Recent reviews by Hashashiyyin

[some of of the major points in this review were obsoleted in the course of early access, might rereview later]

Imagine you arrive to listen to some kind of musical production. The stage is a little too small. The lighting is a little too bright. An accompaniment begins; it is serviceable, maybe even has some good moments although it frequently veers into the distinctly unimpressive. You wait in anticipation for the star of the show. But the backing track just goes on and on. Every now and then, a performer steps up. Maybe they are here to really kick off the show! But no. They just perform another mediocre little routine that, after a brief moment of promise, fades uninspiringly back into the drone. There is no star, no performance to make this worth spending your night and money on. You leave unsatisfied with an empty experience.

And that is pretty much my experience with SpellForce 3. There is no part of the game that is actually exciting or compelling to engage with. Where there are interesting concepts, the follow-through to make them that "star" is without fail not just slightly but entirely lacking. I feel that Grimlore did not want to commit to fleshed out or engaging systems on either the RTS or RPG side; a mistaken compromise that results in an empty frame of a game without meat on its bones. Far from the "perfect blend of RTS and RPG", it feels like the developers didn't have a clear and well thought out direction in hybridising the two genres which consequently brought down their whole effort.

World of Magic is intended as a direct successor to the venerable Master of Magic. I'd been looking for a game that made a decent attempt at building on MoM's legacy for a while so I was pretty excited to hear about this one. However this game is less about building on MoM's legacy and more about porting it wholesale.

The good:
- most things that made MoM good are still in there i.e. lots of customisation, reasonably interesting fantasy setting, casting spells.

The bad:
- doesn't support 1280*1024 resolution!
- the map and units quite ugly. The game world in particularly is quite poor at communicating information eg. resources and dungeons are not easy to make out.
- interfaces are neither pretty nor particularly functional
- doesn't let you skip movement animations on the combat map
- maps have 6 subdimensions for no reason, which is unnecessarily confusing. 2 is plenty.
- basically nothing significant has changed since MoM. So city building and expansion are about as bland as you'd expect from a strategy game made in 1994.

When I saw this game, I was hoping that it would retain the features that made Master of Magic a really interesting game and combine them with a solid 4X core that built on the advances of the last couple of decades. At the very least, I'd have expected MoM with a slick interface and nice graphics.
This game delivers none of that. Its interface fails to make any notable improvement on MoM's neanderthal counterpart - and in fact lacks the aesthetic charm of the older game. The underlying problem of Worlds of Magic is that in their quest to preserve every mechanic the developers have not added or changed anything substantial but have still managed to lose plenty. If you run the two games next to one another, you will see they play in the same sort of way - but one lacks charm, and a soul.