Turn-based strategy games are enjoying a revival of late. Chris Anderson takes as long as he likes thinking about what to say next
It's inevitable that at some point games within a genre stop being original and start becoming little more than rehashes of each other. Which is exactly what is starting to happen in the world of turn-based strategy games. Go and play Heroes Of Might IV, then come back and play Age Of Wonders II, and tell me I'm wrong. There really is very little to differentiate between the two. But does that make Age Of Wonders II a bad game, though? No, of course it doesn't, it just makes it a supremely unimaginative rip-off of what made the Heroes series great, which in turn makes it, well, rather good.
If it ain't broke...
The familiar premise goes thus: find a hero, recruit characters for your cause while you travel around the game map. Grab any loot you come across. Build a city, improve it as funds permit, hire more warriors and magic units and send them off to clonk the enemy on the head. Research and cast spells, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. There's not a whole bunch of innovative stuff here, though unlike the first game you now get bigger, more detailed maps as well as more involvement in developing your cities. And as you are now a wizard, researching magical attributes and ever more powerful spells from the seven magical spheres plays a much greater role. As you'd expect, combat is played out in turns, and you can either assign tactics and orders individually to your units or simply click the auto button and watch them strut their stuff. However, if you choose this option you risk losing some of your better units if they don't keep themselves out of harm's way, which, due to some erratic AI, they seldom do.
But it looks good...
Age Of Wonders II, in all fairness, is quite graphically impressive (well, for a turn-based strategy game anyway). All the characters and environments are rich and detailed, and even battle graphics are fairly decent unless you zoom in close on them, at which point they become blurred and low on detail.
So, should you buy it? Well, if you already have Heroes Of Might And Magic IV and you want to play it again with different graphics, go right ahead. If you are new to this genre, Age Of Wonders II is as good an introduction to it as you will get, and the fact that it's not quite as complex as Heroes IV may well make it a better title for beginners. In closing then, AOWII is not quite as good as the title it seeks so desperately to 'emulate', but it's damned close.