Rage of Mages

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Review: Rage of Mages

Have you ever bemoaned the lock-step similarity between units in Warcraft? Ever wanted a bit more tactical control over your characters in Might and Magic? Looking for C&C meets Wizardry? Well gather 'round, folks, because Rage of Mages brings us two great tastes that taste great together. Role-playing real-time strategy? You bet. Monolith imports this delightful hybrid from Mother Russia and scores an unlikely success with this unheard-of mix of genres.

Your main character gathers various heroes and followers throughout your journeys in Allods, bringing them through a vast assortment of quests in an effort to build their strength for a final confrontation on the Isle of Uimoir. The hub of the game is the city where you recruit, train, and equip your heroes. The blacksmith offers a bewildering selection of weapons and armor, equippable in a manner similar to Diablo. At the inn, you meet heroes who will join you in your questing, and you also hire temporary followers to serve as your main fighting force.

ROM's best element is its numerous and well-designed quests. They're often simply stated, as in "Rescue the captured mage," but they can become much more. Once a mission is completed, you're allowed to continue playing-a nice way to get more treasure and experience. In one mission, a party of knights goes to help a human village fight against raiding orcs. The band is wiped out in an ambush, and an escaping knight beseeches you for help rescuing his party's captured mage. Once you've accomplished that, you can continue to the town that's been raided, heal the few remaining knights who've made it there, and go with the townspeople to exact vengeance on the orc village. This open-endedness is extremely satisfying and occurs frequently.

While the top-down view offered in the game looks and acts much like Warcraft II's, the elevated 3D terrain, shadows that change with the time of day, and the dynamic lighting effects for the multitude of spells all serve to deliver a rich vista. The units are colorful and detailed, their animations are excellent, and they clearly show the weapons they're holding both in the game and in the well-executed picture in the interface. Although most of the changes in armor and weapons are not accurately reproduced, it's easy to distinguish units even during a pitched battle. As for the battles themselves, ROM handles them surprisingly well.

While some of the movement features are flawed-Autoformation didn't work well-you're given roughly as much control as in any other RTS game. You can group units via the standard RTS convention of Ctrl-#, and you're offered different movement and attack choices (such as Swarm, to attack in a group). With some preparation, your units behave with surprising intelligence. During one fight with an ogre, I found that one of my mages had ceased casting fireballs and had instead begun casting much-needed heal spells on my bloodied knight-without my telling him to. These well-implemented elements made the frequent battles detailed and exciting.

On the downside, Rage has an annoying soundtrack, and like most RTS games, it suffers from repetitive responses when you order your units to do something. Still, while it doesn't have the gloss and glitter of the more recent RTS or RPG titles, Rage of Mages makes up for it with an inventive genre-mix that dishes up a hearty serving of that almost-forgotten plate-gameplay.-- Matt Holmes / GamePro