Warlock: Master of the Arcane

Have you ever sat playing Civilization and thought: “This game could use some more magic spells or perhaps a few vampires”? Apparently you are not alone as publishers Paradox Entertainment, the company behind the recent King Arthur II RPG, and developers Ino-Co Plus (who worked with Paradox on Elven Legacy) have been hard at work on Warlock: Master of the Arcane. Expected for release in the second quarter of 2012, Warlock is set in Ardania, the universe established in Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, and in many respects is a reimagining of that game in the form of a modern turn-based strategy.

Like Majesty, Warlock sees you building an elaborate kingdom full of pubs, goblin guilds, mage towers and castles. Whilst in the older game you couldn’t control heroes directly (instead influencing them with rewards), in Warlock you churn out troops and command them around a large map in an attempt to take out rival kingdoms. The spectre of Civilization inevitably looms large over the game, particularly in the hex based grid (which was such a welcome addition in Civilisation V).

Like Civilization, the thrust of the gameplay is on resource management. Whilst keeping your stores full of grain and your coffers full of gold may be a familiar proposition to many armchair strategists, the additional resource of mana (produced by mana traps and, strangely enough, pumpkin fields) is somewhat less familiar territory. And you better make sure you have enough of it, because the huge amount of spells you can research throughout the game are certainly expensive to cast (perhaps too much so, indeed).

The build we played was still in its early stages, but Paradox have a fine pedigree in the strategy simulation genre with long running series such as Europa Universalis and Pride of Nations under their belts, so the end result is sure to be balanced enough to keep strategy-heads happy. However, the game’s presentation, which differs greatly from the somewhat dry nature of their staple titles, may make it their most accessible title to date, and if the recently released Elven Legacy is anything to go by the final product should look pretty good too.

There are certainly problems that need to be addressed, however, primarily with the somewhat clunky interface and the fact that there are as yet no tech trees (or spell trees in this case) or clear descriptions of what anything does (though we’re fairly sure these will be added). Particularly frustrating is that you have to right click to deselect a unit, but doing this anywhere other than open ground will call up an information window instead. Even clicking on a unit in the first place is an unnecessarily tricky case of pixel-hunting which often results in you opening the city build screen instead. It’s also excruciatingly easy to send your army in completely the wrong direction (or send them through a magical portal to another dimension where they are immediately obliterated by elementals), suggesting that the game would benefit greatly from an Ogre Tactics style rewind button. However, all of these problems can be fixed by a robust QA process and a few months spit and polish.

Just as Majesty borrowed from the fantasy RPG genre, Warlock allows each of your troops to level up, allowing you to select perks to make them even stronger. The game also has four distinct victory conditions, one of which is to kill God’s avatar and absorb his power in order to become a demigod! It’s touches like these that differentiate Warlock from Civilization and if these elements are allowed to shine through then Warlock could stand to become a very welcome addition to a genre dominated by Sid Meir’s classic.

Having blown away years of cobwebs, Paradox are certainly making the most of the Majesty franchise this year. Not only do we have Warlock and the port of the original game on mobile devices, but there is the forthcoming Defenders of Ardania on Xbox 360, PSN and Steam, which sees the series moulded to fit the tower defence genre.