The beginning of the series, a solid game with erratic difficulty. For the nostalgic or those that like difficult games
The game would stand and fall by the quality of it's gameplay and the balance of the four factions. The game basics are good and by now well known, gathering resources, building up your castles, building up the army, grabbing items and mines. In battle, correctly positioning your forces, using your spells well and trying to use your troops better then your opponent. However if one side starts off unbalanced, no matter how good the rest of the game is, the whole gets wrecked. To 3DO's credit, none of the four factions are either too weak or too strong so you can play as any, at least in single player. The knights lack ranged troops, magic and are not the best spell casters but their heroes give a boost of moral and make your troops hard to kill with their high defense. Their castle and troops are cheaper then the others so while inferior up until you get Knights and Paladins, you can get more of them so end up with an army dwarfing your opponent. The Barbarian heroes are strong in the attack and are quicker on land, making useful scouts though weak on magic. The troops lack mobility but have good range and cyclopes are very powerful, need a lot of ore though. The sorceress hero is quicker over water and a powerful one can have a lot of Armageddons up her sleeve though is weak in melee. The need for a Mage's guild means Mercury, not the easiest resource to grab is needed, the troops are very quick and have good ranged troops, with Druids tending to go first they and a good spell give the sorceress a chance to cause massive damage before the opponent can move. Warlock heroes, again poor melee but they are the most powerful spell-casters in the game and see furthest on the map which makes them useful scouts. Their castle is the most expensive in the game in terms of gold and the need for sulfur for not just two buildings but your dragons mean warlocks can be slow starters. Troops are expensive but powerful, usually the most powerful in the class and dragons are the best troops in the game. They lack ranged troops but have three quick units, the problem for a warlock is despite the powerful magic, despite the powerful troops, 3DO have made them so expensive that the others forces could build up and take them over before the warlords can really build up.
Each faction clearly has advantages and disadvantages, while dragons are unbelievably powerful, I have defeated a warlord army packed with dragons with a knight army. Some maps will suit some armies more then others but overall, the balance for single player is superb, the ability to hire heroes not of your faction was a good touch and of course, when you conquer an enemy town you can buy their type of troops. Are dragons game breaking in their strength? As I said , I have defeated warlock armies with lots of dragons in and they tend not to have that large a dragon section yet if you can grab warlock cities and get ten or fifteen dragons, the level tends be as good as won.
Therein is one of the main flaws, in a multi player game, the first person to be able to build ten or so dragons has a huge advantage over every other player, one that can decide a game. In single player, a good solid fun game is wrecked by a very poor campaign mode. In the game there is almost no story, no reason to play it again other then to attack the faction capital of the side you first won it with yet it could still be a fun in one play through if not for a major flaw or two. For one the game feels like it is cheating at times, the other factions always know which creatures will join them and can sense when you leave a castle unguarded, though that isn't always a bad thing. The other major problem I have is the campaign difficultly level is very erratic. First level is easy, too easy, the second level has the right balance between being hard enough to force you to think and work hard but without being impossible to those that persevere through the setbacks. The third level is one that is entirely different from usual but good balance but the fourth is a horrible one. Suddenly the spike goes from formidable to very hard, it will take a couple of restarts but that level can be done with a lot of frustration. Suddenly, the next three levels are like level two, it has the right balance, doable but formidable. Then the last level made me long for the fourth level, the enemy concentrate solely on you and make it very very very hard. It should have built up the difficulty level over time, not waver from one set of difficultly to another.
None the less, it is a good if sometimes frustrating game and one from which 3DO excellently built from.