Warlock is best described as a game with an identity crisis. I feel as if the developers wanted to please so many different crowds. There are parts from Civilization, Battle for Middle Earth, Magicka and Warcraft all peppered throughout the game.
Now don’t take my opening paragraph as a letter to say I hate this game, on the contrary. I loathe it. The only thing this game has going for it it’s install size and the graphics. There are so many little things gone wrong that just make me feel sad. I was really looking forward to a Fantasy style Civ game. Let’s start at the beginning, with the menu.
I fired up my copy and started a game, and because of a misrepresented arrow I ended up choosing the default character by accident. A white wizard whos name was something along the lines of ‘ MOBIAS THE HAT ‘. I remember the hat part fondly.
That brings us to the beginning tutorial, or as I like to call it, ‘Bad Sean Connery Impersonator Theater’. It was funny at first but then it became very obvious they were trying for a bad Sean Connery narrator. The tutorial is a complete joke. It seemed as if it was only putting up new prompts at random. Best example, I built some warriors and moved them out and killed a few groups of skeleton swordsmen. Then a group of rogues came into my field of view and suddenly it was time to get the combat tutorial! I literally won three battles but that was all bullshit what I was doing before, I knew DICK about combat according to Shawn Conory.
The diplomacy mechanics are there and I feel like if they spent just a tad more time working on it they would be manageable. At one point during the my time playing, another army requested I do a trade with them. They demanded I give them 0 Mana. Thats right 0 as in Zero as in none. Of course me being the dictator enemy to all I said no and chose the “WAR” option. Then the next turn the same guy had the same demand, 0 Mana. Again I said no. This went on for six turns. Fed up I just gave into his demands and gave him the 0 Man, hoping it would stop. It didn’t. I had to declare war on him to shut his face up.
While we’re on the subject resources lets talk about the gold system. After a round of building structures and units I found myself at -31 gold. I thought that the game offered a debt system, but no. They just didn’t program a stop in. I was able to spend that -31 gold and offered it in diplomacy with another army, they became my ally and were fond of the -31 gold, which left me at -62 gold for some odd reason. This game has no concept of numbers.
The interface is a fuck bag. If a unit of yours is sharing a hex of a structure, there is a 50% of selecting the unit or the structure. There is no way to accurately click around between units. Building new structures is weird one. You can build something, after the required turns are up it becomes usable, but if you click on its icon after it is built, it puffs out some smoke and becomes unusable for a few rounds which seem to be random. I don’t know if this upgrading the building or just firing all the workers, the stats of the building DO NOT CHANGE. At one point I was unable to build in my town because of “Low Population”. I couldn’t figure out what the fuck this arbitrary variable means. I moved all the units I could into the town, still “Low Population”. I tried EVERYTHING, but I guess this was just another bullshit thing the game decided on its own without informing the player. A few random turns later, the “Low Population” message went away.
The emotions Warlock tries to evoke also seem to be completely random. The skeleton archers make this wacky bugs bunny metal spring sound when they shoot their bows, but when those arrows kill some female rogues, their blood curdling screams of pain and sorrow make me feel slightly uncomfortable.
So what should you take away from this? At $20 dollars and under 2 gigs this game is horrendously over priced. If someone said this was a mod for Civ 3, I would say “Hey, that one guy who built it did an ok job for his first go around.” I did not enjoy this game