I really hadn’t expected much from Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria - it was a bargain basement buy (just £1 at HMV), and looked like a low budget Heroes of Might and Magic spin off. However the more I play the game, the more I love it – it’s the perfect example of a game being deceptively simple.
Though the storyline is clichéd and the cut scenes serviceable but far from impressive, the game itself just continues to grow on you. Everything seems to be very simple, thanks to the easy to use interface and uncluttered display. However the more you play it, the more you realise is going on behind the scenes and how much importance even seemingly innocuous decisions might have on the outcome of your game.
Warlord IV is a turn-based strategy game set in a fantasy environment. Getting started is easy, just pick a warlord and enter battle! There is a campaign mode with a storyline – ancient evil and all that, fantasy fans will know the score – and a nice feature of this is that you don’t have to actually conquer every territory to complete the campaign, only ones key to the story. However conquering the other territories will enable you to level up more, which will definitely help in later scenarios. Levelling up your main character (who cannot stray from your capital city) helps in various ways – reducing unit production time, lowering costs for certain things, etc. Every unit can also level up, and each one has basic and special abilities that can be increased. The battles themselves look very simple – you just select which unit you want to send into battle first – but there’s a lot more to it than that. Battalions can only be made of up to 8 individual units (though you can leave an active battalion in a city in addition to the one garrisond in the fortress. However as you play the game more, you realise that different units in the background have an effect on what’s going on – the most obvious example is that of archers firing the occasional flurry of arrows, but there are a lot of other possibilities.
There are many types of unit to choose from, affiliated with different races. The level of unit you can create depends on the city level. More powerful units take more turns to create and also cost more. There is a lot of subtle interplay between different types of enemy, and learning what type of creature is best to put against what in battle is far less obvious than it at first appears. Your warlord is affiliated with a particular type (ie Dragons, Dwarves, Elves etc), and you can only create heroes in Level 4 cities belonging to that race. Heroes can have special abilities that affect the whole battalion. These can also level up and improve their ability over time. You also have heroes / creatures offer to join your army – for a price, of course. You get income from each city per turn, some more than others (depending on whether they have affiliated resources), and balancing the books is an important (but not annoying) part of the game. Spending time creating the right creatures – the more powerful ones – is also very important, but you need to have your cities well enough defended or it might get overtaken before your big powerful dude is ready to serve you.
Get a city with the right building and a quest will be opened up to you – these are in four stages, involving defeating the creatures inhabiting particular ruins. You will be well rewarded for completing these quests, usually culminating in getting a very powerful ally, but along the way you will get money, useful allies and magical objects to enhance your heroes’ abilities. There are other ruins scattered throughout the map which yield their own rewards.
Each aspect of the game play is very easy to manage and the size-adjustable mini-map is extremely useful to see what’s happening and what your enemies are up to. With just one enemy to contend with it’s all quite straightforward, but when you have two or more enemies things get much more interesting, and a single map can take you over a hundred turns to conquer. This might seem too long for some people but the game play is engrossing, and being turn-based it’s far easier to leave a campaign in the middle and pick it up again later than in an RTS game where timing is critical and you don’t necessarily get the time required to reacquaint yourselves with the game map and current state of play before being gazumped! Despite the apparent simplicity the game is never too easy (there are four difficulty levels) or boring, and of course as time goes on your realise that the simplicity is a veneer – it’s actually quite complex when you get down to it! The AI isn’t bad at all, making games against the computer more interesting – the computer’s actions are don’t feel too predictable.
The graphics aren’t amazing but they do the job – everything looks clear and things are quite nicely detailed. The sound too is more than adequate – atmospheric, moody music and some good effects. The samples are perhaps a little on the sparse side in terms of variety, but I can forgive the game that easily enough.
Just to add a little more spice to the game, you can learn spells and cast them in battle or during your turn – these range from bonuses to your side, deficits for your enemies or summoning a creature into your army. As with the other aspects of the game, this all seems very basic, but in order to use your spells effectively, you really have to think about what’s going to be of most benefit to your long-term strategy. Oh, and the ability to carry three of your heroes / creatures over into the next conquest is a very nice touch. You get surprisingly attached to some of your Generals...
The campaign mode is going to take you many hours to complete anyway, but there are also random maps with several different win conditions to choose from, so that will keep you going for a long time. Then of course there’s the multiplayer option, which has many options – play over the internet, take turns on a single PC, even play by email! (Brings back memories of the old PBM games... well okay I never actually played a Play By Mail game, but I was aware of them so have the memories!!)
This game would give real value for money at full price, but as a budget re-release (on the Sold Out Software label (now owned by Mastertronic), and especially for the meagre one pound that I paid for it, the VFM is incredible. Warlords IV is a great game and I prefer it to Heroes of Might and Magic V, even though that is a great game in itself. This is a lot easier to pick up but has a surprising amount of depth, and the AI seems better. It may not look quite as pretty, but Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria has got masses of both playability and lastability.
System Requirements
OS: Windows 98 / Me / XP (and worked fine on Vista)
CPU: 450MHz
Graphics card: 32Mb
DirectX: 9.0a
RAM: 128Mb
HDD space: 1Gb
PEGI Rating: 12 for violence (there is a blood effect, which thankfully can be turned off. Oh, and the front cover isn't too pretty...)
Original review and a few hints and tips can be found on Epinions.
CaptainD - PC Gaming Blog
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