Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria

Warlords IV does a lot of things right. The persistent characters and dynamic campaign, carried over from Warlords: Battlecry, are great. The unit variety, carried over from the previous Warlords turn-based games, is great. The A.I., carried over from everything else Infinite Interactive did when it was part of SSG, is great. The random-map generator, skirmish options, and multiplayer support are all great. Unfortunately, all this is built around anemic gameplay. If ever there was a game in need of a little healthy feature creep, this is it.

Warmongering for dummies

Warlords IV is simple. You��re basically capturing cities, each of which is associated with one of 10 races, determining which units can be trained there. Neutral locations can be ransacked for treasure and magic items for your heroes, who are powerful units capable of learning unique skills. There��s a simple magic system by which you can choose a school of magic for your warlord; you then spend a set number of turns to learn progressively more drastic game-bending spells.

For all its simplicity, Warlords IV is missing the elegance you��d expect. Gameplay comes down to shuffling individual units around. You can automatically direct newly trained units to a rallying point, but this still leads to steady streams of lone units marching hither and yon. Unavoidable busywork involved in assembling your units into stacks means larger games can become epic, logistical nightmares.

This sort of shepherding is arguably the long-established core of the Warlords games, but in the previous games, each stack was a sort of synergistic metaunit, assembled from the bonuses and special abilities of its individual units. In Warlords IV, there aren��t so many group bonuses, so a stack feels more like an annoying, arbitrary limit of the number of little guys who can stand in one place. There is, to be fair, a lot of strategy in creating stacks, particularly since battles almost always guarantee casualties��you��ll need cannon fodder if only to send entire stacks to their death to soften up a particularly formidable enemy group.

Combat takes an ��every man/beast for himself�� approach. Early in development, Infinite Interactive planned a tactical-combat screen �� la Heroes of Might & Magic��this would have lent itself much better to the types of units in Warlords IV. But in the final product, it has instead delivered a quick and dirty mano-a-mano approach. When two stacks meet, each side picks a unit. The two units fight it out to the death, at which point the loser brings in a replacement. It��s very neat and polite, with a kind of Pok��mon vibe (��I choose you, Swamp Dragon!��) and not a hint of battling armies that gave the previous Warlords a little sense of grandeur.

The student is the master

It doesn��t help that the competition looks and plays so much better. Next to the elegance of the Disciples series or the depth of Age of Wonders, Warlords IV feels a day late and a dollar short. Although Warlords IV is by no means a horrible game, it��s something far more damning: strangely joyless and conspicuously missing the spark of enthusiasm that often manages to find its way into even the worst of games.

Verdict: 2 Stars

A strangely joyless version of a classic strategy franchise.

Copyright © 2003 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Computer Gaming World.