deep gameplay marred by bugs
User Rating: 7.4 | Lords of Magic PC
lom was quite a deep unique game, with a mixture of turn based, realtime strategy and some rpg elements thrown in unfortunately the game was broken. The original release was quite buggy with horrendous load times and skills that didn't work. After it was patched though it fixed alot of the problems. To start with you selected your faith and hero, there was a mage, theif and warrior class so bascially there was 24 heroes to choose (except for death which could be later unlocked). Your goal was take your party around and attack and conquer enemy buildings and resources whilst gaining experience and leveling your troops and building your cities. There was also many items that could be found that your hero could use, so it made the questing quite interesting. The different faiths interacted with each other depending alot on their opinions, so earth and air were always against each other, but earth was somewhat friendly with the fire and death faiths. So it was kind of a light verse dark kind of approach. The thing about the game was that it was so huge, each faith had around a dozen different units. So there was around 100 different units in the game, same with spells each faith had unique spells to research, maybe around 20 odd so there was a good 160+ spells in the game. Another interesting thing was the barter system than enabled you to trades spells, units and items. The graphics were quite well done, and I loved the soundtracks for this game. The thing that let it down was the shoddy AI, it just used to do weird stuff like you could be allies with another faith and then for no reason they would break it off and suddenly attack you for absolutely no reason. You were also always offered pathetic trade deals, like a few hundred crystals for your level 12 mage, but then the computer would go hostile on you if you rejected it. I keep coming back to it just because it is really deep despite it's flaws, the special edition added more creatures and some cool questing to be done. If you ever see it in you bargain bin it would be worth a pick up.
