Art of Magic

The Art of Magic's story can at best be described as tried and true, and at worst cliched. You play a magically inclined farm boy named Aurax who wakes up one morning to find his sister Nadia under attack by goblins and other monsters. The pair fights off the bad guys, heads to town, and finds it under siege by the fearsome Goblin King. During the battle to defend hearth and home, Nadia gets captured, and Aurax, as any good magically inclined farm boy inevitably must do, has to rescue his sister from the clutches of an evil wizard and steal back powerful magical orbs of power, thus saving the world. The story is well told through non-player character (NPC) conversations, and the designers made sure the missions in the campaign mode are varied and interesting (there are also skirmish and multiplayer modes). One mission involves the aforementioned Goblin King, another has you storming a troll fortress for an artifact, and others have you fighting various evil wizards, sometimes in tandem, for territory or artifacts.

All three play modes basically center on what the game calls Places of Power. You've got to stand on one of these, or summon a creature to stand there for you, and this helps your spell power recharge more quickly. Because conflicts against enemy wizards (especially in multiplayer or skirmish modes) generally devolve into battles of inches, taking and controlling these places is extremely important.

During the game you can recruit allies, like an archer or warrior, while looking for items to combine so you can access a whole host of spells. Picking which spells you want to use--and gathering the materials necessary to cast them--really affects your play style. You can spend your time and items creating defensive spells, or instead opt for an offensive strategy. The AI does a good job of learning your playing style and trying to counter it. By far your most important magic is summoning. You can summon weak creatures, like skeletons or wolves, or opt for more powerful minions like a fearsome giant. Your choice is basically one tough monster or several weaker ones, but these beasts gain experience as they go, so eventually your puny skeletal warrior may become a skeletal lord and gain new attacks and defenses. The experience track makes you take care of your creatures; they aren't just cannon fodder.

The Art of Magic also features a 3-D point of view and fairly good 3-D graphics. The spell effects are fantastic, even if the voice acting isn't so good. The gameplay is very involved but can at times bog you down with minutia, especially concerning the sheer amount of spells, items, and creatures. But fans of the first game, or fans of strategy gaming involving high fantasy, will find plenty of magic and mayhem to go around. --Bob Andrews

Pros:

• A full 3-D camera system and excellent graphics
• Plenty of options, spells, creatures, and gameplay

• At times a bit too many options; complicated gaming
• The conflicts sometimes devolve into tedious battles of inches

The graphics of the game are pretty bad, and moments that should be deep or story-like are often ruined because you'r character looks like a voo-doo doll or emaciated puppet rather than a real person and talks in an annoying scottish accent. Overall the Voice Acting is mediocre, OK at best.

Gameplay is a neat idea, though the interface is flawed. Picture it sort of like the game Summoner, although you can't move and cast spells at the same time. The AI can, however, so expect them to do it at you all the time. You have to pause the game to make this happen, while he runs around you throwing fireballs. The first time you experience this, by the way, he has probably 500-700 hitpoints and you have 200 and some change. Real fun!

The first few missions are easy enough, but then you quickly run into a near impossible battle against an opponent worlds above you, and you are armed with only two low level spells. It's possible to beat him, but it's one of those battles where you suck so much but he can't heal (well he can, but not that well) so you have to nickel and dime him to death with puny spells. But, the AI will agressively take over the power circles (the only way you can get back your spells) with their more powerful units, and it seems that they can see where the circles are and head for them while you are still stubmling through the fog of war. So they are usually guarded when you find them, and in the case of the match I mentioned above, by something way better than what you can summon. It's grossly unfair.

Bugs -- beware of multiplayer! It was fun when it worked, but the sound was choppy and most of the time didn't even operate. I also experienced so much lag I had to shut down my computer to escape it at least twice -- and I'm running it on a brand new Gateway (1.7 mhz) on a LAN for pete's sake. Shortly into our 4th multiplayer skirmish, the AI cheated again -- a bug occurred where they had an invincible elf, at whom my two dragons (!) were hurling fireballs and my wizard lightning for what seemed like hours and he just stood there, with zero hp, shooting and slowly killing us. It was maddening!

The AI also seems to be able to summon more units than you can and stronger versions of the same. Don't ask me why my wolf dies by the first spell he throws at me, but his wolfs take three lightning spells to take down. Or how he manages to summon over 35 harpies at me in 5 minutes with only one cricle of power, when I could probably summon 5 or 6 under the same conditions (he'd just started over, too!).

If there's anything good to say about, it's that it's a neat idea. It's almost like Magic the Gathering come to life, summoning living walls to take damage for your wizard and fierce beasts to fight for you. Except that the AI usually only casts 2-3 spells, fills the map with hordes, and takes over all the mana nodes if you don't employ the same rush strategy right away. It just sucks all the fun out for me.

If anyone has played this game and had a good experience with it, please post a review. I believe my experience was really ruined by the bugs and cheating of the AI, but if you can look past it maybe there are some real things to praise. But not for me... I'm going to try and return it today.


A Good Quick Thrill   January 4, 2002
 3 out of 4 found this review helpful

Art of Magic sits in a very precarious position--there is a lot to like about this game, but it has some definite flaws to overcome.

Art of Magic is basically a real-time strategy game with a fantasy role-playing game feel. You play as a wizard with an array of summoning, damaging, and supporting spells to aid your army of summoned creatures against one or more opposing wizards' armies of the same.

It hardly sounds like a novel premise, but the gameplay is far from traditional. Spells are divided into three categories: chaos, neutral, and law, and before every combat, all players are given an assortment of reagents to allot. Every type of reagent will yield a different type of spell based upon what sphere it is allocated to, but no reagents are doubled. You'll have to decide if your quicksilver is better spent in law giving you some nice elven archers or in neutral for the elusive haste spell.

This ability to alter one's spellbook before every fight applies both to the campaign and the single-match bouts for single and multi-player, and breathes a heafty breath of fresh air into this game. No two fights will prove to be exactly the same if you don't let them.

Unfortunately, though, while this novel approach to war in a fantasy world will prove interesting to many people, there are a few problems with the game that make it seem akin to unrealized potential.

Players will quickly find that the AI very repetitive--despite a maximum of 18 spells being available per fight, a computer opponent will select either three or four of them to cast and there will be little or more likely no variation on that point. The AI's tactics will get tired very quickly.

The game is furthermore exceedingly difficult in the campaign--the difficulty thrown at players as they are attempting to learn the slightly confusing controls will turn off many people from wanting to see it through. You'll quicly find that the computer's ability to think on its feet and command so many creatures independently will dwarf human skill, and this advantage is pressed mercilessly as you struggle to learn the game.

The controls, while only a little confusing, will fail to help the situation, as their explanation in the manual is very confusing and unforgivably lackluster. The manual also fails to provide descriptions of the spells' effects--which are sometimes obvious, in the case of the heal spell, but often times ambiguous without knowing for certain.

All things considered, though, Art of Magic should entertain most fans of both fantasy games and strategy games for at least a good romp or two. It's most likley worth your time, so long as you don't expect great things. Just some nice things.