Dominions 2 is an all time strategy great, with depth to keep you coming back for years.

User Rating: 8.8 | Dominions II: The Ascension Wars PC
By Moodgie | Review Date:
Gamespot completely missed the boat in its review. Dominions 2 is perhaps the finest strategy game ever made. That it was made by only two people who hold other jobs aside from game making is incredible, when you realise the depth of this game. You can do virtually anything relating to fantasy that you desire in this game. You can be a Aztec-like society that sacrifices its own young for magic, an enslaving race of mind-sucking tentacled aliens, a Transylvanian-like society dominated by mighty Vampire Lords (after applying the small patch), and of course traditional fantasy empires you might find in any fantasy game. All the various races are impressive in their numbers, but much more impressive is that almost every one presents new gameplaying opportunities. For instance, playing Ermor, a nation of undead, you cannot even raise troops normally, instead having to rely on raising the dead, which effectively changes the entire game system. In fact, most all of the 17 races have distinct playing styles. Some races even have multiple types of societies, which you can change at the beginning.

Micromanagement in this game is not really a problem, no more than in, say, Civilization 3. If you choose to play a massive map with all 17 races, then yes, I'd imagine micromanagement would get very tiresome. However, most maps provided both with the game and available on the website are geared towards fewer players. Micromanagement in Alpha Centauri, for instance, was noticably worse than in this game, particularly when you consider how much deeper this game is than Sid Meier's masterpiece.

The manual provided with the game is ample and explains things well. The interface is fairly easy to learn, after you start a game. Designing your "god" is incredibly interesting, with tons of different mages, monsters, dragons, monuments and other things available for you to deal with, along with the domain aspect, which allows you to increase magic or income at the expense of something else. The magic system is immense, as well. Item creation is literally better than any other game ever, even better than Master of Magic. Discovering an invaluable item can literally change your game. Race specific heroes that will come to you if you set your Luck scales high enough (yes you can control luck, as well!), range from interesting and useful for the traditionally powerful nations to absolutely incredible for some of the unorthodox countries.

The graphics in this game are functional. Nothing more, nothing less. You can forgive them, because strategy games are not known for graphical prowess and also because despite limited resources, the game features tons and tons of different monsters and a functional battle viewing system, which actually can be quite fun, considering you can change tactics before battle for each of the units you put together.

Overall, I can absolutely reccomend this to any strategy gamer or anyone with an affectation for deep, replayable games. This game introduces so many innovations, and manages to balance things so perfectly, that it will provide hundreds of hours and many sleepless nights for anyone who bothers to dedicate some time to it.

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