About World Of Magic:
I am very excited to recommend WoM in its current state (1.2.4). It had a lot of good ideas, sadly the product is crippled with flaws and bugs (and not only myrodants, the insectoid race in the game). UI is very clunky, lists are not exactly presented as list and are scroll fests (what good is an overview that show only 2 cities at a time? no troll in the game, so here they are?). While artwork is gorgeous, translation to 3D models is very uneven. Music is decent while SFX are pretty awkward (smells like placeholder). Visual feedback when casting spell is present, although sometimes very discreet and as there is no sound to accompany the effect… Isometrical 3D also has counter-intuitive implementations (i.e. to select a unit on a mountain, you need to click at the base of square of the mountain, cities control zone visualisation is also affected by relief and is pretty confusing). Top-down map is present, but nearly no information is there (no armies, no resources) so its like totally useless. While the game seems to be fully in 3D, there is no way to rotate the camera (neither in strategic or tactical views) while this would already solve quite a few “visibility” issues. There are also several bugs, most of them not game breaking but still ranging from slightly to very annoying. The game feels so unfiinished and unpolished, yet I could go over it if the features in the game did work properly. Yet they don’t. For example you have resources (typically minerals like adamantine or mithril) that are supposed to provide your troops with bonuses in the town owning them if you also have an alchemy guild. Does not work (or if it does, there is absolutely no visual feedback on that, numbers stay the same, unit skills screen don’t show any modifier). For a price tag nearly matching a triple A title, so many flaws, unimplemented or buggy features, this is not acceptable. After checking the forum, the resource bug was reported at least since March 15. At the time of this review (end August 15) such a major feature still hasn’t been fixed despite a dev acknowledging the feedback at the time. And that is one of an overly long list of typos, missing text, placeholders, glitches and bugs that was indeed reported. I mean, it seems no one does any QA (except the users) or track and prioritize the bugs. Many of those reported stuff is easy fix – probably as fast as answering “thanks for the report we are working on it” like they do on their steam forum, but is still not done. It feels like the company is badly managed and organized and it shows in their product, despite all the heart artists, designers and some programmers must have put into this game. It already feels like WoM is a lost cause (even if some patches rolled out since official release, most visible and major issues are not fixed) like if the code was not documented either and they are lost into it now, scared to try to fix anything without breaking much more. It is a shame. I would advice to only buy if you are really getting tired of playing MoM on Dosbox since more than a decade and don’t care about money well spent. Even then you may end up frustrated and could consider the excellent Endless Legend or Age of Wonders 3 instead. Too bad, this game really was a promising remake of MoM with nice upgrades. I reserve the right to edit or delete this negative review if Badlands actually release a patch that drastically and visibly improve WoM.
