Warlock: Master of the Arcane (PC) Review

Strategy for the masses

Warlock: Master of the Arcane is a fun turn based strategy game from Ino-Co Plus and Paradox Interactive. Being turn based, it is a little more user friendly than its real time brethren. Great graphics, fun sound effects, along with varying battle options makes this a great package.

The game starts off by putting the entity of the game in the player’s hands with just about every option you could want. Ramp the difficulty up to kiss-your-elbow impossible or take it down to a leisurely stroll through a summer meadow. Change up the size of the world, change the number of other “players”, even add more worlds to explore and conquer.

I started with a massive world and made it super easy just to explore the game and see everything. I thought I would do a quick run. Wrong. The world is massive and you really need it that way to see everything, but the game is going to take much longer to complete. However, moving up the difficulty and trying to make everything as normal as possible shortened the game in the opposite way. I was trounced.

There are plenty of things here that players can and should explore. I think even experienced players would find enough here to keep them entertained. Hardcore players that focus on clicks per minute type of stuff will probably get bored. It’s not that kind of game.

Warlock: Master of the Arcane is what you would expect from this kind of game. You build cities, build buildings to gather resources, build fighting units to tame the wild or take over other cities so you can found a new city and build buildings, etc, etc.

There are a good number of different types of buildings you can build and units you can recruit to keep it interesting. The more stuff you have the more population you get, the more population you get the bigger city you have, the bigger city you have the more stuff you can build.

There are also special resource areas of the map. If one of these falls in one of your cities, it will allow you to build special buildings or recruit special units.

There are things going on outside of the main game play on the map too. You have other (computer controlled) wizards that are essentially playing right along with you, so there are relationships to manage. There are also gods that will send you on quests. Doing those quests will grant you a bit of favor with those gods and grant you some buffs or abilities. There will also be traveling merchants that will sell you items that give you buffs, and every so often a hero will come along. If you hire that hero, they will appear as powerful unit on the battlefield.

The UI is easy to use and understand, but you don’t really need to understand much. When it is your turn, the game will feed you all of the actions that are important to take, such as building a new building, researching a new spell, or defending one of your cities.

Take all of your actions, end your turn, then sit back and watch the other wizards or creatures in the world react with their own actions. There are some actions you can take that are not fed to you, but those will come naturally. For instance you, as a wizard, can cast a spell down from the heavens, or you may want to move a unit into a defensive position.

The units are all very simple but still fun to command. When they level up, they mostly have the same options. Increase damage or defense, etc. But you can build building that give certain units unique abilities or spells. There are three races that you can experiment with but they all have the basic range, magic, and tank fighters. Still, the compulsion in me to see everything made it rewarding to try them all out.

The spells in the game are what really makes Warlock: Master of the Arcane worth it. Most of them are your simple fire ball type things but they have also included the ability to change the lands around you. You can make yours more fertile, or your enemies less so. You can also raise the land into a mountains or even a volcano. Probably the one I like to play around with the most is the one that lowers the land and can basically make an ocean or river. There is something great about a game that allows players that much control.

As with other strategy games, you can select the criteria that will need to be met to “Win” the game. Controlling the holy grounds, learning the ultimate “Unity” spell, etc. Personally, controlling everything suits me just fine. I actually found that I would purposely extend the game so I could explore more of it, and I think that says a lot.