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Very disappointing compared to the first AoW

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: June 18, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Age of Wonders I was certainly one of my all-time favorite games. Highly customizable hero with fantasy creatures under your control in a beautiful fantasy realms. It had high replay value and kept my interest for many months.

This sequel did not live up to my expectations. The leader customization revolved primarily around magic spheres, as compared to specific abilities, which was possibly the coolest feature in the original game. The magic sphere customization system was not reminiscent to the first game, and definitely not as fun.

This may be worth getting if you're just looking for another fantasy RPG/Strategy game, but if you're looking for a sequel, you will be very disappointed.

Sorry, Can't play it.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 11
Date: December 10, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I immediately bought this upon it's release mainly due to a review on pcgamer.
What I was looking for was, of course, a updated master of magic; everything I had read was indicating that while not exactly the direct heir of MOM, it was close enough to be enjoyable.
So I bought it, installed it, checked it out...then uninstalled it.
The Random Map Generator which had been heavily praised on the pre-release version wasn't there; just standard scenarios. Gameplay-wise, If I wanted to play the standard scenarios, I would probably just whip out the AOW1 CD and play that. Sure the gameply is a little better, the graphics are a little cooler, but without the Random Map Generator, this is just a upgrade to AOW1, not the game at all I was lead to believe it was.
So, I check back to the AOW2 website occasionally, and look for the RMG....and as soon as it's available to download, I'll play the game; If they try to SELL it as a expansion, I'll probably sue them.
If you haven't played Turn based strategy before, ever, it's worth your time, I'm sure...But it's not the game they advertised it to be.

VERY buggy

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 10
Date: August 18, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I am an avid fan of Turn-based strategy games. I also adored the original AOW. Naturally, I rushed to buy AOW2. Sad to say, it was a mistake. The game locks up, is very quirky on map transitions and the technical support from the website seems to consist of the phrase "Have you tried reinstalling?" Lest someone think I am playing on some esoteric, exotic machine, I am not. It is a 3 month old Dell Dimension that plays almost all of my games flawlessly and didn;t even quiver over Neverwinter Nights, which I am told is near miraculous... Anyway, I cannot recommend this game simply for the bugs, technical glitches, lock-ups and total invisibility of tech support.

Enjoyable, but flawed

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: November 07, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Building on the original Age of Wonders, it's an enjoyable fantasy strategy game.
Unfortunately, it suffers from graphical glitches with some graphics cards, mine included (GeForce 4 Ti4400, 30.82 drivers); the only remedy is to turn off DirectX acceleration, which costs a moderate amount of performance and eye candy.
Given that this glitch is still present after the 1.20 patch ... not so impressive.

Good graphics and sound..but worth your time?

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 5
Date: November 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

It had nice graphics and music, and I played about 10 hours on the same map trying to get a better feel for it as well as to see the new and different units. It's fun to control/meet fairies and unicorns and other fantasy characters. But it took too much time to do even the basic city management.

Maps were filled with lots of places to visit and explore..but on the other hand, that only draws out the battle to a point where the player is thinking, if this one small map takes this long, how will i ever finish this game? Consider my statement above that I spent 10 hours on the first single player non-campaign map that I tried. I didn't even finish it totally since that would take several more rounds to gather my armies for the big fight at the one last remaining enemy town which happens to have a big army on it; I just played it to the point where I knew I would win.

It reminded me too much of Kohan, which I enjoyed much more and took less time to play because it was RTS instead of turn-based.

Interesting fantasy/strategy game with a poor interface

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 17 / 28
Date: June 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Age of Wonders 2 is a turn-based strategy game set in a fantasy world. You play a wizard set again a circle of other wizards, and must attack each one on their home turf. The formula is very familiar to games like Civilization or especially Heroes of Might and Magic. You explore the land and run into all sorts of NPCs, mini-quests, random monsters, and of course enemies. As you explore, you build or capture more towns in order to build more units and expand further. You build structures in each city, a la Civ, in order to access bigger and better units, or defenses, or city-bonuses. Heroes are "super-units" which you recruit and level-up RPG style. Your main character researches new spells and thus can summon new creatures, cast spells in combat, or area-effects on the main map. An underground cave network adds all sorts of way for your enemies to double back on you, and each map is littered with strategic locations for you to fight over. Individual battles are turn-based and take place on a tactical mini-map, giving you many tactical elements to exploit in an important battle. (again, more interesting here than in HOMM4) If you ever get bored you can always have the computer resolve a battle.

There are many different races, like orcs and halfings and dwarves and more exotic things, and the game tracks each races' feelings towards your character and adjusts accordingly. The graphics are amazingly rich and colorful, and perfectly capture that high-fantasy feeling of D&D or Lord of the Rings (and much better than Heroes of Might and Magic 4). Together this gives the impression of a large, breathing world with many people in conflict and friendship, and lots of good (or bad) work for your character to accomplish. Beware, though, you'll need 256megs to run the game effectively, and I have a strange flicking problem with my GeForce4, which is incredibly distracting. There is over 40 missions, half in a story-driven campaign, and half are individal scenarios. Each map is like a puzzle that you must figure out to beat it. The campaign is nice in that there are difficult side-missions if you want an extra challenge.

Still, I am finding myself getting bored too quickly with AoW2. Leveling your heroes is too simple, city-structures repeat too often, and differences between the races is more cosmetic than functional - we're talking more Age of Empires here than Starcraft. Most importantly, the interface is too cluttered, and there are hardly any keyboard hotkeys at all in the game! Being forced to drag the mouse over to each button 10,000 times in one game gets old fast. The interface doesn't offer some of the most basic options, such as restarting a level from the beginning. Perhaps you should check out Heroes of Might and Magic 4...

Good, but lacking

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: October 08, 2004
Author: Amazon User

After playing the original Age of Wonders (and becoming hopelessly addicted to it), I was ecstatic when AOW2 was released. I rushed right out and picked up a copy, hoping for great improvements to one of my now favorite games. Unfortunately that was not the case. While the graphics and audio are mildly improved, I felt gameplay took several steps back, at least in the single player campaign. The new units were nice and had a good variety between the different races. Unfortunately, the wizard/hero system that this game revolves around is terribly one dimensional - spell reasearch is your only real option, unlike the original where you had many different skills to choose from, so you could basicly make your leader/heros into whatever you envisioned them as being.
The single player campaign is fun to play through, the first time. After that it's gets pretty boring. Scenarios are fun, but I liked the campaigns of the first AOW, where you really had a choice in the direction the game went. You could start as good guy and end up on the side of evil, or vice versa. You be righteously good (as the Highmen), plain old good (as the Elves), run-of-the-mill bad (as the Dark Elves), or evil incarnate (as the Undead). This made for massive replayablity, which is lacking in AOW2 - You're Merlin and no matter what you do the game ends the same. The multi-player options are fine and might give more play options, if you like multi-player gaming (I don't, as I prefer to start a game and play at any time - not worrying about others schedules).
Overall, not a horrible game and fun for a while, just not up to the standards of the original.

okay

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: June 17, 2002
Author: Amazon User

My $.02: after playing through 6 scenarios (out of 20), here are the main points I noted (mainly changes from AoW1):

Graphics: the graphics is much improved (although I had always like AOW1's graphics also). The scenery is breathtaking, with waterlilies in the water, etc. The animation is also improved.

Customization: for the campaigns you cannot customize your wizard beyond the skill (channeler, conquerer, casting specialist, etc.) You're stuck being Merlin. For individual scenarios you can customize your wizard.

Campaign: You no longer make choices as to which sphere you will use. The campaign walks you through each sphere (there are three levels for each sphere)... although maybe at the end you'll have an extra scenario that you can choose. The annoying thing is, you do not carry your spells, skills, items, heroes, or anything else you may gain in one sphere when you go on to the next sphere of magic. It also seems that whatever you do the story doesn't really change -- you're just going to go through each sphere one by one.

Gameplay: this feels closer to Master of Magic. Your wizard is primarily supposed to sit in the wizard tower and cast spells, as your wizard will never be able to gain levels or experiences or enhancements such as 'magic strike' or other combat skills. You can also get your ordinary soldiers to pick up items and teleport them to you. There is the addition of spirits, whom you can build altars and accomplish quests for. Other than that, the gameplay is much the same

Game elements: the spells and races are much the same, with a bit of name changes, the replacement of lizards with draconians, and other changes like that. They do have additions of some rather wonderful creatures though.

Overall: I think it was tolerable. It has most of the things I like about AoW, like wonderful graphics, variety of spells and units, etc. However, not being able to carry spells, skills, etc., across spheres basically means that you play the same game with 3 episodes for 6 times. It gets rather annoying. The scenarios are probably better.

Good Turn Based Strategy Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 18 / 18
Date: July 25, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Age of Wonders 2 is a turn based strategy game set in a fantasy world. The player plays an immortal wizard, and can control different races (Dwarves, Elves, Draconians, etc), each with its own special units. The player can learn specific spheres of magic (Air, Earth, Fire, etc). The main difference, in my opinion, between AoW2 and other turn based strategy games is that there is a story line. Basically, there are twenty episodes. Every three episodes are a part of a "Sphere" story, such as fire, air, water, and the character you develop continues in them. (If you learned X spells in episode one, you'll still know them in episode three). However, the story continues in all the episodes sequentially - episode four follows episode three. I'm not sure exactly how that makes sense (how can the player forget what he learned between episode three and four if the story continues?!), but that's how the game is. AoW2 is pretty much a "standard" turn based strategy game. However, the graphics and music are gorgeous. I've never played a strategy game with such richness and depth: all the units are animated, and are absolutely a joy to watch. Strangely enough, the tactical AI (I'm usually too lazy to actually do my own tactical combat, I like to use the 'Auto' feature and watch) is beyond terrible. I've seen times I attacked an enemy with ten of my units against seven and lost without killing a single enemy unit, and when I controlled the combat myself I won without any loss. This happens ALL the time. I've stopped using 'Auto' because of this feature. I wonder why AoW2 is so bad in this aspect.. never seen anything like it. Other than that, the game play feels pretty much like other games of the genre. The scenarios are somewhat repetitive, but it's such a refreshing idea to be "forced" into a situation, and the scenarios are different enough that you have to try different tactics.
Overall, I think AoW2 is really a great game. The AI could use a serious overhaul, but it's still a lot of fun.

Master of Magic Reincarnated

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: June 26, 2002
Author: Amazon User

The best way to describe this game is Master of Magic 2002. The developers no doubt borrowed HEAVILY from the classic turn-based strategy game Master of Magic. So if you enjoyed M.O.M, this game is for you.

My only gripe with this game, is that there is no random map, or random game. You can customize your wizard and choose your own race in the senarios, but you cannot modify your opponant wizards, they are set in each senario. But overlooking these two negatives, the game is very fun and colorful.

Each civlization has it's own strengths and weaknesses, and builds it's own unique units. The civilizations and units are largely based after Tulkiens races Orcs, Dwarves, Humans, Goblins, Elfs, Hobbits ect, and the game adds a few new ones such as Tigrens(cat people), Frostlings, Undead and Achrons. There are also many cool mystical combat units, much like Master of Magic.

Also, just like Master of Magic, you get to pick which sphere of Magic you want your Wizard to be apart of. Earth, Water, Fire, Death, Life, Air, or a combination of all 6.

The soundtrack to the game is also nice, and the female wizards are hot as hell!

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