Age of Wonders 4 n00b review

My experience after four hours of sucking at this game

*Image taken from the Xbox website. No copyright infringement intended.

April 23, 2025

Categorization: Fantasy

Where played: On PC

When I was a kid, one of my favorite PC games was the Heroes of Might and Magic series, in particular, Heroes II, III, and IV. I could not get enough of these games and would play them for hours on end. You controlled an army of fantasy creatures to conquer realms! You collected gold, gems, and crystals and built your town base from the ground up and got new spells and creatures with each upgrade! You laid siege to your enemies’ towns in order to win each scenario! Best of all, you could breed any army of UNICORNS and FAIRY DRAGONS to take on your quest throughout the land! It was everything a kid fantasized about and more.

Best of all, it was internet-less multiplayer turn-based (sort of what modern folk call "couch co-op"), meaning that back in the nineties, my brothers and cousins and I would hop on and off the “hot seat” in front of ONE computer, to control our respective heroes and try to defeat each other. Yes youngins! Before the invention of the interweb, in order to do computer battle against each other, we had to take turns on one computer and one seat! When one of us was too slow we would pelt him or her with potato chips until he finished moving his hero! Good times.

As a child I must have clocked hundreds of hours of the three aforementioned games in this series and became something of an expert in this sort of strategy game. I would also play the crazy fun Red Alert and Age of Empires II games, which had similar mechanics, and did super well at those.

And then, adulthood set in (I entered highschool).

Suddenly, my brothers and cousins and I no longer had hours to spend taking turns in front of a computer in order to play through one long-ass scenario. There was soccer and girls and homework for them, and for me, homework and friends and eventually moving on to other games that were more appealing to a nerdy pre-pubescent girl, like The Sims.

But I always retained fond memories of the HoMM series. I even played it a little bit during the pandemic, as a sort of regression into a zone of comfort during a very confusing time. I even won a few scenarios and part of some campaigns. Raising unicorns and elves was still fun.

But there’s only so much you can do with a twenty year old series that you have already spent hundreds of hours on. I left it alone in the past few years, but then, very recently, on a whim, decided to google whether or not there would be a “Heroes of Might and Magic remake”. Why not, right? There have been a ton of remakes recently, and some of these older games have a special place in my heart that newer ones have not been able to replace.

To my delight, Steam informed me that there is an HoMM remake set to be released in “Q2 2025”! I was, and still am, beyond thrilled. Elves and unicorns and dragons! Basilisks and mighty gorgons and medusas! With modern graphics that don’t hurt your eyes to play! Maybe even some audible spoken dialogue! This was going to be epic.

And while I was browsing eagerly, Steam showed me an advertisement for what is supposed to be a similar game, called Age of Wonders 4.

The pictures looked amazing (seeming to contain magic and forests and resources and elves and dragons, very much like HoMM), and it seemed like the game had garnered plenty of good reviews. “Q2 2025” seems very far away (it being only the last month of Q1 at the time this post was written), so why not practice with this game first?

Four hours later, I realized the answer to that question: because I would have liked to hold on to the remnants of my pride.

From someone who only has the twenty-plus years old HoMM II, III, and IV to compare it to, Age of Wonders 4 looks absolutely gorgeous. The rendering of the environments and creatures is incredible, almost futuristic! And when you booted the game up, they give you (among a ton of other fantasy classes) a choice of about five different subraces of elves to start with. FIVE. What riches! In HoMM, if I wanted to have elves in my army, I had to play the druid nature town called the "Rampart". There was only one kind of town that would produce elves, and only one kind of elf. Amazing.

And for the first two hours or so, I had a completely lovely time moving my hero around the realm without knowing what on earth I was doing. I was collecting riches! I was building… things! I could annex things! I’m not sure what that accomplished but it surely had to be a good thing. Also, random cool creatures were offering to join my army! I was undoubtedly unstoppable now that I had some trolls and little fire gnomes alongside my elves, right?

Wrong. See, in HoMM, you could build stuff from your town and give it no more thought afterwards, so I proceeded to follow along the same lines playing Age of Wonders 4. I randomly clicked things to build, like farms or fisheries and whatnot, and then proceeded to do what I really wanted to do, which was explore the land with my guys.

It turns out these modern strategy games are a bit more complex than that.

Three hours in, I started to hit a number of roadblocks that were impeding my progress and enjoyment of the game. Some of them were quite… embarrassing. For example, I tried to enter a wolf temple near my town to “annex” it, by moving my hero back and forth into and out of the wolf temple (thereby wasting allowable movement per turn), but I could not for the life of me figure out whether I had already “annexed” it, or whether I needed to do something in my town to complete the “annexation”. God.

Already feeling quite stupid at that point, but determined to “learn by doing”, I soldiered on, constructing random buildings in town, hoping that one would eventually let me produce a different, more powerful kind of elf than my starter elves (just like in Heroes of Might and Magic!)

If there is actually a way to do that, I did not progress far enough to discover it. First I ran out of food, then my town’s population became unhappy and I think were threatening to oust me as a governor (or something equally cruel), then my army started deserting. What the absolute f&^%^!!! In Heroes of Might and Magic your armies never deserted you! Once you paid for them they had to fight for you until death! I suppose it had something to do with my town’s lack of food, but I was trying to fix that by building more farms and signing more trade treaties! It's not my fault that my mean neighbor-towns refused to negotiate with me because I had no food or money!

The straw that spelled game over for me was when my trolls deserted me. I could not figure out how to make stronger creatures in my town, and I had no food left to attract new trolls…or any other rogue strong guys for army…. and at that point I had wasted four hours of the afternoon and had to throw in the towel (and I still couldn’t figure out if I had annexed the wolf temple or not). It was six o clock in the evening when I looked up from my screen, and my husband was already yelling at me from outside the room to “hurry up and get dressed”, to which I yelled back “just need to finish up this email okay!!!!!”

I couldn’t sleep that night.

I mean, I pride myself as a gamer. Could I really be that terrible at a game similar to one I have played for the greater part of my childhood? Was gaming one of those skills you could actually lose as you get older? What kind of unfair world do we live in?

I decided the next day that the problem was not that I was stupid or too old for modern games, I was simply out of practice. So I proceeded to download Heroes of Might and Magic V, which I had never played.

I took one look at the yucky graphics and decided that considering the series’ age, I needed to go straight back to my comfort zone. I loved the painterly graphics of Heroes of Might and Magic III as a kid, maybe that would get me through practicing with this very old game...

Ten seconds of downloading later (geez louise these old games are file-size tiny), I booted up HoMM III in normal mode with my starter druid and forest glade town, collected my unicorns, dendroids (ents), and elves, and began my adventure (hello, old friends).

Four hours later, I turned the game off and buried myself in bed for a good, long, sulk. My computer opponent had completely destroyed me. One by one, all the castles that I had gleefully occupied during the first two hours of play had fallen to its forces, and now it had taken the hordes of ghost dragons, black dragons, gold dragons, and beholder eyes (oh hey D&D reference that I didn’t get twenty years ago) that I couldn’t afford to purchase from those towns (and was therefore forced to leave behind) and brought them to the borders of my island. I was doomed but in such a state of complete indignation that I couldn’t bring myself to enter the final round to complete said doom. I am now a walking, talking, professional who goes to work and earns a living, for Christ’s sake! How can I be worse at anything than my nine-year old self?? Can gaming skills really atrophy in the manner of say, algebra and dodgeball skills?

A rhetorical question, obviously.

So now I am in a quandary. Should I give up more precious hours to practice Heroes III and perhaps Heroes IV in preparation for the Heroes remake? Should I ask my husband to teach me how to play Age of Wonders 4, as he is a veteran player of the Sid Meier’s Civilization games? Should I give up on this genre of games entirely and go back to my RPG mainstays, maybe finally try Elden Ring?

Definitely the second option. I will update at a later date.