Master of Magic

I don't really see what everyone is complaining about. This game has all the original gameplay as the 1990's version with updated graphics, and a couple of cool new game-improving features.

Could the graphics and sound be better? I guess so. Music is not memorable, for sure.

But, I honestly think the developers did one bang-up of a job to be able to publish this for only $40... I'm enjoying it thoroughly!

I loved the original game, but it demanded so much of my 1990s PC that I very rarely got to play it with sound. Sadly, this update is also very demanding. I have a high spec computer, but I've experienced serious slow downs in battle scenes and bad PC-locking crashes both on launch and exit. The game itself is also both slow and difficult. Even on 'Easy' it's challenging. You start off so weak that there is little you can do except explore. This too is extremely slow; I felt like I was doing nothing but mash the end of turn button. Building anything useful takes at least 20-30 turns at the start and if you build or summon too many units, you quickly run out of food, money or mana. You have to play for over 100 turns before very much can be achieved. Then, when I was just beginning to make progress, my lands were invaded by two impossibly powerful enemy stacks which wiped out my army even though it contained 4 heroes and elite troops. There's something wrong with the balance which needs to be addressed by the developers. Finally, battles themselves are clunky and hard to manage. You can have your strongest unit attack a 'weak' one and quite often find it being hacked to pieces. I found it difficult to work out what was going on, really. While I like the game very much in many ways, it's been a disappointing and rather frustrating experience to play it. I hope the developers address these problems with patches. Until they do, I can't recommend it.

How can you fail like this with every title you try to remake or emulate?

Master of Magic could have been such an awesome game, but with Slitherine, it is just marginally improved (and I use the term lightly) when compared to the original title.

It is a good thing I didn't play for that long, as the old game is available for free online and I could get my money back for this ripoff.

Good gameplay, but everything from graphics to sounds and soundtrack is poorly done.

I don't understand the ruckus. I played the original using DOSBOX and my eyes would water. Since then I've tried a number of MOM-like games such as Age of Wonders and Elemental, but they didn't quite hit the spot. This new MOM is, as far as I can tell, the original Master of Magic updated and modernized by people who clearly love the game. Plenty of details can be found in other reviews here, but I'm looking forward to playing this a long time. Absolutely recommended.

Ok, I'm one of those old gamers that played the hell out of the original and wanted a remake since.. forever.
I wanted Master of Magic with a facelift and that is exactly what I got. 10/10 You can stop reading now.

Still here? Yes, we're never happy. There are things that could be better. It's still 2022 game for a 40 Euro price. New graphics are.. fine but could certainly be better. Needs more and better music. AI is still pretty much as incompetent as it was and could really use some improvement. UI.. is improved from the original, but only in small way.

Personal pet peeve? Conquering nodes is one of the most important game mechanics.. and here all you get is a little tinsy flag to denote that it belongs to you. Needs a far more flashy effect. A pillar of light in your color that ascends to heavens or something, as it is it's just underwhelming.

Underwhelming, that describes the game pretty well. Adequate, but underwhelming.
It's a pre 2000 game with a facelift, don't expect anything more than that.

Still that game is one of the best ever made and that counts for a lot. If you're looking for a great and simple fantasy 4x, look no further.

Highly disagree with the current mixed status, it is a very faithful remake of the classic, with a few visual and sound changes, For me the sound of the old MoM was grating and would hurt my ears regardless of volume setting, the new music and sound captures the spirit while also not sounding like tin being blasted out of a cannon.

There are a few small things I miss like the summoning screen for units and the fact that the beastmen swordsmen are bears rather than dogs, but if we do nothing but pick nits all day, we won't get anything meaningful done.

I'll admit I did not grow up with MoM but as a strategy guy I have a deep admiration for it. It seems to me that most negative reviews are people with nostalgia goggles for MoM and wanted a 100% transfer of the old game, it's a 98% transfer, therefore does not live up to their expectations. It never could. It is made by an entirely different team with entirely different technology in an entirely different version of the games industry. You can never go home again, but you can boot up the old MoM again. So what does this remake hurt? It's not like they're making the original unplayable like Blizzard and Reforged.

Yes it is overpriced, it is published by Slitherine, most people who know Slitherine knew this was going to happen, but hey, sales exist don't they?

All in all, this is a faithful remake of a beloved classic, boomers are boomers, publishers are publishers, but I think that the devs genuinely care about MoM and did the best they could given their constraints of modern development and publisher demands.

As an experiment and played it exactly like I play Classic MoM and was pleasantly surprised that the only change to my playstyle was that my units were no longer sprites that semi-represented what they were.

I was honestly dreading what was coming given how I feel about modern games, and I am so happy to be wrong.

I think the Devs did grand.

[Please note that virtually EVERY positive review is a nostalgia freak who played the original and can't get their head out of the 90's. This should tell you loads!]

In my teens, I saw Age of Wonders 1 in a discount bin at a computer store. To this day, it remains the best $5 I have ever spent. I don't know how many hours I've sunk into that wonderful game. That game was phenomenal on all levels. Charming graphics, great music, immersive atmosphere, a great balance between empire building and adventure, etc. From there, I played AOW2/SM, and AOW3 (mechanically the best of the series, though it lost the charm of the original). Fallen Enchantress, however, remains the best 4x games ever made. Nothing has yet topped it for its sublime mixture of genres into one glorious package. Recently, the game Old World has been entertaining. It's good without being great, and the combat is a little dry, but overall, pretty good.

The reason for this preamble is to show that I love 4x games, and that I can't have played the above without having heard of the granddaddy of them all.. Master of Magic. I had never played it due to the atrociously outdated visuals (I'm not even a graphics buff, but original MoM is bad beyond bad), so you can imagine my delight when I saw the beautiful visuals of this re-release. I immediately purchased it, having relied on the ENORMOUS fanfare this game has gotten over the years from the community.

And you know what? NEVER, EVER trust "nostalgia reviews." I love AOW1, but can admit that the game is way too easy once you know how the AI plays. I wouldn't ever recommend it as a "complex and tactically challenging" game, just something to kill time with and have some fun.

MoM fans seem to not have the "problem" of objectivity. They give utterly false reviews on the basis of their subjectivity.

This game, frankly, is a mouldy piece of purely overpriced garbage that should be lit on fire. Outside its stunning visuals, it has NOTHING else going for it.

No side scrolling (seriously, wtf!), the combat is dry and tedious. Dungeons are everywhere, and WELL defended, while cities are fewer and POORLY defended. I could care less about dungeon delving in an empire building game! It should be an added bonus, not the main feature!

This game is all about building units that take way, WAY too long to produce, then giving you an unclear combat log as to what's really going on when in battle with said units . Put some effort into it, devs! You're getting paid enough, judging by your overblown pricetag. Give us some numbers, some ROLLS, to see what's going on in the background (Temple of Elemental Evil has the best combat log ever - extremely precise and clear as to what is happening - go and check that out and just copy their system).

If you want a dungeon delving game, play any number of RPGs. If you want an empire builder, play any number of grand strategies. This game does neither well. It wants you to.... build ENORMOUS armies to... delve into dungeons with them (!). LOL!

It is a game of no substance whatsoever, and the reason I am writing this review is to put the nostalgia freaks to rest - shut up already about how good this game is. Stop lying to people with your emotionalism. It isn't good. AT ALL. Objectively, it's bad. No one cares about your wonderful childhood where you had nothing BUT this to escape from the humdrum of daily living. By every measurable metric, this game fails.

This game is like a restaurant everyone recommends, and then you go to it and get food poisoning from the overpriced meal which offered you no nutritional value or even a sense of being satiated.

This game gives the same feeling of filling out a tax return - extremely bureaucratic and dry, There is no sense of achievement when you do anything. It doesn't have a good sense of "continuity" between turns. It doesn't tell a story. It really is like filling out a form; a truly sublime analogy.

Despite the diverse races found in the game, there is NO interesting dynamic (such as in Age of Wonders, which does everything correctly) between them. Elves don't hate Gnolls, for example. You can just conquer the poorly defended city and it just joins your empire with apparently no complaints. In AOW, evil races rebel against good ones (and vice versa) and usually need to be migrated over in order to keep the city. Also, in AOW, you can improve relations via diplomacy, another thing this shallow, empty, vapid game fails at. Since race relations don't exist, there is no complexity. It's mindless number-crunching... just like a form.

The diplomacy is dry. The "Treaties" are dry. What they should have done is enhance this by expanding on it, not by remaking it. Every facet of this game can be improved on, from the more complex stuff like diplomacy, to the less complex stuff (like introducing AUTO SCOUTING!!!, being able to pass a turn WITHOUT clicking on "next army" until every army is clicked on (again, AOW does this better by not making it compulsory), and having side scrolling).

Another reviewer who bizarrely gave it a positive review said "If you have never really played MoM in depth, you really need to let go of your past expectations based on Age of Wonders say. While superficially MoM looks like it is very similar to AOW , it is actually different in focus and hence has different options. Neither AoW nor MoM is "Wrong" , they are just focused on different areas, with MoM focusing less on tactical unit options but more on spell casting management."

SPELL CASTING MANAGEMENT. Exactly! WTF does that even mean? It means that you need to mash the "end turn" button over and over while waiting for spells to research, or while waiting for a spell to be cast. So while this reviewer says that neither "AoW or MoM" is "wrong," that is in itself wrong. MoM has entirely the wrong focus. AoW is correct and MoM isn't. Spell management in an empire building scenario is absolutely and unquestionably WRONG. Tactical unit options is where it should be AT. MoM is a laughable joke of a game. Its entire focus is off.

Just to be clear - I am not giving this remake a bad review - I am giving the entire Master of Magic brand a bad review. Many reviewers are saying that this is a faithful remake, which damns the series itself. The series sucks, and I feel deceived from reading FOR YEARS how good this game was. It wasn't and isn't. It's the granddaddy of a wonderful series of OTHER games which itself should be put to rest. Stay in your coffin, grandpa. You've got nothing to offer the world anymore. AOW has supplanted this series IN ENTIRETY. There isn't a single thing - not one - that MoM does better than AOW. Not one. AOW is the true MASTER of this series.

MoM doesn't give you that "one more turn" feel. It gives you a "man, have I checked and balanced everything this turn? Have I filled out this form correctly" kind of feel.

I guess some people never grow up and can't give an objective review, hence all the nostalgia freaks keeping this game afloat with their positive reviews nonsense.

Truly awful. 9/10 for the visuals, 1/10 for everything else. Go play anything else.

I recommend this game, but if I would give it a "so-so" rating if i could. I would. I ended up with the positive rating to encourage support for the game and perhaps further development.
On the positive side, it is pretty and is a rather faithful cosmetic update of the original MoM.
On the negative side, it is SLOW - everywhere! Starting with loading, changing scenes, movement, battle, etc. etc.s (I have a fairly fast computer with plenty of memory). IMHO, games like this need to be FAST so that one can explore different strategies. Ironman is for later.
- It has also crashed 3x already, once bringing down the whole computer.
- I don't like the map - it doesn't cover enough area and it is hard to see some units at a glance.
- I had an (undefended) taken, but had no notice of the event.
- Maybe I miss the city build notifications, but I seem to end up with cities building housing too frequently.
- You cannot sort cities by production, population, etc!
- Battle map is also too small, with action taking place off the screen.

That's a few comments after a couple hours of play. I confess to having played Caster of Magic quite often and am a bit spoiled. They should have had Seravy working on this remake.

It's what it says on the tin, pretty much an updated version of the original game.

Art style is a bit of a mixed bag, as wizard art is great, but all the animated bits of the original have been replaced by static portraits. Unit portraits are also a bit cartoonish.

Works fine on Windows 11. I haven't encountered a single bug yet.

Fairly perfect reproduction of the game play of the original game.
pros
AI is way more competent even using cheese strategies the AI put up a pretty good fight on normal difficulty and is still fairly dangerous even when weakened.
User interface is much improved.
cons
The new graphics and music while pretty enough don't have the same retro charm of the original game though that was probably inevitable.

Classic game remade with better UI and art. Minor 5% design adjustment, basically adding some quests and a check box to enable new quests if you want them.
Only bugs I found were minor ones and it sounds like some of them are being fixed.

The things that I didn't like is they kept the 30 year old AI and 30 year old 'autocombat simulator' instead of making them better. They have lots of room for improvement.

Great remake of classic 4x game.
9.5/10 (-0.5 for hex grid instead of squares)

Some QoL features that will make a game even better:
1. Speed up gameplay in general - auto-continue movement, instant global map movement, add quick save
2. Spell book improvements - favorite spells, remember last open page, etc
3. Improved visibility of critical gameplay objects on the global map (ownership of mana nodes, selected unit and unit path to destination, resources, etc.)

Essentially a remake of the 90s classic and that's just it. Nicer graphics but no innovation compared to the original. Once you win, the ending is rather disappointing. Fun to play, no doubt, but $40 is too much for it.

I have to disagree with most of the negative "reviews".

I find the game to be a breath of fresh air, to be honest. The original core mechanics are hard to beat, even in today's world where a new 4X game is released every other month.

I had forgotten how well the power/magic/casting/spell systems provide the player with layer upon layer of options, so that you craft your "magic experience" in any way you want. This, of course, begins with your wizard choice and filters down to the state of the map.

The races, units, and combat system are all as amazing as I remember, and really goes to show that 4X games don't need a million different units and attributes--most of which end up being ignored--they need a solid foundation of mechanics that remain fun and interesting after several replays.

Recent 4X games have moved away from RNG and have embraced the "more is better" idea, which, in my estimation has made a lot of recent 4X games feel "samey". Sure, they have a lot more options, numbers, units, and the like, but you end up resorting to using the same strategies all the time.

MoM takes it back to basics, makes combat interesting/exciting, brings back risk management, spells that actually do things, and makes each game feel different, making you respond to what the map gives you, what magic the AI is using, etc. Most modern 4X games just become a steamroll very early, even on harder difficulties, because their systems are far too bloated and fraught with synergies, exploits, etc. that the AI can't respond to.

The new MoM is a fine addition to the 4x genre. It preserves the core mechanics of the original. Mechanics that have never been surpassed or duplicated. Many have tried, while putting their own "spin" on things--but all of these imitators offer vastly different experiences, each of varying excellence, with their own set of issues.

Age of Wonders, Warlock, Fallen Enchantress, etc. are all their own things, and each has their own problems born of all the extra stuff they've added. There's something to be said about the core simplicity of MoM, and it's completely lost on many gamers who just want "more, more, more".

Great art, excluding the map - very empty and poor.
Lets talk about the game...
Nothing to talk about - VERY poor gameplay. Totally unbalanced. The game feels empty and stupid. It is so bad that you will be wondering WTF is going on. Then CPU comes and kills you without any problems.
But forget about the unbalance... it is very unpleasant and boring experience.

Was waiting and hoping MUHA knew what are they doing - but I guess Publishers got the final say and the game is just a marketing stunt - bad one.

So lifeless game I have never seen.

An on the fence no. I mean it *is* Master of Magic an it runs, the nostalgia is fun. Overall though the game is in a beta state at best, there's even an omnipresent bug report banner reminding you to press F8 constantly on your screen.

Diplomacy just, doesn't seem to function. Occasionally other wizards will ask you to trade very rarely you'll get something worthwhile this way. Successful trading doesn't seem to improve relations at all. Treaties, or even peace when you've all but killed off an enemy do nothing other than worsen relations when they're rejected.

Want to get details on your units? What do all those little icons mean? Yeah sorry can only mouse over them for details when you're building the unit or when you're in battle. The armies screen is mostly just frustration. Want to know what 'merging' means on the artifact you just found? Sorry no UI for that, you'll have to Google and hope the ability is unchanged from the classic MoM. This game could be so much fun and I'll probably get enough value to justify buying it but...if a friend asked who wasn't a huge MoM fan as a child, I'd prolly tell them to skip it.

Missed the mark. Recommended if you haven't played the original, otherwise I would wait for a sale.

I was really excited when I heard Master of Magic was remade. I spent hundreds of hours on the original and it was one of the most appealing concepts for a strategy I had seen. This re-make though just feels like it fell short of recreating the "magic" of the first one.

I launched the game hoping to see a re-imagining of the cheesy opening cut scene but was just plopped straight to the title screen.
It is great with the options given for a new game, as compared to them being toggles in the original, and there is a little bit of a tutorial for basic navigation of the UI, but if they were hoping to appeal to a new audience they should have had more information available about the combat and statistics.

There are a few quality of life options and features, over the original, but I also think this is the biggest shortcoming. A few examples. Scouting, they mention that the magic spirit is a good scout, but its still as micromanagy to send it around as the original. Or if your playing nature magic and cast earth lore, its even less intuitive of the area of the spell for trying to line it up to hit the most new tiles.

The map it cluttered. As far as visual improvements go they did a good job, the assets themselves look nice, but the visual design is lacking. In a way it feels hard to tell whats going on, if a resource is in a hex, it doesn't pop out like it would on the pixelated map. Oh those rocks are a mine. The deer are wild game, that makes sense. the birds are... ambiance apparently? And I guess a tile next to my first base was a river, even though it looked like forest.
I do like the spell effect visuals I've seen so far, but from reading other reviews it sounds like stronger spells don't necessarily get their power represented visually.

I think the sound is probably one of the weakest points, the BGM is uninspiring and bland and the event sounds don't stand out at all if they are there. In the original certain jingles would always signify certain events, something of a school was summoned, a random event happened, a certain enchantment was cast. And for this I honestly couldn't tell you even they even have any other than for summoning, which wasn't great.
Some sounds also get annoying and repetitive. Sprites and magic spirit, I'm looking at you.

If I ever have the urge to play MoM again I'll probably play this one more, but as of now I haven't seen enough from this one to make me want to sink a lot of time in it, but It might just make me want to play Caster of Magic instead.

This game is a reskin of a classic with some upgrades. Kind of like an "enhanced" version of an old game. If you are worried about graphics, you don't belong here. Move on! If you like reading up on strategies and unit stats online to come up with a way to win, this might be your happy new home.

I'm a serious MoM fan, I have been since the start. This game is a classic with a nearly 30 year history fan-favorite status. I have 980 hours logged on the steam version of the original, and that's just one version.

The Good:
-For the most part, this game has stuck to the original far better than I'd hoped it would. I don't like "Caster of Magic" which tweaked everything. This version is far better.
-It has some needed balancing tweaks, like Hellhounds costing 2 to upkeep instead of 1. Starting on the Myrran plane costs 2 instead of 3 when customizing your wiz. Fixes like that allow more builds to be viable.
-UI upgrades are here, you can see more info per page and move through your cities much more easily. Just having a construction queue is a huge time-saver.
-There are many more options on game setup, making it easier to get a game that is challenging but not overwhelming.
-If you have favorite builds, you can still use them. For example, taking Runemaster and Artificer allows you to make items and destroy them, getting back x2 their cost in mana. (but it still costs you time and wizard choice points, of course).
-So far, this one seems easier to beat than the MoM community patch version (available on Steam), but I haven't tried all the options yet.
-The AI seems about as bright as it was in original MoM.
-The map can be much larger than the original.
-It's not a crash-ridden mess.
-Hexes work probably better than squares can.

The Bad:
-I would have liked to have seen an option for more AI wizards up against you.
-There are some design choices I don't like much. For example, you get complete information on a lair when you scout it, rather than just a hint. That lowers the challenge somewhat, but it doesn't ruin anything.
-There are too many resources on the map. Gold is everywhere. Would be nice to be able to tone that down as an option.
-Some of the hard-stop "you're screwed" moments have been nerfed. That's not good for a purist, but I bet it will help a lot with new players.

Summary: If you are a new player, you'll get the gist of the experience without all the pain of the old interface and the terrible graphics. If you are an old player, it will seem like a nice upgrade with some tweaks.

Highly recommended!

Pros:
It's shiny, I guess? Better graphics, sort of.

Cons:

Honestly aside from the new graphics the old version is just straight up better. Heck, even the new graphics is sometimes worse when it comes to relaying information. It can be hard to tell where resources are on the map, it can be hard to tell where Myrro gates is, especially on the Myrro plane. You can't really tell in battle if a unit is being buffed, there's no longer a glow around units that is, even the invisibility spell doesn't show the units as invisible.

There's a few balance changes, some are fine, some doesnt matter but all in all it's just whatever.

But the thing that really makes me not recommend it is the fact that the game just plays A LOT slower. Unit movement is so slow in this compared to the old one, both in overview map and in combat.

Speaking of combat, you can't see the whole battlefield. This creates a huge problem if you have ranged unit's. Every time it centers the camera on the new active unit, and because you can't see the whole battlefield you have to scroll the camera to be able to target the enemy units with your range attacks. It completely breaks the flow of battle and gets very tedious in the late game leaving me to autoresolve most battles.

The UI in this remastered version is abysmal.
Master of Magic being what it is, there's often a lot of spell casting during rounds. The problem with this is, it takes AGES scrolling through your spellbook and finding the spells you want to cast, now don't get me wrong, this was also a bit of an issue in the old version, but it's exaggerated in this version because of how slow the UI responds and does things. Heck, it's made even worse by the fact that you only have 8 spells on view at a time. In the old version you'd have 12 spells when you opened up the book. As I mentioned, the the UI for the spellbook is also a lot slower in this version compared to the old version. Even with this modern version having filters such as spell realm, unit buffs, summoning and what not, it is just so tedious to use.

When you finally do find the spell you want to cast the next issue then becomes it doesn't go off instantly but get's put in a turn event queue. Now I don't know what they were thinking making this event queue, on paper it's a great idea, it gives you a overview of what cities finished buildings, if any units leveled up and what spells been finished. But because the UI is so abysmal it is just much faster to go through every city manually and see what's happened and if you need to adjust ques. The alternative of using this queue, is just laborious and tedious at best. Click event, go to town, change what needs to be changed, go back out, wait for the queue to pop up on the side of the screen(Because you can't click them before they are fully loaded mind you), rinse repeat. Instead I just end up going through all my towns manually.

Even the city overview has been made worse. In the old game you'd have a full list of buildings and units, but in this game you only have 7 buildings and 7 units per page in the town screen. So you often have to scroll the page to see what new buildings is available or if the unit you want to build is in the second page of the unit list this is an ongoing problem. It's just a strictly worse version of the much cleaner way to do it in the old game.
You now get a neat little picture in the center of the screen where the building or unit stats and requirements is, but even this they completely miss managed. It shows you what buildings is required for the building or unit with a icon of the building, but you can't click the building so you have to scroll through the list of buildings, find the building icon, see if you can build it or if you have to scroll through to find another required building to build that building. Sigh, would have been so easy to make you able to click the building required to take you to that building and so on and so forth.But then again, this is a problem they have created with the new UI to begin with. But at least you can use the mouse scroll wheel to flip through the pages in the building section, can't do it if you hover over the unit section mind you, but you can with the buildings.

Which leaves me to the issue with hotkeys, now there's just a TON of easily implemented hotkeys that would make most of these issues completely irrelevant, but there is just zero implementation of hotkeys. In fact, you can't even change the hotkeys, so your stuck using a 3rd party program such as autohotkey to change the few that is in the game if you want it more player friendly. There's no hotkey for virtually anything, things that you do a lot such as going into the build option of your town, finding the same spell over and over again is just not there. In fact when it comes to hotkeys, it's even made worse then the old version where you could move your units around using the numpad.

So yeah, go play the old Master of Magic, it's just better in most ways.

Was able to cast incarnation and get Thorin by turn 17. I wasn't sure about trying for the 11 book pick, but wow this has been a fun strategy.

Looking forward to trying out my lizard lock next run. Also, plays great on the steam deck so far at standard settings. Well worth it!

This was one of my first loves of a 4X game, along with MoO II, and so far this has been the most successful relaunch of at least one of those series, lol :)

A faithful recreation (for better or worse) of the original Master of Magic from the 90s. It's got a shiny coat of paint on it, and some quality of life things that spare you from reading the light novel-sized manual that came with the original (and the supplementary spell book). Like many of the 4X, RTS, or Grand Strategy games, the higher you set the AI difficulty, the more they will cheat. If you aren't used to this (it was prevalent back in the day and throughout the 2000s), then the game is going to slap you in the face while you try to learn how to play. Let's get into things.

WTF is Master of Magic? It's a turn-based strategy, with a fantasy setting. Research spells, manage cities, build/summon armies. Fight the neutral elements nearby; use taxes, faith and martial law to keep the peace; defeat the other wizards or cast the Spell of Mastery to win.

How similar is this to Thea? It's nothing like Thea. Look elsewhere.

Can I ally with other wizards? Yes, but it's difficult and hardly benefits you. Go with Life/Sorcery magic and hope you get the spells to improve relations. Take Charismatic as a specialty. Your reward for all of that? You can ally with other wizards; are they chaotic? Congrats that alliance is about to get you into several wars where your ally will back out without telling you.

Is the game balanced? Heck no. The game isn't about balance. Some factions (races) have inherent advantages. Lizardman units are amphibious, you are not limited by the landmass you start on (in the situation where you're island-locked), you can colonize the world. Playing Myrran? Small chance of a competitor starting on your map, and Draconians all fly. Trolls all regenerate back to life after combat unless you get wiped out. Halflings produce tons of food. Dark Elf armies almost all have magic ranged attacks (even the cavalry), but all the other races hate them. Klackons are super productive but rebel against those that lead other races. They were meant to be unique instead of balanced, I think.

Would I recommend the game? For what it is, sure. Personally, I would have liked the game more if they had opted to improve the game over keeping things identical to the original. The original game has been modded several times over now, included mods to balance, imbalance, and add multiplayer. These features are not in this game. You're capped at 4 other wizards, and it is single player only. It is also as balanced or unbalanced as the original game.

Long story short, it's a 4X game with magic and low diplomacy. It's shiny and works on modern systems. And is less esoteric than the original. If that sounds like a game you'd enjoy, give it a shot. If the price is too high, wait for a sale. If you're feeling nostalgic, then you already know what this game is and whether you'd enjoy it or not.

I bought the game and keep getting destroyed. How do I keep up with the AI? Look, this isn't going to work every time. I have three pieces of advice: 1. lower the difficulty until you understand the game; 2. make a custom wizard and take the Myrran specialty, this will leave you alone longer to figure out how to run a city, build an army, etc; 3. do not wait to scout and expand. Did you see advice #3? Once you understand the game, that's the most important piece of advice I could give. Good luck, have fun.

TLDR: Solid, extremely faithful to the original with nice updated graphics and animation, and a few QOL changes that don't change the core gameplay. Warts and all implementation of the original brilliance along with dated game design. Definitely worth playing, but leaves me wondering 'what if...'

Every detail of what made the original great has been faithfully replicated here. Including some wonderful unbalanced combinations. The charm of the original was trying out new combinations of powers and spells to build overpowered armies to smash the opposition. The way that a dungeon could give you new spell books or powers that could completely change your build. Also here. The heroes that start off weak and end up powerhouses. Yeap, it's here. Meticulously recreating every game mechanic you remember from the 90's original.
This is both a blessing and a curse, because you also have the dated design that encourages city spam and tedious micromanagement of each city, and slows the game pacing down the longer you play. You get the same 'I know I've won this game, but I have to still destroy each city and faction, and slog through the endgame' of the period. And more. I find myself wishing that the developers had been a bit bolder in changing some of this. But if they had, we'd have just complained anyway about deviating from the formula.

If you'd have asked me 1 month ago what I wanted from a remake, I'd have asked exactly for this. Having got it, I'm wishing that had been more bold about some of the outdated design choices.
They've proven they understand the original games appeal. Lets hope for a MOM2 that keeps the spirit of the original, and brings the core design and mechanics in to the 21st century.

If you liked the original Master of Magic and mostly wanted to play it with nicer graphics and without having to run it on dosbox, then you are getting precisely what you wanted.

I'm having a lot of fun with this, huge thank you to the developers =)

Remember how the internet and all this modern tech. was going to make our lives easier? But then society's attitudes changed and now everyone expects you to know everything, as you can find out whatever you need to know by googling it or searching online. Then people expect you to be available 24/7 and it gets harder to get downtime away from the intrusive pestering enabled by all our devices. So our lives got harder in many ways.

Well, playing this game has reminded me of the old joy of 90s games: figuring things out, experimenting and trying things to see what works. Like our wider society, 21st century strategy games increasingly bombard you with stats, tool-tips and complex systems (combat prediction data and so on). I thought this was largely a good thing until now. But so often, hours of boring busy work is required to push the game forward, and then the pay-off is often disappointing when the usually brain dead AI opponents try to challenge you. After some underwhelming conflict with an AI player the game then pushes new complex systems and mechanics at you to keep you engaged. Most AI cannot handle the complex systems so they get buffs and cheats, or the player gets time limits or handicaps to keep the game competitive. All of this makes most modern strategy games unsatisfying, especially the AAA ones.

Enter the Master of Magic Re-make and I'm reminded of the old joy of the classic UFO Enemy Unknown. I never played the original MoM so I'm enjoying blundering around trying to figure out what's going on under the hood. There seems to be some wild RNG dice rolling going on as combat results are so unpredictable, but nothing is explained. There are few tool-tips, descriptions are vague. I don't understand half the magical spells, or the properties of the creatures, and it's great fun finding out the hard way. The meta of the game is very easy to get used to, being very similar to the early Civilization games. The AI is probably as bad as any other, too early to say, but it doesn't matter, as the mystery and variety of exploring the world will be enough to keep me engrossed.

And they say this is the same game that came out in 1994 with updated graphics! Wow. I missed a classic. This game hits the sweet spot for complexity and play-ability, and now it looks beautiful as well. I love the graphic style.

And now lots of you are slagging off this amazing game! Many after playing for an hour or less! You guys are too 21st century. Others are claiming it isn't as good as the original! Really? With those headache inducing retro-graphics? You lot are too 20th century!
This is why I'm putting up a review after only 5 hours play, to try to counterbalance this injustice.

A valiant effort with a lot of new feats and neat cliffhangers. The possibility to make choices when exploring dungeons is most welcome. But if dev & publishers want to level up even more, they should expand on this and connect the dots between the dungeons, high-level units, random encounters and heroes. DLC/patch with more genuine quests/plots in this spirit are always on demand among rpg influenced audiences; brings harmony and more purpose to players; but without upsetting the purists.

Good luck

They have done a Great job at remaking this. Plays so close to the old one! There are a few things that could be fixed in upcoming patches, but I think it just depends on what their vision is for the game. If they want it to be a straight up copy, then they will only make small changes(Like renaming your heroes, which you cannot do, though you can still rename your cities and such). Other than small things, they hit it on the head. Ifyou loved MoM you will like this one. Then again from the discussion groups, people are griping and complaining about everything, so im just glad that I like it and enjoy the hell out of it.

faithful recreation of the original. Nice alternative to Civilization. Could use some quality of life improvements to speed up the gameplay

-- Update, save file is corrupted. No way to complete a game with 20 hours dumped into it. Terribad :(

I think some of the negative reviews are a little odd. This game needed a 30 year updated and they preserved what made it great. If you like civilization but want dragons, heroes and magic over $40 dlc? (I’m looking at you Rise and fall) This game is for you.

Like it or not...this is Master of Magic.

It has a fresh coat of paint, looks a bit sharper, has some nice QoL features, but it is...MoM.

Do I wish they would have redone the campy music and used it instead? Probably.
Do I wish they had the cheesy intro that we all skipped after the first time watching? I would.
Do I wish they would have kept the cramped looking units that felt like an army when they attacked? Yes...definitely.
Do I wish they would have modernized it more and added a bunch of new features (not QoL)? No, not really.

This is one of the first games 4x Strategy games that a lot of players grew up with, although I suspect quite a few remember things differently.

Do I think this game is for everyone? Probably not...you have to be okay with a simpler game of spam your cities often, spam your cities first. You also have to be okay with nonsense such as the other Wizards walking their Spirits onto your nodes and then freaking out at you and declaring war when you recover it...as if you were the aggressor the whole time.

The mechanics would seem unbalanced by some modern games...but that's the charm. We all know/love the first node we explore with multiple foot troops only to have them slaughtered by a single pixie that flies out of reach before shooting...until we remember to cast spells to hold them in place, hurt them, etc. Then it becomes a matter of learning the art of cheese...say by casting a cloak of fear on your unit, or loading up your heroes with magical artifacts, etc.

All in all I've just started playing...yes, only 4 hours due to the fact that sadly I don't have the same amount of free time when I was a much younger man and MoM originally released. But I can tell you that I've had no crashes, the game runs smoothly, and I personally love it.

Will you like it? Hard to say...if you go into with your eye's open and understand what you're getting...I think so.

well, i was happy to see an updated version of this classic game come out. then i seen the price and thought, well maybe they added more for it? $40 is a bit high in my opinion.
anyway, the game plays. i have not run across any game breaking bugs. what i do not like is that the AI cheats.
not only do they not pay any attention to some spells (for one, aurora of majesty) but by the time i had 10 cities, they had me at a 2 to 1 disadvantage atleast.
the enemy just roams through your territory until they decide that they have the advantage and blamo! you just lost a bunch of cities. no asking for permission to cross your lands, no alliance or any other friendship type diplomatic stuff to do so. i could not get anywhere with diplomacy.

if there was a MEH recommendation. thats what i would give this one.
wait for a sale

Lost my first 3 games. Halflings are still OP. Heroes still avoid me, if not forced by magic. Its the old game alright.

Visuals are ... ok, a bit murky. The art is great, where it applies.
Gameplay is mostly like the old one, so you need one thing, that no one has anymore today: patience.

It could use a patch or two on the QOL side of things, but i like it.

This is my first review so you've been warned. ;)

I was really looking forward to this game as I played the original a lot. And the feel of the game is accurate to the original. My problem is that I was expecting more as it has been a long time since the original and for 2022 it seems simplistic. Some of the simple things could be better sounds and music, more detailed graphics, when done researching a spell to give you a description (not just a useless title page), option of importing a picture when creating a custom mage, etc.

So overall I need to give this a recommend rating although just barely. I believe that the developer could have done a lot with this.

How many times have the fans said "Just give us the old game with updated graphics!" Well, Slitherine has delivered just that, albeit that with a few modern upgrades. Same wizards, same magic, even the same 5 banners.

The artwork is gorgeous as well.

It's like age of wonders 3, or age of wonders 3 is like this..?
Although it's good I'd much rather play something real time so I don't have to bounce around units that can only move 2 tiles per turn all the time.

This feels and plays very close to the original with the new events adding variety and options (although they feel a bit limited in what you can do). It truly feels like an updated version of the original game and this is overall good with a few things I dislike. The game runs fine for me 200+ game days in. I do have a fairly hefty computer though and, as of yet, have experienced none of the slowdowns some people have talked about in their reviews.
The things I want to see would be
1. Selectable opponents (Unless I missed something, you still are unable to select your opponents (Just like the original)
2. More opponents (It tops out at 4 just like the original)
3. Cities that grow larger and/or take up more territory over time (As of right now they always take up the same space and territory when they are built (Just as in the original)
4. They need more animation and actual model usage in the game, I was very disappointed when wizards get banished and all you see is their portrait that cracks and breaks, you never actually see the full bodied image of the wizard other than the selection screen for your wizard.
5. They have more options when creating your own wizard but, I would like to see a few more points on the easy mode so you can make a truly OP wizard (nothing a mod wouldn't fix)

I'm sure there are other things but it's all little nitpicks and this game is very true to the original with all it's quirks and flaws. Overall I'm enjoying it and recommend it.

Sadly, I can't reccomend this game. Graphic is nice enough, but not really worth the asking price... But still as a nice and faithfull remake I wouldn't have minded the cost. But combat is to clunky and tedious to be fun, in my opinion.

The weird autofocussing camera in combat every time I do something is very annoying to me.

So I refunded. I rather play another round of Age of Wonder III (or II).

I dunno about all the negative reviews here, it's pretty decent and true to MOM which I am a huge fan of, being probably the best fantasy/civ games ever made. It took me awhile to figure out the new UI, but I appreciate the graphics and hex-tile combat a lot. After a few games, it seems the 'magic' is still here, I'm definitely enjoying the game and if you're a MOM fan you'll probably like it too. It might seem a little primitive in some ways to age of wonders or modern civ fans, but it definitely has it's own set of charms.

Feels like the dev just want to turn the classic MoM into a hexa map turn based game with unimproved UI and then copy paste the others. A lot of things can be done to improve this new game but you just have to make the opponent AI spam cities and cheat the game, you can intro new features like destroying the road for strategic reasons or custom build race and even some new spells. You can even make better combat animations and speed them up but you just have to release a game to wow players only in art and graphics. I rather play the original class MoM instead. Go do something about it.

The game looks simple but has a good deal of subtly. It took me 7 hours to gain the feel for the mechanics. And you can trust Slitherine to update the game and offer some good DLC. I will get my one dollar per hour of play out of this game, and it holds promise of great replayabilty with different wizards.

Like many others, I played the original MoM before for about 2 decades, it's a unique game with amazing features and possibilities. This revival was highly anticipated by me, and it delivered! I only have one caveat (read below).

The developers did really well to sticking to most of the original game's features, only enhancing certain aspects (hex based instead of square grid, some improvements for playability, small things that do have a big impact on playability, which was what MoM needed most IMO. Obviously the graphics, art and UI have been massively improved.

From what I notice in the new manual and news from the devs, they're not done yet, and plan more things, but it's unclear if this means more upgrades or more new content. Either suits me fine!

Anywho, the game plays great, 0 bugs or crashes for me, and the gameplay is simply still totally great. It's such a massive relief to finally be able to play this on a modern machine, with a modern UI and so many improvements.

I played this for hundreds of hours, and MoM's core gameplay mechanics simply allow for so many different playthroughs, which means I'll play it for several hundred more. Only, this time, it looks and plays much better.

I really highly recommend this, with kudos to the developers for such a great game. Although with a caveat: know what you buy! Don't compare this to other games (you know which I mean), MoM is it's own game and doesn't pretend to be anything else. There's plenty of resources online showing playthroughs and stuff.

Big thumbs up, I see a lot of people whining about the game... is it perfect, no... but one can lay that at the feet of the beta testers if proper feed back was not given (wish they had picked me for the beta). There are things I would like to see changed, yes... but over all it is a very good game. I see people complaining about the price, I think it's priced right for a normal release... it's not a 60 dollar game, but it also is worth more then 20 bucks. If I break it down by $$ per hour... well it's been out a few days and I've played near 60 hours, so it's already down to 1/2 a dollar per hour..... bought plenty of games for more, that I stopped playing with less then 10 hours played. Overall I'd give it a 7 of 10... I hope they fix some of the annoying UI issues but in any case, I'm quite happy with it.

Pro's...
Stayed very true to the original game, which is one of my all time favorites, it was one of the few games out back in the day.
This was Sid's 2nd game, and I enjoy the way his games play... they are all pretty much all variants of This and Master of Orion (his first, also redone well).
The character creation if you do not want to play a premade wizard, is well done and gives a lot of variaty.

Cons...
The UI and the AI could of been done better. I've taken over capitals of other wizards 300 turns into the game, and seen that the ONLY buildings they every made were the troop producing ones. So, unless they ignore the economics of the game for the AI (which they very well might) it puts the computer at a disadvantage, if they do ignore them.,.. it's a huge AI advantage (would take a guess the AI ignores this part, with the size of the armies it pumps out).
Once in a while, the game (corrupts) and after that you can no longer do saves, you have to load a prior game from auto save in order to uncorrupt it.(so do not set a large number in the amount of turns between saves.. I would do 1-5, I have mine at 5).

(Iniitial) Yup.

I played the original in my youth. I recall it being a little buggy, but pretty unique (with item forging, klackons, etc). I'm surprised how well I remember the mecanics, because this is almost the same. It's actually what we often want with the classics (e.g. Master of Orion 2 vwas the peak, and 3 and the "Reboot" were terrible, terrible versions) just a modernized version. So in some ways it will look a little dated, say compared to Age of Wonders: Planetfall. I played Planetfall to death, and it has controller support etc... though I found the AI wasn't challenging to an advanced player. But it was good. These games kind of live and die on the AI -- I have liked most (but not all) of Slitherine games, and I can't say how good this one is yet. But I'm happy buying this at full price at release.

My biggest complaint -- it looks like you can't rename heroes, which I remeber bugged me about the original (one of my 4x pet peeves is when you can't rename stuff). You can rename cities and your magician at least.

Hey devs, maybe patch that hero rename option in!

AI seems competent so far. In comparing it to Civ and AoW etc, I'm finding the tactical combat maps so far give the game brownie points. I remember playing Thea and similar and liking alot of it, but not the combat. Civ's is pretty basic, though it of course lacks many of Civ's other options.

Biggest missing feature so far (unless I've overlooked it -- AND AFTER RENAMING HEROES!) is auto-explore. I zig-zagged some spirits across the map but I kinda loathe exploring. My city just built a boat and I actually sighed, I don't want to command it every turn (parking it). I originally picked a big map, but I restarted the game and used default settings. The smaller maps are big enough especially with the mirror world. Neutrals have been aggressive, so far the other mages are keeping distance (they seem ahead of me in research and items on normal difficulty)....

Love this game but cannot recommend it ! I am a plodder so slow progress is very appealing to me. And this game is somewhat of a grind...Lovely :)
The problem is the AI cheats ridiculously. Kill 100 enemy units they will quickly return with 150 units. Where do they get them from ? The Matrix ??
I have restarted several times and tried different strategies. My conclusion is that the game is impossible to beat. It's still fun though ! Guess i'm a sadist !!
So unless you are too, for now, i would avoid this like the plague.
Maybe someday they will balance the game properly. Until then i shall continue getting slaughtered.
Gotta go now, i feel the urge for suffering !!

Just tried a new game...did ok....Then i met an enemy hero who is immune to all damage forever !! He roams thr map alone and destroys everything. This game is completely ridiculous !!
RUBBISH !!

Has promise, but needs a lot of work for the price asked. You can't scroll the map, opponents are capped at 4, you can't save game settings in the setup menu...etc. The devs could have looked at some modern titles and at least made some quality of life changes to the base game. Hopefully they at least opened it up so a modder community can improve it. Wait until the price comes down.

I have been waiting for a follow up to Master of Magic for decades. When Slitherine bought the IP and started fixing up the old game and (of all things) released DLC I was excited that this wait is over. About a year later we get a new Master of Magic, but is it good?

It is not good. I'll let that sink in.

It is also not bad, but what keeps it from being good is what I have seen the dev MuHa do in the past is and that is release a game that is not ready. At best this is a faithful recreation of Master of Magic, which was a deceptively deep game. There are some new things in the game, but really this is a half baked recreation. The systems of the old game seem to be in place, some balance tweaks but the 1990s foundation is still there and it is creaky. They failed to being the game up to modern QOL standards. I've bought three games from MuHa who I think do interesting games but like this new MoM it feels light and needs more content/polish/etc.

The Good
-----------
* It is a beautiful, every screen and unit art looks great
* Hex based maps
* Maps for battles have terrain, though there could be more
* By and large it is a faithful recreation of the old game
* World is nicely generated, too bad that that the AI are murder hobos and you'll never explore it
* World map is beautiful
* Manuals are included (PDF and printer friendly), but kinda buries
* The AI seems to play the game better, overall
* (Correction) The magic items that are offered from purchase seem more random, you can also create your own (I did like the item creation utility in the original, but I think this is more robust overall)

The Meh
-----------
* Maps can/should be procedural generated to keep things fresh
* City battle maps are laughably bad
* When is new is not obvious
* Animations seem kinda slow (you can speed up battles
* Some units are hard to discern from each other, but they look great
* On the world map, unlike the original game everything is a bit muddled and hard to discern.
* Not enough new stuff to really make the eyes pop
* Those few seconds you have to explore caves and adventure seem less rewarding than the original
* Hero management and info (along with units) is klunkier than the original
* The AI will rush any city that is undefended, which means it is cheating by knowing a city is that way. Also very easy to draw the AI into fights that stack your way.
* Various places to explore offer only spells, gold and mana... I liked the old game where it could be a spell, hero or treasure. Not horrible, just wish it was more faithful.

The Bad
-----------
* The game breaks down to a 1 v everyone else and the AI's do not seem to fight even if they are next to each other
* The report an error button displaying all the time, that is a bad look
* Diplomacy is a joke, treaties are broken and trades nearly so
* Pretty much every AI will declare war on your early and often which means the exploration and collection part of the game does not exist
* The AI being a murder hobo in regards to you the player means they turn a blind eye to each other from what I have seen thus far
* Unit graphics are not to scale with each other, being a miniatures gamer I find this especially offensive... it is a virtualy battlefield, table space is not a big deal
* Some serious performance issues: loading saves is painfully slow
UXUI issues: Inconsistent methods to get out of screen and pop ups, most underlying screens are prettified 1990's screens and thus kinda hard to use
* QOL issues: No quick save, no button mapping,
* A launcher that is only advertising for Slitherine. IMO a launch inside of a launcher (i.e. Steam) is poor form and with no ability to disable it, double so
* The DLC is laughably bad, wallpapers? Seriously I'll keep my money.
* Given the AI being murder hobos, the pace of the game is not great, while they do not fight each other much you are not able to do the fun/side things in the game.

What would have made this great
-----------
* An AI that was not bent on killing you ASAP
* Diplomacy being an actual thing
* Something new that is not DLC
* Better battle maps
* Modern UXUI (seriously MuHa, you chunk out beautiful but unwieldy stuff)
* Game mechanic improvements like upgrading units (which Fallen Enchantress rocked)
* Letting us enjoy all aspects of the game

Overall
-----------
Right now I'd give the game a C- grade. If they fully bake this game and expand it I think it could get an A. But for now disappointment is the main feeling.

For fans of the game, they (like me) will likely have mixed feelings. A 30 year wait for this? Bummer... I will say the game is mediocre at time of release and thus maybe appealing to old timers such as myself. Fans of 4x or fantasy have better options (Fallen Enchantress with mods is something else, heck even Age of Wonders 3 is better).

Given a thumbs up or thumbs down rating system on Steam, I cannot recommend this game to people in general.. It is not good enough. For fans of the original, I'd say it is worth picking up with the caveat being that $$$ will lead to improvements, DLC and an actually robust modern game. If I could leave a neutral review that is what I would do.

If Slitherine/MuHa is checking I'd be happy to lend my time for a user panel/interview. I want this to be successful. If they make improvements I will change my review accordingly. That is how you make great games and products. It is also hard and time consuming, but you'll get a lot out of it.

Ok so first of all let's get the 'hurr durr I'm a veteran' crap out of the way. Yea, MoM veteran, been playing it since the 90s. No one really cares.

Do I like this remake? Yes. I mean, I bought it (even if I thought $40 was too much for this game), started it, played it for 5h in one go.

It does feel like MoM to me, so I'm happy.
Are there things I don't like? Sure:
1. The thing where things are computed before the animation is complete (moving on the map, attacking in battles) is weird and I would make it so that things only happen when my unit gets to the dungeon on the map, or so that damage is only dealt when my shaman's bolts reach the target unit, not before. Just doesn't feel right at all.
2. I'm not a big fan of the hexagonal tiles but whatever.
3. Some spells feel nerfed a bit but it's ok (I'll say why below)
4. I'd like the nice image of the city where you can see the buildings and houses and stuff be the displayed by default when you look at a city, like in original MoM - I liked that a lot.
5. In-battle maps feel way too big..
6. It would be really nice if units had some auras or whatever if they have enchantments / debuffs cast on them.

All in all it's a good game and I'm gonna keep playing it.

For the ones that are oh no this is bad blablabla. Guys. You can change the crap out of this game. No joke. I spent like 5 minutes in the ExternalAssets directory and figured you can change quite a lot of stuff in the game by tinkering with the .xml files in there. You can do messed up crap like making Raise Volcano cost 1 mana and give way more power, and be a Common spell so you can choose it as one of the starting spells. Same with Great Drake. Same with any spell lol. Of course these are cheats but you can really make it like you want so in my book it's quite a moddable game. (Slytherin, hope you won't remove this in a patch, god dammit)

Is this game worth $40? Maybe not. Am I sorry for paying $40? Nope.

Give it a few days to get used to and - IT IS AWESOME!!!

It took me awhile to get past the last 5 or 6 years of playing mods and Caster of Magic and remember the old days, where you needed to click "end turn" 5 or 10 times between things happening. With this new interface it took a little time to figure out where all the buttons are (check your city list every few turns to make sure you aren't building housing) and to go ahead and relax and click "end turn" - don't worry you won't lose the game if you click it 5 times in a row without making "progress" - this is an EPIC scale game,,, and just when you think you have won and are "dealing" with the wizards on your plane - the Myrran wizard will break through a tower and be far, far ahead of you. Don't stress if the other wizards' have more towns and research and army strength. The AI is still not very good and the only way for the game to keep up with a human is to "out-resource" you. Fight your battles well and you will claw your way up.

I love this game again!!

Now - having said all of this - SERAVY - I will pay you $15 (and I imagine a LOT Of OTHER PEOPLE would too) to MOD the AI... The Caster of Magic AI is far superior.

Buy this and support the developers. Buy this because you have loved MoM for 28 years.
Buy this because someone will MOD it with the best of all the improvements over the years.

All the negative reviews I saw were from oldhats who played the original and complained about differences. I assumed that they were just fanboys who were mad at this game for being new, so I bought it anyway and gave it a shot. Turns out they were right and I should have listened.

The game is awkwardly built and clunky. Just moving units around feels tedious and slow, and getting anything done takes forever. Some of the mechanics are interesting... but I've seen everything here from other 4X games. I can't tell if that's because this game is a progenitor of the genre, from whence all these good ideas came, or if it's just piggy-backing on newer titles; I never played the original.

The gameplay feels like something from the nineties, but I don't consider that a good thing. The world feels bland and barren, exploration isn't rewarding, and it started to feel stale and repetitive only a couple of hours into my first match.

What's good here, I can get from other titles and the only things that stand out to distinguish it as its own thing are its flaws. Not even remotely worth the money they are asking. This is an obvious cashgrab aimed at players who either loved the old games or want to see what they missed by not playing them. You should pass on it.

The game is a modernized version of MoM 1.31. It has nothing to do with Caster of Magic or other mods. So you get the mechanics from 1995 with better graphics and some QoL and balance changes. If someone is looking for a game of the 2020ies, he will not find it.

The standard units, fantastic creatures and heroes are the same they used to be. Same goes for the spells, although there were minor changes. Cracks Call costing 25 mana instead of 20 is something you normally don't even notice. Cities work the same as they used to, with the same buildings I remember.
There are some changes, though. There is now an AI feature (the damiliar) which can administrate your cities and do auto-combat for you. Of course, auto-combat is in any and all games like tossing a coin. It is often right, but when you can bring special combos to play, it does not take them into account and thinks you will die (and advise you to that effect).
There are some new events, too, which can be activated (or not) in the game options when starting a game. There are also more options to set up the game.
You get now a swordsman when founding a new outpost, and one free magic spirit a few turns into the game. Winning a battle does not move your army anymore. Cities have gotten a building queue. You can play with high resolution now, and on the latest windows version (I am on Win11, works fine for me). It is stable, as I had not one crash in like 25 hours. I found no glaring bugs, but an annoying one....the animated "report a bug" button is still in till the patch next week ;)

It feels like the old game, despite the small changes, and that was the goal of the remastered version. If you are looking for that, this is for you. If you want something else, like a new AoW, or a modern 4X, you are in the wrong place. I can recommend the game to those of us, who enjoyed MoM in 1995.

After spending a couple hours with the game now, I feel I am ready to give my opinions. I am a Master of Magic veteran. And I feel, the MuHa team has made a great effort, to bring this game into the modern era. Let's start with the important points:

1) Quality: The graphics are very nice (I would have liked a more heavy metal color palette, but oh well). I feel, the graphics want to look like a polished HoMM4. The gameplay is EXACTLY like the game from 1994. But the game was miles ahead of it's time, so that's still quite ok by modern standards.

2) Price: ATM it costs 40 Euros, which is not cheap. If it was 20, I would scream "Buy it now!". But looking how AAA titles have decided, they charge 70-100 Euros these days, I have to admit, MuHa / Slitherine charge half of a triple A title here. And I feel, being old enough to have played the original, I have the money to support a small studio like MuHa Games, and that I should do that.

3) Faithfulness: The devs have decided, to be extremely faithful, with one exception - they put it on a hex grid. I feel, I liked the checkers grid style a tiny bit better, because of the way, the cities meshed. But the hex grid just works fine - it's really not a big problem. I would have liked more changes. But I also understand, this is the safer approach.

Lastly, what would I like to see change in the future? Most importantly multiplayer. Especially HOTSEAT, because it should be extremely easy to incorporate and I do not understand, why so many titles ignore this option, which was THE key to the success of Heroes of Might and Magic!?
Also I suspect, that the AI is as dumb as it was 1994 (faithful port...). So I hope, there will be options for different AI behavior - maybe even neural networking. That has become very accessible in the last two years.
Finally some support for modding would be very appreciated, considering how successful the MoM community worked on Caster of Magic. This could also be a way to improve the AI.

Should you buy it? I feel, if you like 4x and the feel of older games, like MoM, Heroes of Might and Magic and the like; and if you can spare the 40 Euros; you should by it, to support MuHa games.
If you are very tight on money, or if you are unsure, if this is to your liking, wait for a discount (sad face).

A decent and faithful remake. One of my main complaints, is that it lacks Caster of Magic integration. A couple of bugs are still there and very little has been done in terms of QoL features. I would recommend trying the original, if you don't mind the graphics.

This game is very different from the original Master of Magic, despite having the same content. It's very slow to load. Game turns are very slow. The music is not as good as the original. The graphics are higher resolution than the original and look good. BUT - I much prefer the art style of the original, it just looks better. Other things I hate - a big turn number coming up in the middle of the screen, which slows down the turns - why not just have a inconspicuous turn number in a corner? The UI needs to be done so that turns are rapid fire like the original. I don't like hexagons and I don't like the way the main screen is displayed. The original programmer was a Master of programming to come up with the original master of magic and worked extremely hard on it, this game feels half-hearted - you need someone of the same caliber to achieve the same thing in 2022. I'm hoping this game can be salvaged. But it won't be unless reviews like this are taken to heart and not just ignored.

I must first note that I am a long time fan of the original MOM (1994). The new version of MOM has been a lot of fun for me so far. The developers did a good job of producing an new version close to, but not exactly the same as, MOM 1994. I have seen no bugs - there have been no crashes. I find the game to be fun and easy to play.

I know that some people do not like it. As far as I can tell their objections fall into several categories: 1. It is too much like the 1994 MOM and should have had more changes. 2. It is not enough like the old MOM - too much was changed. 3. The game is not enough like modern 4x games like Age of Wonders III. I cannot see how the developers could have made everyone happy. However, they made me very happy I am looking forward to future developments both free and paid DLCs.

I really wasn't sure about this game. The price point was not what I was expecting.

I was a HUGE fan of Age of Wonders 3, so I worried that the game would have to be better - a high goal indeed - otherwise, why not just play that? But I pulled the trigger and I am glad I did.

I don't think the graphics are up to AOW3 splendor, but they have a charm all of their own. Whoever did the effects for Phantasmal Warrior - please - take a bow. Fantastic!
The colour pallet for the Myrran plane is a little muddy for my tastes, but I am not an artist. What do I know?

See - the part I really loved in AOW3 is kitting out my heroes to be demigods - and this game has plenty of that, but in a different way. AOW3 had cool skill trees and stuff, and this game doesn't. However - AOW3 had a lot of guardrails to prevent crazy synergies. Most magic that augmented units only did so in combat. This game ... pffft - go to town. You want to make flying golems reistant to magic and have giant strength? Go to town. Want to give a Hero a sword that makes them resistant to elemental damage and petrifies enemies? If you got the mana - be my guest. So, that is a lot of fun. Because you can do so much with magic (Like the movie Glengary Glen Ross - ABC ... ALWAYS BE CASTING) there is always something interesting to do.

The game starts out SLOW though. You will be INCREDIBLY weak, so it will take some time before you are ready to shake things up.
The music is charming
For a game on release - this is one of the most stable releases I have played. No crashes after 17 hours of play. There was a funny visual glitch where my fear spell was manifesting on slain enemies, but that was just a visual effect. Other than that - I haven't noticed anything. Of course like all PC games, YMMV.
Also - the AI is no slouch. I played twice on easy and got curb stomped twice. Switched to the Myrran plane and it is a lot quieter.
Was worried about the Micromanagement. So far, have about 20 cities and it really isn't too bad. No worse than AOW3.
I think the developers should be proud of this release.
I am really hoping for some DLC and awesome mod tools.

I have played the first MoM only a year ago and instantly fell in love, despite its 30 years of age (but to be fair, it was probably ahead of its time). People all over the internet have complained that no other game could ever fully recapture the spirit of this classic. From what I can tell after a few hours, the new MoM comes closest and you should give it a try if you liked the original.

Magic feels much more powerful than in Heroes of Might and Magic and Age of Wonders 3, the game feels more mature than Fallen Enchantress, and it's definitely less of a time investment than Civilization, Endless Legend or Dominions 5. Plus, modding looks very easy, as I saw that many rules and assets can easily be accessed and changed, so I have hope that we'll see new content by either the developers or the modding community soon.

Is it the perfect game? No, MuHa could have put in some more quality of life improvements and I would have also enjoyed some additional rules that enable more than four AI magicians, more diplomacy, just more new content. Graphics and music could have been more inspiring, the original pixel art had more charm to me. I can't judge the AI yet, we'll see if it's smarter than in the old game. But most importantly, I'm having fun with the game, and if you like any of the titles that I mentioned above then maybe you'll have fun, too.

Returning the game as it didn't measure up....

For a highly anticipated game they didn't put much work in making it modern. I was reminded of the art looking more Civ like. The vanilla atmosphere of the game really didn't do much and I found myself getting bored playing it. There are several content creators who have done some in depth reviews of the game that I would encourage you to check out. I so so so wish they had put more time developing this game! Big disappointment for me.

This is more of a neutral review than a positive one. I feel the urge to be positive though, as the game is true to its legendary original.

Yes, the game is clumsy. Yes, the diplomacy needs to be upgraded, but I do believe that the developers can patch these topics. Other than that, the MoM world is still magical place where levelling up your heroes and magical skills is extremely rewarding

Always liked the game. A few interface tweaks and some (rare) improvements here. The game remains solid and my favorite 4X.

If you like 4X games and do not own the 1995 original (or Caster of Magic), this game is a gem awaiting for you.

I played the original way back when it was released and this is a pretty good remake. The only problems I have with it are the lack of multiplayer (seriously?) and sometimes the units feel a bit floaty when moving them around in both the strategic and tactical maps.

8/10

I am having a lot of fun and I don't understand most of the negative reviews.
Surprisingly stable; I've had one crash so far. For a small independent title on initial release seems great.
Faithful enough to the original yet it looks great and has improved on some of the real jarring weaknesses of the original.

It runs really well on my PC, although saves do take awhile to load (around 1-2 minutes).
It could use some QoL improvements like auto explore, better control of armies.
The UI is decent but needs to be smaller, cleaner, and streamlined.
I would like to see some improvements to game start: saving custom wizards, selecting wizard opponents (including custom), saving map seed and reusing (better control over the map in general).
How about a manual, tutorial, or something on how the editor works; I'm baffled. Mods could take the potential of this game and make it blossom.

After all that is done I have my fingers crossed for more content which requires the developer to feel there is financial benefit in doing so....So buy it!

The only question that matters for this game:
Q: "Do I prefer the remaster (this game) or would I rather start the original game again?"
A: I prefer the remaster!!!

- The remaster is extremely faithful to the original
- After playing 30 hours, I can tell it is Master of Magic (the one more turn disease is back!).
- The remaster fixes bugs present in the original
- The only significant change is using hex instead of squared maps and this is definitely an uncontestable improvement.
- The remaster is obviously prettier than the original (and doesn't require dosbox)

There are still areas where you could wish it would be better (really minor things, a few screens here and there could be prettier, some QoL). I guess the biggest feature that we could have wanted is multiplayer (but at the same time, everyone knows that Master of Magic is not a balanced game).

For the newcomers: This game is famous because its base mechanics are fairly simple, but there's a ton of units/spells to discover. The game also is just on the perfect balance between exploration, length of combat, economics without being too heavy. It did age well.

So Muha games delivered on the promise and this is no small feat (many have tried before to copy the formula)! Thrilled to see where they will lead this fantastic game next!

While I am old school gamer, I missed this back in the day but played other games like MOO, AoW1. I always wanted to play and have the OG version on GOG which I dabbled with. In more recent years I played Dom 3-4 extensively, then enjoyed more casual SP games like Fallen Enchantress and Diety Empires, both of which I highly recommend.

I think the new MOM is going to be a great game. I am just scratching the surface so far. It's a little hard to get into since it starts so slow and you are so weak. I moved the settings down to beginner and now really enjoying it. A true test of a game is the amount of hours the reviewers put in, especially post the review. I expect mine will get up there soon. It looks simple at first, but there are so many nuances I can see it providing many hours of enjoyment uncovering the combos. Relative to AOW3, I like the variety of races and units and spells. AOW3 has great tactical combat but it moves slow and has some annoying aspects like units aren't weakened. It doesn't move as fast as Diety Empires or Fallen Enchantress - but has more variety of spells and magic seems more powerful - both great additions.

I'll stop there and say I recommend taking the plunge.

I played the original MoM for the first time a few years ago. Without nostalgia affecting my judgement, I could see why the game was considered a classic, and was surprised at how well it held up after nearly 30 years. The interface needed some work, the fact that populations and hammers didn't overflow was annoying, but the base mechanics and flavor were totally solid. The biggest issue was the lack of multiplayer, combined with the often inept AI you would see from your wizard opponents it made it hard to utilize the magic system to its full extent.

While the new version is definitely fun, I hope they continue to develop it. So far we have a more or less direct translation of the original game with an improved interface and better graphics and art assets. The AI seems to be fairly strong in the early game and gets worse as it goes on, in my limited experience I've seen gold/mana hording and not much change in army composition by the mid-game. The strength of ranged units seems to be downplayed for combat resolution. We still do not have multiplayer, unfortunately, but I can understand why the devs would want to limit the initial scope to single player and build from there. Overall its a good foundation.

MoM's gameplay loop is fairly straightforward compared to modern 4X games. There is no mechanic that tries to limit the amount of cities you can control, just opportunity costs and different dimensions of expansion. Generally you'll be deciding for each city whether you want to build military units, build settlers, or develop the city further. The number of neutral towns often makes military expansion a viable alternative to creating new cities. The size of your military is constrained by the size of your economy, you will need gold and food to keep units in the field. Food requirements will force you to turn more of your population into farmers, taking away from production, and money might force you to raise taxes, creating unrest in your cities which wastes population potential. At the same time, you will need your military to grow to protect new towns and lower the unrest therein. On top of this, there is a magical economy to manage - magic power is split into research, mana generation, and skill (how much mana you can use in a turn, or a battle). Summoned units will be a regular part of your army, requiring a mana upkeep instead of food and gold like your built units.

All this is to say, that MoM succeeds at creating a wide range of strategies and play styles from a relatively small set of rules. Much of the game is balancing how much power do you need in the moment vs how much do you want to invest for greater returns later. It's an elegant system that has stood the test of time.

God how I love, Love, LOVE this game! Everything the original was, just so much more beautiful and modern looking. Some nice QOL changes, and with a ton of the bugs fixed and better AI.

A lot of the negative reviews are from people who wanted a different game (Caster of Magic, the fan driven, quite changed derivative of MoM). Mods are well supported for this new version of MoM, so I'm sure there will be a ton of ways to customize your game moving forward.
I do NOT understand the people saying it's too expensive, $40 is very reasonable for what I know (not think, KNOW as it's the same game) will be hundreds of hours of deep enjoyment. I needed this. So happy.

This is the original. I knew how to play from the moment I started it up.
If you liked the original game and were afraid a remake would brokenly "Re-imagine" the fantasy 4X GOAT game, you are in luck!
This is EXACTLY what I have longed to have available for multiple decades: a faithful recreation of the original.
The DEEP replayability and all the spells and units are almost exactly the same.
The mechanics are almost identical.
The strategies and tricks that worked in the original work almost exactly the same.
Things that were OP, remain OP.
Elite Adamantium (or to a lesser extent Mithril) Slingers are as fearsome and Paladins as brokenly good as of old (mods will let you tweak if desired).
Torin the Chosen is still a fledgling demigod among lesser beings, who grows more and more so at a fearsome pace.
If you want an easy game to get back up to speed: Play Ariel with Halflings, find a Mithril deposit (or focus on getting a Halfling settler unit to Mirror for the ultimate base Slinger unit. I love the eff around and find out portrait of the halfling slinger unit.
The art team did a great job of updating everything, but keeping it recognizably based on the original.

Ok, you can't paqe ahead in the spell book on turn one and use your handwritten decoding key to see if you are going to get a key spell or spells that you feel you NEED to play a particular strategy. And I'm definitely going to find a mod to put an updated version of the original overland music back in for sheer nostalgia.

But I've been playing this almost every evening until my dog pointedly reminds me it's time to go to bed.
The BEST Christmas EVER!
Especially as my eldest adult child bought me a gorgeous Samsung 49" G9 monitor that this game (and Stellaris!) looks fantastic on. :-)

Any future DLC add on options will have a home in my library as soon as they become available. I love the fact that they made it extensible with dialog options for dungeons etc.

Thank you MuHa, you rock!
And a very Merry Christmas to all!

First off: I'm biased. Master of Magic is probably my favorite game. I've installed it on every computer I've ever owned and I play it a few times a year.

Master of Magic (2022) is a faithful reproduction of the 1994 game, but with a handful of QoL improvements. It's basically the original game, except you can set your towns to autobuild and can skip easy combat with autobattle.

That said, as of the first week of launch, it's also buggy as hell. For example:
* Engineers have to build roads one square at a time.
* The quickbutton for road construction doesn't work if any other unit is in the same square as your engineers.
* Troops inexplicably avoid going through cities, even when there's plenty of room for them, and you have to micromanage their pathing if you don't want them to take forever to get somewhere.
* Units will stop moving and guard if they stop in a city that has other units that are guarding.

And that's just a taste! I reported four or five bugs the first morning I played it. Nothing literally stopped me from playing, but I did run into strange graphical and behavioral issues that slowed me down. Thankfully, a helpful/annoying "Hit F8 to report bugs!" button constantly pops into the upper-right corner of the screen, so I did that. A lot.

Otherwise, here are some things that bug me, a weirdo who has played MoM for 30 years:
* When you kill a wizard, you just get a pop-up window that says "So-and-so has been banished!" Boring. In the original, you got to see your wizard blast them in the face.
* In the original, you got to watch your wizard summon monsters out of your summoning circle, too. Now they just show up (and start guarding immediately, so you forget you summoned them and can't remember where they are.)
* Nodes used to have big sparkly effects that showed you how strong they were and who owned them. The new ones are so subtle I could barely tell when someone stole my nodes. Do I have to look at the teeny little flag?
* Some of the icons are really boring. I literally did not know I had found an Arcanus/Myrror tower for half the game. It looked like another ruin.
* I miss the old music. The songs were cheesy, sure, but couldn't they have remixed them? (Yes, I know the song that plays on the menu screen includes some of the overworld motifs. Still.)
* Did they have to make Phantom Beasts look so dorky?

But, on the other hand: Myrror/Life Magic/Dwarves with Torin is still an unstoppable murder machine, so I'm still happy. But please fix roadbuilding and unit pathing. I can't play this game without my enchanted roads.

This appears to be a well-intentioned remake of the original 1999? Microprose game that I played for multiple decades. I got to know the originally intimately. In fact, it's still installed on this PC. I never played or looked into the "Caster of Magic" expansion/mod, and it has been a few years since I started up another MoM game to play; instead, I waited for this one. Wow, it took long enough.
Overall, I would give this remake a solid B+. I write this review roughly 40 hours in on the game as released.
Some good and bad, from my perspective after winning my first game. Also, this review is not comprehensive; I am throwing it together just before sleep and work tomorrow and I'm sure I will remember other good/bad stuff when I start it up again.
Further, I have not even looked at the manual yet; I suspect I will and some of the below may be explained. I just played an initial game, cast Spell of Mastery to win it with maximum obtainable population during play, clearing every possible node and enemy (sans one enemy city) before conclusion.

GOOD:
Authentic unit and races remake. The races and advantages are well paralleled with the original well-balanced units and races. I have yet to maximize boosting units with adamantium or silver weapons (via the alchemistry tower) as none were available during my game. This game really puts most others to shame with the amazing balance of the units and conflicting wizards across so many varied races. Leveling seems to work well, also. Happy to see these features were not neglected.
Random world and city events having multiple options/choices are an interesting modification. It did not stretch too far beyond the clearly random events of the original that you had to eat without options unless you reloaded. Multiple encounter caves/dungeons/nodes were also kind of cool. This is a nice touch.
Game play is smooth, sans the GUI issues. The GUI should have been revised to be more efficient and intuitive. Maybe (hopefully) in the future.
Nodes have power? ratings and (presumed) corresponding challenge ratings. In the original game, the nodes lit up some squares around the node (presumably to reflect power of the node). I do not recall whether nodes in the original definitively had different power/mana ratings. This new game uses numbers (presumably) to reflect mode power. The monsters do not always appear proportional to the power of the node.
Myrran (enchanted) roads have calculatable movement amounts. Wow, this is about time. The original allowed you to move units insane distances on enchanted roads on Myrran well beyond what would be considered reasonable.

BAD:
Cursor hovering on the overland map does not function adequately. Some area of the display should be dedicated to reporting what the cursor is hovering over (including a nameplate on the currently highlighted unit(s). There is a button that helps for hexes (mainly for finding settler destinations), but the information it provides does not appear fully fleshed out and an opportunity was surely lost providing maximum information on what is hovered over (e.g., bonuses, units, empty/protected nodes, etc.). When using a button like this, you should get all information about that hex in a straight-forward way. Clumsy.
Nodes unexplored, conquered, unbound, difficult to navigate, decipher, and track overall. At least the merged nodes use physical flags bundled to the node itself that are visible on the map.
"Move Unit" button doesn't really do what one would expect. Even while resting on a unit with orders, pressing this button simply shoves the cursor to the next unit able to move (similar to space bar). Units with orders are not automatically moved when pushing this button. Also, units with orders will not traverse through a city even if there is room for them. Thus, issuing orders to move a long way are forced to happen manually unless you are willing to spend the extra 4-5 turns while the unit stacks traverse around each city on the road from A to B.
Battle Map: no good zoom view port and zoom disappears/resets as the screen jerks from enemy unit to enemy unit as they go. Many times, targets of enemy ranged attacks are not visible when being shot. Also, many enemies you want to shoot are not visible on the screen until you pan. At least make a screen/zoom that shows the entire battlefield so I don't have to constantly pan or drag the screen around while battling.
Wizard total mana shown in battle spell book instead of actual casting power. I would rather know I have 65 mana this battle than know I have 1200 mana in my store.
Bugs, like screens and windows showing even after you have switched tabs so as not to see them. So many bugs, I figure, they included a moving "Press F8 to report bugs" banner that enters and exits continuously throughout the entire experience.
No breakdown that I could find regarding how a final score was determined. No breakdown, no discussion of what the score means, or what contributes to it. There was no indication, for example, how many population you have as the game ends, nor the time (and any associated points associated therewith), spells researched, or even points for the Spell of Mastery (all of which were critical in scoring in the original). Finally, unlike the original that showed ALL the wizards that were part of the game, this game only shows the alive (and now banished) wizards when casting Spell of Mastery.
No Steam achievements?? Really?? I expected some "Win with 5000 points" or "Win playing Trolls" or "Win playing Ariel" or "Win starting with only Chaos Spell books," or all of these along with a couple dozen more achievements to make collection a serious challenge over many games and playthroughs. God knows I tried achieving many of these on the original on my own.
Spell of Mastery appears to be a flat 50 rounds with a warning that "all the enemy wizards are coming for you now," Really? The 50 rounds appears to be regardless of your casting power. Uhm, huh? I have to stand around and wait a full 50 rounds while the floundering last remaining cities or wizard struggles, when my casting power is off the charts and there is nothing left to research?? Get real. Casting power is important.

------------

Look, overall I am very happy this game was finally produced, and this studio's heart is in the right place. I am surprised that there was not more play testing and feedback from people who knew this game better than some family members. I even applied to play test (expecting no compensation), but was never contacted about it. It's too bad more input was not gathered, but I suppose that release and initial sales motivated release in this form.

This game may not expand much beyond the original fan base or those intrinsically drawn to 4X games. I'm ok with that also, but I hope it improves over time to proved a better, longer lasting quality play time experience. Like the flawless original Master of Magic.

Ok, I'm off to bed. Go enjoy a game. Or five.

Having played thousands of hours the original, I find this remake so far to be nearly as satisfying. There are even a few improvements baked in, which were totally pleasant surprise.

The game interface is usable, but could be tweaked a little for better experience. For me the background music was a bit annoying at first, but tuning it down helped. Also the unit movement sounds are queued up, so when you move a unit along long road in Myrran.. well, you'll be listening the galloping for quite some time.

Overall, I welcome this as a good or even excellent remake of the original game and will surely continue to be huge fan of Master of Magic.

It's a slow burn at the start, but like the old Master of Magic there are so many fun ways to combine troops and spells :) It's a great remake of a classic and for me the change to hexes is fine. It would be nice though, if engineers could be automated.

I loved the original MOM, it was THE game for me that combined my love for fantasy and role playing games with civilization style grand strategy.

Here is the thing.. I would not play Civ1 or 2 again, no matter how much I loved those games. They were great games for their time, but we have much better, more modern alternatives for them today, some of it in the same brand/franchise even. (looking at you, Civ4)

Same goes for this Master of Magic. Much like the new Master of Orion game, this game cashes in on our feelings of nostalgia and longing for memories of older, simpler days. It does not bring anything to the table really, that you would not get from any of the otherwise decent successors, like Age of Wonders.

For someone who has not played the original MOM, the game is really just a dumbed down version of Age of Wonders at this point. MoM was great in its time, however that game is simply not good enough in 2022, especially not at this price tag.

The game has a horrible UI. I was fighting with the UI for most of my attempt with the game. Lack of tooltips on what different things do, obscurely hidden tile information, lack of proper contextual info. These are all things that you cannot afford in a 2022 title.

This game will appeal to anyone, who would want to play the original Master of Magic, but then you have emulators and ways of playing that game for a fraction of the price in its original form, which in many aspects I feel is much cleaner and polished, even if its low resolution can make your eyes bleed :)

Summary: pick this up at a huge discount, if you want to experience some of what the 4x genre was like in the early 2000s. Otherwise, just pick up Age of Wonders and you will have a superior game at your hand with game mechanics and UI elements out of this century.

So, this is basically a direct remake of the original. The game starts fairly slowly and progresses slowly, but is pretty fun. The main problems right now are that the AI is HORRIBLE. The AI does not build any roads, nor does it use any overland enchantments, city enchantments, and not many spells. This is terribly disappointing for a game centered around spells and magic. The AI is not good at attacking, especially considering all of the ocean there tends to be. The AI makes the game extremely boring and makes you steamroll it at some point, it can't really do anything, and there is no multiplayer. Pretty much all games you play, you will win by casting the spell of mastery. There are many bugged spells, and again, the AI hardly uses any spells what so ever. The game itself becomes CORRUPT periodically forcing you to reload. There are a lot of balance issues between races and types of magic. The diplomacy is basically non existent. Heroes are extremely weak and the auto combat will almost always get them killed.

I recommend this game only in hopes of fixes or expansions, either through the devs or community. Right now, while sort of steam-roll fun, it will not keep you entertained for long because of the serious lack of AI.

If you are hoping to buy this game for nostalgia, you should know that the original games AI was way better, it's sad.

I waited over 25 years for this to happen, a modernization of the cult classic Master of Magic!
And I cannot praise MuHa games enough for this: despite updating the game visually, they stayed true to the original, and playing it feels just right and the same addictiveness and atmosphere kicks in that made the original so good.
They updated the graphics, switched to Hextiles and poured in some of their MuHa magic that made their Thea games so wonderful.
I am on my third playthrough now, and for a game that has just been released it really only has a few non-gamebreaking bugs (like reloading midgame sometimes taking a while), which is a marvel in times where even AAA studios release unfinished games riddled with gamebreaking bugs.

If you were a fan of the original 1995 Master of Magic, this is an instant buy!
Everyone else who doesn’t know the original, but loves games like Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic or Fallen Enchantress, get this game too!

I‘ll go back to the game now and try to conquer the enemy wizards with my Draconian army and the red magic of Chaos \m/

Thumbs up and a heartfelt Thank You to MuHa games for the good work on this one!

For me, Slitherine seem to be very inconsistent with the quality of their games. Unfortunately, this belongs to poor category in my opinion. Play management on both strategic and tactical level is very cumbersome, there are simply too many options for charcters, races, spells, troops, etc. City management is also very poor.

The best game ever updated to continue to be the best game ever. Love most of the few changes and don't mind the rest at all. Most of the old strategies and tactics still work and the ones that don't were probably based on bugs. Not sure why anyone would say it was changed too much, but to each their own. It's a game the rewards longer play, so if you want something for a quick game it might not be for you. Though there are some fast play strategies, you probably need to read a guide or play a lot to figure them out. It's awesome and I recommend it.

So far so good. This remake seems faithful to the original, which I appreciate greatly.

A noticeable downside is the increased real-world time that it takes to execute turns, mostly due to unit movement animations. The devs should do a timed side-by-side of the original and the remake. Execute the exact same actions on the first 30 turns as quickly as possible, and you will see that the remake takes WAY more raw time to accomplish the same things. Master of Magic campaigns take a LOT of turns, so this added time sink is a major issue.

If the devs add in a super-fast-animation or skip-animation option for player units, and this will make the experience MUCH better.

I didn't play the original MoM or its CoM expansion (the UI/interface was a little too clunky for me), but read extensively about the game and played several of it's alleged successors (AoW, Fallen Enchantress). When I heard the game was getting the remake treatment, I followed development closely and very much looked forward to the release.

Is the end product perfect? No, but it definitely scratches the type of 4x itch I had and filled in the gaps in many places where I felt gameplay was a little too lacking or overly simplified. No other 4x game I've played, aside from this one, has replicated the "wizard" element I'd been looking for. The 200 spells available in the game (all from the original, and from which I understand nearly all have been replicated perfectly) are unique/fun and allow for many different playstyles, not to mention the races. On the latter point, I've only selected "high men as a starting race for my current playthroughs, though I was able to conquer/recruit a lot of other races into my empire. In sum:

PROS
+ A lot of variety in ways to play through the game with different races, spell schools, etc.
+you really feel like a wizard playing the game
+UI is very easy to read/navigate (if a bit bland)
+ creature models are varied and interesting
+the gameplay, even on beginner, is pleasantly challenging
+once you gain the ability to unlock/access the second plane, you can use a lot of creative tactics/strategy

CONS
--while the graphics/sound aren't bad, it's very clear that it was done on a budget. While the wizards you play as have high-quality portraits, all of it's static. The only time you see any significant animations is on the battlefield really. Also, while the creature designs are fairly well done, the spell visual effects and sounds are a little dull.
-the diplomacy system is very simple/boring. Any mechanics (if they exist) are very opaque. There's no clear way to improve your reputation/disposition with other wizards (only once ever did I ever get one to agree to a treaty, and only after I declared war on her enemy).
-maybe it was the difficulty I was playing on, but none of the other wizards on the arcanus plane ever seemed to want to explore myrror
--again, maybe difficulty, but none of the other wizards seemed interested in securing nodes, or in stealing the nodes I had taken
--the game could use some more dynamic/interesting events to keep part of the game from getting stale/allowing the player to become complacent. I.e., a "crisis" system
--the battlefield maps are too simple/few. Would be nice to have unique ones for battles that take place in dungeons, temples, nodes, etc.

This is an excellent update to the original game produced in 1993. The art is wonderful. The game play is just as good as the original with some very thoughtful and faithful adjustments.

If you like Civ style games and the fantasy genre this game is for you. It is unique, outrageous, and deeply complex. If you enjoy 4x games I highly recommended that you give this a try.

Brushing the dust off the road, Mystic X looked about him and surveyed the destruction. Behind the wrecked Granary of Brembury, the population seemed quiet after another of Ariel's losses, perhaps accepting the inevitability of their conquest. As he looked over the other side of the Wandering Island, he thought of the fight ahead.

When the planes were open again, it would fall to him to attack Myrror. Jafar ruled the plane with his legions of Doom Drakes, Warlocks, and Nightblades. However, it would be no easy fight. Rakir, Baghtru, and Deth Stryke had all fallen to the Djinn of Jafar, and it was uncertain whether Master Horus had the power to challenge them. Even if he did, there were certain to be many painful nights, as even with the Chainmail of Invulnerability the Djinn could still work past his defenses. Would the artefacts and new champions that Master Horus had promised be enough? Only time would tell...

If you've been waiting for Master of Magic for as long as I have, then I am here to tell you, this is as good as it will get in terms of a remake. From the power of nodes to the magical overland spells of destruction, Master Of Magic 2022 has it all, albeit with some rough edges.

Planar Conquest and Fallen Enchantress have tried and failed to recapture the spirit of Master of Magic, the former because of bugs and the latter because the game is just flat out different. I agree that there are changes in there that some will not like. The game doesn't do a good job of alerting you that cities are done with their production queues unless you look carefully at the right side of the screen (unlike the scroll in the original MoM). The city screen looks different and it's not obvious that you can manage your population by assigning workers and farmers - creating custom controls that looked like the original would have been far better. There are also some annoyances introduced which were not in the original game.

First off, there's the fact that you can only cast a spell after all of your cities have been given their orders and all of your units have moved, even if the spell took zero turns to cast. This means if you want to cast Flight on a unit and send them into battle, you have to wait at least a turn as the spell gets added to some kind of turn event queue. The same goes for research - even if you have one turn to research, you don't get the spell until the very end of your turn. Then there's the road building and movement.

The computer gets very confused at moving units through cities and other units. In the old game, an engineer would have a "path" that it would build and adhere to, and it would walk through a city without any help. In this case, there is no way to create a path for a road. You have to move the engineer, build a road, move it another tile, repeat. Moving units is even worse. If a unit needs to move through a city, even if there's room in the city for the unit, it won't march through the city, it'll try to march around it, and give up if there's another friendly unit "in the way". This means roads have to be built all around the city as the computer tries to take a "detour" which can take several turns. There's not a lot of contextual information, either.

What enchantments does that gate to Myrror have on it that's blocking my way? Don't know. How much is that tile next to the ocean bringing me in terms of production and gold? Don't know. Where's my spell in combat? Don't know, the list isn't alphabetized or categorized. The list goes on. To be fair, though, there is just so much information to convey that you can't fault MuHa for forgetting a couple of little things here and there. There are some good changes, too.

They use a hex grid instead of a square grid that makes some of the movement easier to understand and avoids the "half points" of movement and actions that you had previously. Each outpost gets a free swordsman rather than having to send your pioneers with extra defenders. They give you a Magic Spirit to start out with so you can explore. These little things make the game play better, even if it does have some of the rough edges as noted above.

The music is ok, but it's lacking the original soundtrack of Master of Magic. With so many passionate modders out there, though, hopefully someone will remix the music to modern standards and release it to add to the game. The sound really sucks. Lightning bolts used to sound like lightning bolts, not they're just... meh. The graphics however are pretty good.

They obviously spent a lot of time on the 2D and 3D art for the game, and although it isn't the best by any means, it's definitely an improvement over the 2D sprites in the original game, and between that and fixing bugs like Cloak of Fear doing nothing, probably worth it in and of itself to buy. The AI isn't too bad either. It'll prioritize ranged units over ground pounders, though it often ignores the heroes and champions. If you aren't careful, though, you can easily get stomped. The diplomacy in the game straight up doesn't work. Make an enemy and they'll be an enemy forever, and they will try to destroy you. I didn't have problems with the computer players not fighting each other as others have, though they don't put any information on the Dipomacy screen to say who is at war with who, so it's hard to tell until you get notification that a wizard has been banished that there was even a war going on.

The bottom line is this - if you liked the original Master of Magic, and you can be tolerant of a few rough edges, then you'll like this game. It's not a modern, AAA, whiz-bang title built by a huge developer, but it's the tried and true, battle-tested formula that captures that "just one more turn" magic that the original game always had. Is it worth $40? Well.... unless you've been waiting for this for as long as I have, probably not.