Friday, July 7, 2017

Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic - 2/20 hours

I'm still playing the tutorial, but I'm starting to get worried. It never showed me how to cancel an active spell, nor explained the relationship between gold income and city production. And it's still doing that thing from the previous Age of Wonders games where if you don't right click to deselect a unit, you may accidentally send it traipsing off in completely the wrong direction if you left click anywhere on the map.

It's frustrating, because I really want to like this game. It's just that it has a series of small flaws that would each be surmountable on its own, but together add up to an unpleasant play experience. I hate how most of your units' attacks miss, how there's no proper research queue and no reminders about unmoved units or empty build queues. And the thing with the accidentally clicking . . . grr, it's so annoying I had to mention it twice.

I'm going to try and calm myself and get past this, though. I know that there is an interesting game of turn-based fantasy strategy underneath it all, and that if I just tough it out, I'll be able to command a whole menagerie of interesting magical creatures.

Mostly, though, I hate being so negative. Believe it or not, I want to say only positive things about the games I play, but sometimes I'll just completely fail to "click" with a game, and it will be difficult to think of anything but complaints.

Sigh. It's probably predestined, though. This is still basically the same game as Age of Wonders 2, and by the end that had me on the ropes. I just have to hope I've learned a thing or two since then.

1 comment:

  1. It's funny. I just tried playing the new(ish) Master of Orion, and after a while I couldn't play it any longer, mostly because the controls are completely inferior to Stellaris. Now I'm replaying Stellaris instead.

    -PAS

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