Warlock: Master of the Arcane Review

[bificommander]

Maybe it was because the game kept crashing, but I really wanted to like the game and was bored. Have they patched it and should I check it out again? I love turn based strategy...

Can't speak for everyone, but the game is very stable for me. The only crash I found was, again, due to a lack of polish: The game kept crashing at a certain turn while reading through the turn notifications. Y'know, the "This unit needs orders" "This city can build something" stuff. I found that there was a "This city can build" notification of a city that I'd demolished that turn because it was a rather pointless city I just conquered. Normally, if you click on the notification, the screen jumps to the unit or city in question. When the subject of the message didn't exist, rather than doing nothing or discarding the message, the game tried to jump the camera to a non-existent city and crashed to desktop. As long as I didn't click on the message, I could just end the turn fine.

It's kind of telling for the game as a whole. They have some very nice features, but they didn't think the implementation through.

Other than that though, the game is stable and functional, which is more than I can say from some of Paradox's promising releases.

 

[NEHZ]

...

If you don't raze the cities that aren't undead, you need food to sustain those cities. Also, only certain races canbuild a temple to certain gods. As for the monsters, yeah, no argument there. The greater fire elementals piss me off more than pretty much anything else in the game due to their high resistance to pretty much everything apart from spirit magic (imo, shamen are the best monster killers).

The food shortage only decreases city growth for non-undead cities. Wich means you can keep conquered non-undead cities if you believe they're big enough already. Point is, ignoring food and razing every non-undead city puts your economy ahead in ways that other races simply can't match. The high amount of mana and gold means that you can easely max out your top units in upgrades and unit enchantments.
You're right about the temples, but having less choises doesn't balance out the huge advantage of the undead. It might have been different if lack of food decreased your gold the way a surpluss increases it. The different units for each god/race combo is actually one of the few things they did right instead of just half-right.

 

[gamesfemme]

I was given this game to review a while back and found it really addictive. It hits the sweet spot in terms of difficulty level-- it's easy to pick up the basic mechanics, but not so easy that you never feel challenged.