vision and won't react properly all the time, AOW1 and Shadow magic did it a way better. The other aspect inherited from AOW1 and which I think was "fixed" in Shadow magic, is the power of heroes. They start quite weak but become incredibly powerful with time, enough to conquer a city or crush an entire army by themselves. So don't be surprised if you can finish some campaigns with your couple of supermen destroying everything in their path.

I initially wasn't going to review this title, in fact, due to the comments made in the AOW forums I had low expectations for it. Everyone cited Shadow Magic and the original Age of Wonders as leaps and bounds above this one. Well, personally I found the first AOW to be fairly irritating. Mostly my own fault since I played Shadow Magic first, but the interface in AOW and the frustration of not being able to do all the things you can in II and III just caused me to fly back to Shadow Magic and then try II. AOW II IMHO could be the best of the series. Don't get me wrong, I like Shadow Magic quite a bit and realistically they are almost the same game, but the presentation here in II just gels better for me. I switch back and forth between II and III, but I find myself more and more choosing II because quite simply I have more fun. I can't be certain, but I believe the AI seems a little more vicious and cunning in II. Also, though many people bemoan the campaign in II it seems alright to me. True, the intros are short and give you little more than the basics of who's who and why you need to kill them, but it does seem to advance the story of reuniting the Council on Gabriel's behalf and I'm always eager to see what new I can learn about what happened and why. If you are only going to get ONE AOW, then I'd say go with this one, but Shadow magic is a close second and offers more raves and a slightly streamlined interface. The first AOW seems ...okay and I'll eventually play through it I'm sure, in fact on its own w/o comparison I'd probably be singing its praises. But, IMHO, if you don't have nostalgia specs on it falls very short of its two sequels

In my review for Age of Wonders, I wrote "Anytime there's a series available on this site, you inevitably end up having to wonder if the early games are actually worth picking up, or if they're just around for nostalgia and historical interest." While the first in this series was the former, the second installment is unfortunately the latter. Everything this game does, either AoW 1 or Shadow Magic does it better. There is literally no point to buying this except for, like I said, nostalgia and/or historical interest. Even prior to the release of Shadow Magic, Age of Wonders 2 was a controversial game, with a clunky, intrusive UI, awful balance (to the point that really only four races or so were viable in multiplayer), limited map locations, and more. Some of the complaints were small (no unit descriptions - seems minor, but they were a huge part of creating the atmosphere of the first game) - others, not so much. While AoW 2 isn't necessarily a bad game, it's also a far cry from being a great TBS. AoW Shadow Magic is the game that AoW 2 should have been, and with its presence on this site, The Wizard's Throne is a waste of money.

Players sing the praises of the stand-alone expansion, but I found TWT's campaign worthwhile, with a more serious story and a more challenging campaign on it's hard mode (or even normal difficulty, depending how new you are to the genre). You might get this one first if you don't plan to jump immediately to multilayer, but would prefer a campaign. Facing off against a number of tyrant-wizards with heated battles in alternatively blasted or lush landscapes is a fair bit better than innumerable talk about the injustice of halfling slavery and semi-sublte references to Christianity. The game is as epic as it's cover portrays it to be. AOW1 also has a good campaign, but a worse AI that it makes up for with hordes of units on hard mode, but arguably the best story.