Age of Wonders 4 Reviews

Age of Wonders 3 & 4 are my absolute favourite grand strategy/4x style games. AoW is my Civilisation and I cannot recommend it enough if you like fantasy, roleplay, lore, and strategy gameplay. The devs are active - and not only with DLCs. The free updates have made levelling and crafting so much better, and I look forward to whatever's next. Love the artstyle and music. You can spend hours making custom empires and characters with written histories and unique traits, all of whom you can then encounter later in the game. I enjoy the gameplay a lot too - it's got variety, while not getting too lost in the weeds of micromanagement. All in all, it's a brilliant game. Its team deserves all the success for their hard work!!

Having shunned other 4X games due to their complexity and overwhelming nature (cuz i'm new to the genre and have the brain-power of a gnat), I was pleasantly surprised when I became totally hooked on AoW4. It looks and sounds brilliant, has plenty of things in-game to keep you engaged, and it's really fun creating new races and being immersed in their own 'lore'. I do feel as though it could still have had a more expansive tutorial for new players like me, and I still have NO idea how to play the 'live combat' mode and still opt for the AI to decide battles, however AoW4 does a great job in making you learn by wanting to play more, rather than it ending up in your Steam library uninstalled with only 5hrs played...

A singularly masterful combination of great depth and replayability combined with a fantastic interface and tooltip UI that makes learning the game easy. There is simply no other game like it out there. Strategically great, tactically wonderful.

This is a game that I will play, but I cannot honestly recommend it. Starting with the positives, the game's unique level of customization for factions and aesthetics is a standout feature. The base gameplay is solid, and the scenario customization adds a unique twist, making the game's replay value quite reasonable. The early and mid-game can be fun, and the ways to improve your rulers and the Pantheon system work well. However, compared to AoW3, this game's predecessor, this game embodies one step forward and two steps back. Many customization options will be purely aesthetic, and your affinity will define most of your in-game experience. You can start a game with significantly different factions, but due to the tome system and how you unlock spells and units, the end game will see many of the same units fighting on all sides. There are no culture-specific high-tier units. Any faction, regardless of start, could unlock any high-tier unit or spell with a small amount of time. Army positioning is not that important. So long as your armies are close enough that can take part in battles. This means you can entirely surround an army or besiege a city, but enemy forces will still be able to get through. This leads to an increased lack of depth in the game's tactics. There is also a lack of more powerful spells and abilities in AoW3, and the end game quickly turns into a slog. The ability to crush terrain and launch city-destroying spells is gone entirely. They updated how the heroes were customized, but hero abilities are no longer unique. A mage, warrior, skirmisher, or any other hero class will have access to the same skills regardless of starting culture or affinity. The multiplayer can be somewhat unstable, and I have had multiplayer games corrupted. If I had to describe this game to AoW3 the difference is this. AoW3 is like a high-quality restaurant. You may not have that many options, but what is there is done really well. AoW4 is like a mid-range buffet. You have a lot of options, but nothing that high quality. As you keep going back to it, things can quickly get bland unless you make a lot of effort to keep things interesting. I can appreciate the breadth of the game, but the level of depth and specialization sacrificed does not seem worth it. I recommend getting this game for at least 40% off with DLC if you want to get it.

so many crashes... all other games work fine and updating drivers and none of their their "fixes" did anything. posted on their forums for help and got told it's not their problem / nothing they can do. shame 'cos game seems fun!

This game crashes way too much to be worth any money what so ever. Don't buy it.

it's just all i want in a Fantasy Strategy game since i first try Warcraft III man. so many customization, so many culture types, so many races and said races can be customized further in the game. the campaign is surprisingly good for a 4X. and there is also many many many challange map with different flavor for gameplay. i don't think i'll ever be bored, at least not for a long time yet. protip, just don't optimize or pick the best strategy there is. Roleplay a bit, it's one of the fun in a Paradox games

My favourite 4X game! The game can be played in quite a causal way yet provides enough depth and city management. The events make it fun and your own custom hero provides an unique experience! A classic "just 1 more turn before bed", makes you lose all concept of time when playing it!

With how long the game has been out and with how many DLCs it has you would expect it to work on all fronts, but currently multiplayer is broken and beyond unplayable. Doesn't matter if you have mods or not. Doesn't matter if your settings are the same or not. Doesn't matter if your wired connected to the person your playing with. The multiplayer will NOT work. It will de-sync roll back 12+ turns for only one player(sometimes the host sometimes not. Sometimes it just refuses to see/connect to a game even if everything is right because.....(?) They keep throwing token 'attempts' to fix the multiplayer(Poking a random thing about it so they can technically put it in the patch notes) without actually changing or fixing anything to fool you into thinking they are doing anything other than ignoring the issue. Also, if you mod the game, any multiplayer issues will automatically be a 'its modded, not a problem on our end'. Not even going to talk about the actual trash mod manager that they use that, quite literally just doesn't work at times.

I can't say i have massively enjoyed the Age of Wonders series but apparently I am a degenerate who is unable to avoid buying games in a sale - and thus i saw this sitting towards the top of my unplayed games. In this case i was pleasantly surprised with this game actually being quite engaging and enjoyable. A lot of the annoyances of previous incarnations have been removed and the game flows a lot better. There are elements which seem staggeringly unbalanced (namely magic) but this actually enabled the most fun elements of the game for me; winning battles which auto-resolved terribly. Whether the auto-resolve function in the game if broken or my skill overcome adversity I don't know. I'll choose to believe the latter. Not sure this will end up as one of those games i go back to again and again, but my resolution to start playing all the games unplayed in my library has been positive on this occasion!