torylines in strategy games generally make blockbuster Hollywood movies look brainy, so European developer Mayhem Studios' turn-based epic, marrying role-playing and strategy elements, is something of an anomaly. Modeling itself loosely after the Roman Empire, the game is set in a fantasy world where generations have passed since the unification of six principalities facilitated the pulverization of invading barbarian hordes, creating an empire ruled by a succession of high mages that has spanned generations.
Peace is a beautiful thing—except in a computer game, and not surprisingly strange things are afoot in the border territories. Random abductions of soldiers and townspeople are exceeded in distressfulness only by armies of rotting undead popping up and ravaging the land. Troubled by events, a magician dispatches his apprentice to investigate. As the game begins, the player assumes the role of this apprentice, Artemian, hot on the trail of a great mage who was last seen heading into the vast Ibrashim desert.
As in most real-time games, the player controls units on a map at a bird's-eye level looking down, but nothing moves in real-time here. Each unit, which can be combined into unit groups stacked three high, has a limited number of action points. Action points dictate movement, combat and spellcasting. Combat occurs when two units "bump into" each other, and consists of a sub-screen tactical view where melee and magic commands can be issued until the conflict is resolved or action points run out. Actions points carry over into and out of combat, making each turn a matter of precise strategic calculations, since even high-power units ending a turn with low action points make easy targets. Units gain experience over time, increasing standard role-playing abilities like attack, defense, hit points and mana (magic power).
The maps in Empire of Magic are 2-D, consisting of pre-rendered cliffs, towns, grassy knolls, forests, palm trees, etc. Towns are repositories of information, skill-building, unit-recruiting and spell-learning, and also serve as points that must be defended. Units or unit groups are selected with the left mouse button, deselected with the right, and the screen is scrolled by pushing the mouse pointer into its corners. There is the standard fog-of-war effect, overlaying unexplored areas in blackness, and terrain plays a crucial strategic role, as line-of-sight rules allow players to "hide" units behind hills, walls and other terrain features. The game ships with two multiplayer maps and supports TCP/IP or IPX/SPX connections.
Unlikely to spawn an Empire of fans
It's a novel idea—slapping a turn-based face on the badly weathered real-time idiom—but it works about as well here as Keanu Reeves in a Roman Polanski film. It doesn't take long to figure out that what at first appears to be a complex strategy game with role-playing elements is merely a tedious, heavily scripted and buggy game of chess.
Most levels devolve into the "try, try and try again" syndrome, requiring the player to poke into unfamiliar territory, die (often) in surprise combat due to depleted action points, and reload to put the "right" unit into position. There's something to be said for careful use of terrain for cover or ambushing, but the 2-D graphics—passable at best—are neither clean nor compelling enough to encourage the sort of meticulous analysis necessary to master various encounters.
The biggest letdown is the combat engine—unanimously lauded in nearly all of the previews—which is literally about smashing two lines of up to three units into each other. What's fun about hitting an attack button in a turn-based game? With just three options (attack, flee, cast) there's so little tactical planning involved that one wonders why combat was included as user-controlled at all. Even worse is the fact that units rarely follow orders. Telling unit A to attack enemy unit B just as often results in unit A attacking enemy unit C. It makes no sense, and the manual (five pages on game mechanics, the rest on spells and character profiles)—is utterly useless.
The game has its moments, particularly the well-developed background story and plot twists, which set it apart from other scripting cannon fodder. Boil away the narrative framework, however, and what remains is a failed attempt to graft the complexity of a turn-based game onto something that looks graphically much more like a real-time engine. One wonders, in fact, whether the game might not have worked better in real time after all.
Lots of games are chesslike, but chess is fun and this game isn't.
— Matt
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