Well, now that the release date for Etherlords II draws closer, and Tycho likes it, I thought I'd review the first game, Etherlords I. Basically, Etherlords is sort of like "Heroes of Might and Magic: The Gathering", made by Nival Interactive -- a Russian game company that doesn't know the meaning of the word "Copyright".
Nival Interactive had released some horrible games in the past -- such as the misnamed and utterly boring Rage of Mages (in Russian, the game is called "Allodiums", so at least the name is good). However, Etherlords breaks the mold, since this game is actually not bad.
In Etherlords, you control one or more heroes, who move around the world map. The map is populated with monsters, treasures, shops, dungeons, resources, towns, etc. Your hero can only perform a certain number of moves per turn. The goal of the game is to reach and conquer the enemy base town. Obviously, the enemy heroes aren't going to just sit there and watch you conquer them -- they have heroes of their own who will try to stop you. Most of the time, you will fight the enemy for control of certain resources or choke points on the map.
What I have described so far is pretty much a direct clone of Heroes of Might and Magic. However, Etherlords introduces one radical difference. In Heroes of Might and Magic, your heroes carried with them a "stack" of friendly units -- sort of like a mini-army. When you entered combat, the opposing armies pretty much started whacking each other, until one of them was wiped out. You did get a chance to cast spells each turn (IIRC), but the spells didn't really make that much difference in the long run.
In Etherlords, on the other hand, there are no armies. Instead, your hero carries with him a deck of Magic: The Gathering cards (they are never called that by name, but trust me, that's what they are). When you enter combat with an enemy hero or monster, you begin a Magic duel, taking turns to play cards, and to attack or defend. Naturally, the rules of the game have been altered from the old-skool Magic rules -- mostly, I suspect, to make the programmers' lives easier. For example, there is no mana per se in the game; instead, your hero opens up a new "Ether Channel" each turn (up to a certain limit determined by his level). These channels produce Ether at the beginning of the turn, which you can use to pay for your cards. The fast effect rules, combat and interrupts have been similarly simplified, but the original Magic is still very recognizable -- you have the same sorceries, instants, summoned creatures with power/toughness, tapping, etc.
This makes the game a lot more interesting than the original Heroes, because the combat is much more strategic than "watch my army repeatedly attack the enemy army". Of course, the player with a superior deck will usually win; however, decks usually have a certain strategy, and so it's not always clear what a "superior" deck actually is. In addition, the decks are shuffled before each play, and so there is always an element of chance involved; and I mean actually interesting chance, not "my units can do 150+-50 damage, let's see how well they roll". In order to build up a good deck, you will have to acquire resources, and use them to buy additional cards at the shops. Your heroes and global enchantments also take resources to maintain -- which is why controlling the resource mines is so important.
Unfortunately, the gameplay gets pretty old pretty quickly. The computer AI is pretty linear: it just keeps doing the same thing over and over. Thus, there really isn't much incentive to customize your deck, once you figure out what all the different cards to (to be fair, that process does take a while). Fortunately, the replay value of the game mitigates this problem a bit: you can play as any of the four colors -- Red, Green, Blue, and Black (White is reserved for the game's boss whom I affectionately like to call "Mr. Cheese"). Your color determines the type of cards you can play (there are no mixed-color decks in the game); thus, you can play the game four times and get different missions and different strategies each time. Still, the missions are all pretty much the same, and thus they eventually do get boring. The total lack of story doesn't help, either.
Fortunately (again), the game compensates for these problems with its excellent art. Some games include eyecandy here and there -- but Etherlords drops you, the player, into a giant vat of eyecandy, like Willy Wonka on LSD (hm... or, I should say, on more LSD). Everything about the game is stunningly beautiful -- the heroes, the monsters, the resources, the combat, the spell effects, the music, everything. This game will give your T&L/FSAA graphics card a full workout, and it will be worth it. You can zoom the camera, rotate it around, look at those freshly summoned Aviak Marksmen from any angle, or pan over and admire the frozen waterfall... Now, I admit, normally I scoff at games that try to cover up gameplay weaknesses with graphics -- but in this case, I am willing to make an exception, since Etherlords is so very good at it.
That was actually the main attracton of the game for me -- the art. I kept playing just to see what kind of stunning new landscapes Nival could throw at me -- and I wasn't disappointed. I mean, I would even go so far as to endorse the Flash navbar on their site, even though (as everyone knows) I hate Flash. Etherlords alone is a good argument in the PC vs Console wars. There is simply no way that PS2 or GC or even XBox (with its sealed, non-upgradeable architecture) can render anything that good, at a high enough resolution.
Anyway, the bottom line is, while Etherlords is not exactly an innovative game, it is certainly an enjoyable one (and I didn't even get to check out the multiplayer features, since I have no one to play the game with). I am looking forward to Etherlords 2, for the stunning artwork if for nothing else. Hopefully, the sequel won't go the way of all the other game sequels... Hey, I can dream, right ?
P.S.: Nival Interactive has a great writeup on their Cursed Lands playtest. Unfortunately, it's in Russian, and there's no Russian-to-English Babelfish, so most people will find it inacessible.
Posted by metabug at 2003/08/30 07:34 | TrackBack (0) | Categories: Games