Age Of Wonders 4 review – fantasy strategy x4

Age Of Wonders 4 – it is a wonder it works so well on console (pic: Paradox Interactive)

It may not look built for consoles but the PS5 version of Paradox’s new strategy epic is surprisingly accessible and expectedly deep.

The original Age Of Wonders was released at the turn of the millennium, and since then its brand of accessible, fantasy themed turn-based strategy has expanded from its PC roots to also include consoles. More recently, series off-shoot Planetfall added a sci-fi twist to its successful 4X strategy formula. However, as a numbered sequel, Age Of Wonders 4 ignores all that, returning to its familiar non-spacefaring setting, while adding considerable additional complexity.

The very first thing you’ll notice when starting a game is the enormous variety available when choosing the people you’ll command. Factions include humans, orcs, and goblins but also toads, rats and moles – the last two being particularly adept at burrowing underground. You then also choose a culture and its societal traits, meaning you could be ruling feudal seafaring toad people or a bunch of feline mystic cannibal imperialists, inspiring two completely different approaches to building an empire.

Your hero is almost as flexible. You begin by choosing whether to be a mortal champion or one of the mysterious, almost godlike Wizard Kings; then you add skills that focus on anything from farming to battle magic. As well as adjusting their cosmetic appearance, heroes are fully upgradeable, so you’ll be levelling them up, adding fresh skills, and equipping weapons, armour and magic items to continue improving their powers as you explore and conquer.

It’s hard making reasoned choices the first time you play, because you don’t know what’s important or which traits make the most sense to the way you prefer playing, but you muddle through, or use one of the game’s pre-canned options. It’s fair to say, though, that there don’t seem to be any bad builds per se, the ability to upgrade and improve rapidly nixing any perceived weaknesses.

Instead of a research tree, there are magic tomes linked to each of the game’s affinities. As you move through their five tiers, each of which gives you a choice of two tomes, you’re entirely free to pick groups of spells that don’t necessarily match the mood of your empire, although over time those choices will start to change your alignment, and therefore the way fellow leaders react to you.

Adding tomes gives you new arcane spells, as well as a plethora of ways to transform your cities and enhance your troops in the field. Many spells also supply deep interdependencies, encouraging you to transform whole landscapes to make them more favourable to your people’s preferred habitats, something that will evolve significantly as you unlock more spells.

Sending armies out across the game’s hex grid to explore the landscape, fighting is just one available option, with diplomacy often a better bet. Through a mixture of bribery, negotiation, and threats you can frequently bend neighbouring cities to your will without raising a sword, although that negotiated peace won’t always last. Even after signing treaties, if leaders don’t like the direction your empire’s taking, they may well decide to change their minds about cosying up.

When that happens you can sometimes continue to patch things up with diplomacy, but war is often inevitable. In the past, 4X games have had a hard time making the stalemate around trying to invade cities into anything other than a boring slog. Age Of Wonders 4 has other ideas, its siege system providing a multi-turn framework for attackers to acquire siege engines and defenders to build their defensive core based on the make-up of their assailants.

Overall victory conditions are varied enough to demand a dizzying array of approaches. Military being the most obvious, involving capturing the capitals of all foes, and tossing their leaders into the Astral Void. An expansion win means conquering enough of the map to light and defend three Beacons of Unity; magic requires fulfilling the conditions to unlock and cast a 15-turn victory spell, and a score victory simply means having the most points when the game reaches its turn limit.

You can track any of those win conditions from the main menu, helping to keep you focused on your chosen path, a system that’s in line with the overall interface, which strongly favours ease of use. Each turn you move troops, cast spells with both local and global effects, add items to cities’ build queues, and resolve diplomatic situations with other leaders – a tap of the right trigger always progressing you to the next decision you need to make.

If there’s something pressing, or that you specifically don’t want to forget, there’s a radial menu that lets you bypass the game’s prefabricated order, commanding units (all of which are recognisable at a glance, without wading through reams of text to figure it out), casting spells, or undertaking a particular piece of tome or spell research. It’s a wonderfully straightforward way of managing a fabulously complicated set of situations.

Age Of Wonders 4 – four times the strategy (pic: Paradox Interactive)

For a game with such depth, moment-to-moment management never feels overwhelming. As ever, the opening hour or two tends to be less interesting than after you’ve made progress and decided on your main strategy. But even once you’ve got multiple cities to command and armies in the field, the process of leading is perfectly natural, with the option to automate where needed, letting you take care of macro concerns while the game sweats the small stuff.

Not all those systems work equally well – auto-battling proving more successful than automated city management, for example – but the principle is sound, letting you choose just how much of a micromanager you want to be. You’ve always got to keep those overarching goals in mind, and having to go through a turn-based fight between two modestly sized armies normally doesn’t seem like a good use of your time.

It’s probably pretty obvious whether Age Of Wonders 4 is for you. A massively detailed, procedurally generated world with a plethora of races, alignments, and spells to influence its evolution is a lot to take in, even with the game’s perfectly metered tutorials and nested tool tips available for every menu item and decision. Despite the masterful streamlining of its user interface, it’s still a long way from a casual experience, and takes several hours to feel at home with.

But once you do, it’s a world that encourages experimentation, rewarding rather than punishing your choices, however bizarre they may at first appear. Whether playing through the handcrafted story missions or setting up your own challenges in landscapes that can vary from Earth-like to Hellish, Age Of Wonders 4 supplies a universe of possibilities, and one which you do not have to be an existing fan to enjoy.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £39.99
Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: Triumph Studios
Release Date: 2nd May 2023
Age Rating: 16

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It may not look built for consoles but the PS5 version of Paradox’s new strategy epic is surprisingly accessible and expectedly deep.