Warlock: Master of the Arcane Review

Posted 11 years ago by myetvmedia

Max Romano

If you have ever played master of magic for Ms Dos Warlock Master of the Arcane (Paradox Interactive & Ino-Co) will be instantly familiar. Warlock is a modern omage to that game and that’s just fine because Master of Magic was an instant classic that featured a design that stands the test of time. In Warlock you take on the role of a wizardry, sorcery type of guy and set out to conquer the world which in this game is represented on a hex map. There isn’t much of a story beyond that, you just tool up civilizations and wage wars and I no more want or expect a story or narrative in this type of gamey game than I would with chess. You can customize your wizard at the outset of the game fiddling with their magical affinities and choosing from one of three base races; human, orc and undead. Though you can only begin the game with a single race and city you can conquer or construct other cities and depending on the makeup of the map and where that city falls you may be able to build unique structures and build units like trolls and rat people. Its a turn based game and despite the trend in turn based games to feature unwieldly interfaces and complex mechanisms Warlock is rather inviting as well as deep. Each turn you may construct units at your city capitol , move around your armies and attack units or structures, rest your units to recover their hit points and cast spells.

Photo courtesy of Paradox Interactive

The game does feature an economy, it’s simple enough that you can easily get yourself out of the red if you have spent too much of any resource, yet not too flexible that it will allow a wizard to “out gold” another. Each of your cities has a growing population, every few turns when it reaches a high enough level you have the opportunity to build a new structure within the city boundaries; that structure could net you more of the games three resources; gold,food or magic, improve our defenses or grant you the ability to build or upgrade units. You can also increase the size our your city by building structures at your borders. In essence the more cities and percentage of the map you control the more powerful you will be. But you will also have to contend with the will of the gods of whom you may have a favorable or unfavorable relationship with. If you complete the gods’ quests they will like you and gift you with rare spells and grant you the ability to summon their followers, however disfavour may reach a point where they take physical form on the map and take you on.


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