“Parley! I must have parley!” cries King Rrat XLII, who is of course an anthropomorphic rat wearing a tiny golden crown. The rat doesn’t just want to talk, he demands I give him mana and gold. Refusing King Rrat is a tacit declaration of war, so I must carefully consider. I look at my forces – the band of black minotaurs, the studious magisters who fling fireballs and ice blasts, the high healer heroine – and the list of spells at my disposal as a Great Mage of Ardania, and then laugh. Come at me, Rrat. You will burn.
It’s easy to compare Warlock: Master of Arcane with Civilization V. The two share a bunch of genres and classifications – turn-based strategy, 4X and “freaking addictive” come to mind. In both games, you found cities that produce military units you can use to attack your opponents. Each turn you can engage in diplomacy, manage resources or choose to upgrade the infrastructure of your cities. The two games even share a similar presentation and a one-unit-per-hex combat system, but don’t let the cosmetic similarity fool you. Playing as one of Warlock‘s Great Mages feels completely different than anything from Sid Meier except for one very important detail – it will keep you playing late into the night, mumbling “Just one more turn” to yourself again and again.
Warring mages have a lot of fun toys at their disposal, and trust me, you’ll need all the help you can get. You start out with one city, a spell or two in your book and a few units. As you explore the edges of your map, you’ll come in contact with all manner of monsters like spiders and werewolves who want your blood. Even neutral cities – those not owned by another Great Mage – are automatically hostile to you. To defeat them, you’ll need to smartly deploy units like skeleton archers and goblin spearmen. Because you are a Great Mage, you can cast spells to support your efforts on the field of battle; a well-timed healing spell or lightning bolt can make a huge difference. Because there can only be one unit on any given hex, managing the tactics of protecting weaker glass cannon units like archers behind burly ogres can be a fun challenge and I was impressed when my AI opponents did the same.
In fact, the AI is a big reason why I keep playing Warlock. Strategy games typically either come too easy, or artificially add difficulty with tricks like adding hit points to the AI’s units. In Warlock, your opponent actually plays like a human player might, moving wounded units back to heal or feinting with a weak summoned unit to draw your attention before moving in en force. The AI will still make bonehead moves like inexplicably breaking an alliance you’ve had all game, or sending countless embarked units towards your capital to die under ranged fire, but it’s a big step forward.
There’s a lot of variation and customization in Warlock, which is the other reason I play it over and over again. There’s a stock of 12 Great Mages you can play as with generic fantasy archetypes like the pointy-hat-wearing and thus aptly named Miralbus the Hat and King Lich V – which, I feel I have to make clear, doesn’t mean there have been four Lich Kings before him, but that he’s been resurrected four times. The writing is all tongue-in-cheek, not taking itself too seriously. Each mage has a default race – human, monster or undead – and a slate of various perks and spells, but you can very easily pick and choose these characteristics to perfectly shape your Great Mage to your playing style or give yourself a specific challenge.
City management is a lot less time-consuming than most 4X games. You build structures on specific hexes within the city’s zone of control, but only when the population has grown to support them. A city with a population score of 5 can only have 5 buildings. Buildings provide (or cost) you resources – mana, food, gold or research – or allow you to build special units, but the streamlined UI lets you easily figure out where your deficit is. When your city grows and you get the chance to build something, it’s pretty simple to build a farm when your vast goblin armies demand food. The relative simplicity of managing your empire places the focus on conflict, for those of you who like fighting wars more than building wonders.
The best part of Warlock is the spell-casting. Most of the spells will sound familiar, but I loved seeing their application in a strategy game. Sure, tossing fireballs and shadow bolts to deal damage is nothing new, but casting enchantments like water walking on your units really gives you tons of tactical options. In one game, I had a cadre of mages blasting coastal cities while standing on the ocean.
There are limits to slinging spells that keep the game from devolving into a fireball fight. Each spell has a casting time, so you can usually only cast one or two per turn, and ongoing enchantments have costs that can add up to seriously crash the mana market in your empire. You can pick which spells you research from a list of five, but those five are randomly chosen. It’s easy to get frustrated without a linear tech tree to guide your choices.
While each tooltip has the information you need and some entertaining flavor text, Warlock suffers from a lack of documentation. There’s no all-encompassing encyclopedia. I had to resort to wikis or forums to find out a lot of specific rules. The latest patch solved some of those problems by adding more tooltips, and making it clear there are other ways to win besides nuking King Rrat and his fellow Great Mages. (You can cast a Unity spell, or kill the avatar of a god; both of which require multiple steps to accomplish that still aren’t exactly clear.)
Bottom Line: A well-crafted, easy-to-play game with an entertaining fantasy bent, Warlock will have you staying up nights taking one more turn to blast King Rrat to kingdom come.
Recommendation: If you have exhausted yourself with historical turn-based games, try being a Great Mage and taking over the fantasy world of Ardania.
[rating=4.5]
Game: Warlock: Master of the Arcane
Genre: Turn-Based Strategy
Developer: Ino-Co Plus
Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Platform(s): PC
Available from: Amazon(US), GameStop(US), Amazon(UK), Play.com(UK)
