Hi, my name is ColdBeer and for a few days now I was playing Age of Wonders 4.
So long story short - it is a wonderful game, it stands firmly behind one of the words in
the name of the game.
Although it has some really terrible performance issues as well, but I will talk about these
later.
This review is all about the feeling and not about the technical things.
I won’t be telling you the statistics of units, their resistances and similar things.
No, just how the game made me feel, what I find fascinating and what could be done better.
So immediately after you turn the game on, you are provided with the opportunity to create
your own faction.
I don’t think that I have seen this level of different options recently in any other
4X game.
Especially in the ones who are so called Heroes of Might and Magic-like.
Here you can create cannibal moles or necromancer frogs, orcs of light or anything you can imagine
and officially name them as well.
To say short - you can break the stereotypes as you like.
And I tried to make something ugly, Quasimodish if I may, so I made my faction with super-long
arms and short legs.
That is all the stupidness I was allowed to make.
Not very cool, but also way more than I was expecting.
Anyway, in my case I became a proud ruler of Alcoholic Wizards of Doom.
When they are sober, they are so nice and help you to fix your leaking pipes, but when
they are drunk they are... also trying to fix your leaking pipes.
What, do you think all alcoholics are bad people?
No, although in this case by fixing your pipes they burn down your city by accident.
Yeah I can clearly say that you may want to avoid them.
But I couldn’t.
Because I was their ruler, the emperor ColdBeer itself.
Anyway, the game at first looks really complex - it is filled with tens or even hundreds
of various tiny statistics, resources, skills, traits and so on.... and that was really overwhelming.
But I remembered the golden rule of any game - just play it as you can and learn along
the way.
And you know - it worked.
It’s actually not that complex.
I played the third part of Age of Wonders almost 10 years ago and then a few hours of
Planetfall along the way, so that probably helped as well.
So I started to treat the game like any Heroes of Might and Magic title and the Age of Wonders
4 went with my gameplay style just fine.
If I failed to understand something - the game was more than happy to help.
With its incredible explanation system, where you can read about the thing in question and
then about another thing and then another and another just by hovering the mouse cursor
on top of the word.
Also the tutorial lady was eager to help every time I clicked on anything new.
So the complexity is here, but I think even a dumber person, you know, like me, will have
no problems learning the secrets of the play.
And gameplay, in simple words, works like this: you expand your territory, build your
farms, forges and mines in it, train battle units and conquer new lands.
That is the main deal.
Of course there are many more complex things like diplomacy, declaration of war, various
quests and so on.
Winning conditions are many as well, you can freely choose what you want to do.
You know if your army is strong - you may want to kill everyone.
That is cool, but you can become friends and share your potato salad with other factions
as well.
The combat of course is the most fun and most interesting thing in the game.
Age of Wonders 4 has an incredible amount of different units made with this cool faction
creation tool I told you about before, from fire gremlins to holy moles with wings and
nimbuses.
Yeah, holy moly is actually here.
Battle arenas are gorgeous as well - the design is really pretty and eye-catching.
Most of them are filled with some shining details that create this magical atmosphere
in which many things die.
Controlling the battles is quite easy.
Age of Wonders 4 did a great job in this field.
Units act as you expect them to act and spells are nice.
Only thing that really annoyed me was the autobattle function - AI is not the best,
to say the least.
For example, once my unit was possessed by an enemy unit for some amount of turns and
when I turned on auto battle - my other units started to attack that possessed unit.
That is stupid - why kill your own units, when you can just kill an enemy unit possessing
it and win the battle without casualties at all?
Oh well, I have no doubt that they will fix it.
The game looks and plays great.
I foreshadow a great future for it.
But...
don’t buy it now.
Or at least read the comments on Steam before buying if you are watching this video a bit
later.
Wait, what?
You said it is a great game.
Yeah.
I did.
And it is.
I play the Steam version of the game but in a few hours of gametime it crashed on me about
10 times.
I tried to play it a week ago and I couldn’t even get into the game, it was crashing while
I was choosing my race all the time.
Then after a week, the situation was better.
I was, you know, allowed to play, but crashes were really frequent - in the last hour and
a half of gameplay I was forcibly shown my own desktop 6 times.
That was beyond annoying.
Sadly I can’t refund the game and get my money back, because I got it for free.
Good thing is that the game has great autosave and you can jump straight to the place where
you were when the crash happened.
Even in combat.
Anyway - the verdict!
So far, if we ignore the crashes - 8 cold beers out of 10.
Also to be honest keep in mind that while I made this review - the game was still unreleased.
They are still fixing it and making it better.
When they fix these issues - this may be the best 4X game of the year.
Age of Wonders 4 releases on 2nd of May.
That’s it, thank you for watching, have a nice day and I’ll see you next time, bye!