Well, well, well, did we get a surprise our way. Even though
Mother Russia is in a bit of economic trouble at the moment -
the software development industry doesn't seem to care much.
First there was Vangers: One For The Road, and now there's
Rage of the Mages. It's a very novel type of game, but then
again, if there's something that the Russian folks definitely do
not lack, then it's originality. This is an RPG, but with elements
of RTS for combat scenes. The way the game works is you
have a central town, from which all of your missions [Quests]
are directed, and to which you return to hire reinforcements,
sell weapons you pick up from dead foes, train your characters,
and so forth. In a way, having only one town somewhat limits
the extensiveness of the game, as you can't, for example, have
different towns that specialize in different types of weaponry -
but on the other hand, this ain't no Daggerfall, but - it was
never designed to be.
You start off with one character, which is always present on
your journey, and upon the death of which your Quest is
always failed. You can custom-build him (or her), however,
only three classes are available - a Fighter, an Archer and a Mage. That is
unfortunate, as a Fighter can by no means use any magic, and
a Mage can by no means carry any weaponry (magic staves
notwithstanding). Also, a Mage's max lifepoints are insanely
low, in my opinion, anyhow - so you'd absolutely have to keep
him in the back of the line during all combats (which is,
actually, somewhat hard in the first missions as you might only
have two - three people in your party, so the enemy can storm
the front lines easily). The Archer is a mix of the two... but still,
some customization would be welcome. The first couple of missions just basically
get you acquainted with the game, being relatively easy and
always providing good support in terms of clubmen and
archers. Later on, as you pick up more Heroes (a term
describing characters that can carry inventories, cost nothing to
maintain and are always present on your journey) missions
grow harder, but your characters improve in strength, as well.
A very neat feature I found was an option to turn on
auto-healing for your characters, so say you'd have a few
mages, you'd put them around your fighting heroes and they'd
auto-heal them if their health would go down.
The atmosphere of the game is incredibly well-done, up to the
font used, and the choice of vocabulary used. I'm not sure if the
Monolith [publisher] or the original Russian developers wrote
the script for the game, but whoever did it, kudos - that's good
stuff. The in-game rendered scenes are skillfully done, too -
and to add to the atmosphere, everything's animated - the
town, albeit a still picture, had a slight bit of animation thrown
in on top of that - horses look impatient, some people look like
they're talking, etc. During the Quests, the terrains are also
animated, with trees, grass and flowers swooshing around,
critters running around, and so forth. Forests are densely
populated (maybe not 'densely', but after you run into some
orcs, squirrels and other annoying critters you'll think it's
'overpopulated' with them), which most of the time present no
challenge, except when in large numbers. There are always
hidden items in levels, so a player might choose to explore the
map rather than go by the path to the ending of the level.
However, those items are usually well-protected, so you
shouldn't skim down on backup forces.
Which brings me to another interesting point - hired forces. In
the Inn, you can hire mercenaries that for a certain fee will tag
along with your team and fight on your side. I found it was a
very useful feature, as usually they're good
(statistically-wise, and cannon-fodder wise) and you usually
make enough money in a Quest to be able to afford a small
force of mercs on your side. You can also pick up
miscellaneous items from slain foes, and resell them for gold
pieces. Interesting is the training room - for a fee (of course)
you can train a selected Hero in a certain skill, be that swords,
axes, bows (for Fighters), or earth magic, fire magic, Astral
magic (for Mages), among others. Slightly unfortunate is the
fact that, when you gain levels, you can't attribute gained
experience to a particular skill - everything is dynamically
increased. However, if you use swords a lot, your sword skill
will rise with more usage - which is a very cool feature. In one
of the missions, you have to slay four Ogres - and that's a good
place to raise your Blade skill, as they are pretty tough.
The downfalls of the game, albeit few, still are somewhat
disconcerting (though I'm sure repairable with a patch or two).
For one, the fighting scenes tend to be somewhat slow, and if
the game is on Maximum Speed, then things REALLY get out of
control, and even usually harmless creatures can do a lot of
damage to your characters. Why? The way combat works is
you have to point out an enemy to kill to your strike force
(inappropriate name, given the medieval times of the game,
but oh well). Thing is, if your game is set to maximum speed,
the critters move around so fast you can't click on them, as the
engine is lagged a bit - so bad things can happen. It might be
better on a P2-400, but as tested, on a P200, it was somewhat of
a problem. Granted, you could use the 'Swarm' mode (which
basically tells your characters to run into an area and start
hacking everything left and right), but I prefer meticulous
sniping of some creatures with archers, etc.
Another (annoying) thing is that the so-called different
resolution modes do nothing to the actual playable screen.
What it does instead is run the game itself in a varied
resolution, but, by holding the action screen constant, you get
more real estate elsewhere on the screen, so things such as
stats can be displayed all the time. It's annoying because you
can't increase the size of the play screen, but, on the other
hand, given that it's already a bit slow, maybe that's a good
thing after all.
And last, but not least - the sound issues. The
acknowledgements from the characters seem straight from a
real RTS, however, I believe they have no place here. That is,
the characters SHOULD say something, but a) the voices should
differ for your main and hired characters and b) they should
really vary the lines, and have more than one or two different
ones per character. Fortunately, they only say their lines once
in a while, unlike units in, say, C&C - whether that's due to a
bug or a feature I'm not sure, but I'm happy with that, as you
get annoyed with the acknowledgements pretty damn fast. The
atmospheric sounds aren't bad, with swords clanging, enemies
screaming as they die, wind swooshing, and so on.
Rage of Mages is, in resume, one of the most interesting games
of the genre to hit the hard drives in quite a while, and, given
adequate appreciation, can definitely become one of the better
RPGs of these days. It doesn't overload the player with
incredible amounts of statistics tracking, but yet manages to
keep the interest in because of all the action and the
unwrapping storyline. Definitely one to check out - haven't
seen anything like this in a while (if ever?).
Rage of Mages is a well thought-out game. This is a welcome
addition to the ever so few Role Playing Games which are
produced today. I suppose the reason so few RPG's are made
is because they are so involved and require an immense
amount time in the making. However, when a good RPG is
released you can be assured it will be accepted with open
arms.
Graphics - 16 / 20
ROM has three resolution settings which can be used to play
the game. I ran the game in 640 X 480, 800 X 600, and 1024 X
768 and could tell no difference in the screen quality at all.
The only way I knew that I was actually in a different mode
was because the title screens and the towns were still in 640 X
480 so they were fairly small in the higher resolution modes.
The landscapes used in the game seemed to be very repetitive
although they were eye-pleasing, and fully detailed, with many
trees/rocks and such placed about. The town was very neatly
drawn with detailed attributes in all the buildings, from the
Inn's Keeper to the Blacksmith. Overall the game has highly
detailed graphics which makes up for the repetitiveness of
scenery.
Sound - 8 / 15
Not much to say about the sound here, that being because
there are very few sound effects. The sound effects did
correspond quite well with the action, and added to the game
when they were used although that was not very often. More
sounds effects of the same quality should definitely have been
added to the game, for more realistic action.
Gameplay - 26 / 30
The characters proved to be very easy to control. ROM
implements a play control very similar to that of Warcraft and
the like. It took no longer then ten minutes to fully figure out
how to control the characters. The enemies in ROM seemed to
have some variety although they all apparently attack in the
same ways, and retreat in the same ways. The creators seem
to have made many different enemies but given them all
similar AI.
Fun Factor - 16 / 20
Rage of Mages is compelling from the very beginning. It draws
you into the action. I recommend playing in no more than one
hour sessions. After about an hour the game started to drag,
but if I took a break for a little while it rejuvenated itself quite
well, thus consuming more of my time.
Multiplayer - 4 / 5
Up to sixteen players can compete at the same time. This
brings in many options of play. This sort of game doesn't
require a high speed connection in order to run smoothly in
multiplayer. This is very beneficial to those of us not equipped
with a high speed internet connection.
Overall Impression - 7 / 10
For anyone who is into the RPG genre, I recommend picking
this one up. It's well worth your time. I would also
recommend Rage of Mages to anyone who finds RPG'S a mite
boring, seeing as this game is not actually a full blown RPG.
Rage of Mages incorporates a fighting style similar to that of
Command & Conquer where you simply select the units and
click on your enemy. This real time fighting is much superior
to turn based fighting as in games like Final Fantasy 7.