by

Bullfrog 1998

As the shaman of your tribe, you are the only one who possesses magical powers. And because of these powers you feel that it is your destiny to become a god. In order to do this you must fight and defeat several enemy tribes on about 25 different worlds.

Since you have magical powers, you are also given a wide range of spells to help you in your cause. But you are not alone, you also can create firewalkers, (which shoot out fireballs), priests, (which convert enemy units to your cause), warriors (your typical grunts) and braves (peasents). You can also create defense towers to help keep a lookout over your village and balloons to attack the enemy from the air.

Given the wide number of units you can use and the diverstiy of spells, it allows the user to develop many different strategies for combating enemy tribes. The graphics are outstanding in this game, especially at higher resolutions. And one of the most impressive freatures is a 360 degree rotation so you can surf around the entire world and look at any unit or village from any perspective you want too. This is a little different from the top-down perspective of games such as Warcraft 2.

Despite these neat features, I had a hard time deciding weather or not I really liked the game. Part of the problem was that there was too much repetition in levels. In other words, each level seemed to have the same idea behind it. You line up your units and fight in huge masses until one of the shamen is strong enough to destroy a village. But there were a couple levels that were totally different. At one time you are placed on a new world without any of your follwers. That was a really interesting level, which required unique stratagies. But for the most part it was the same basic level idea. Another problem that I had was that the game crashed once when I was saving it and wouldn't allow me to restart any of my saved games. Luckily I was able to find my corrupted file and delete it and then continue from where I was, or I might never have finished.

However, at the end of the game I found myself very into it and ready to play some more. I guess the moral of the story is that if you can get over the repetition of the levels there are enough spells and units to keep you interested for awhile.

Ratings
Graphics 9.8
Gameplay 8.9
Plot 8.5
Overall 9.1


Bottom Line: This game was pretty cool and enjoyable. I really liked the 360 perspective as well as the graphics and the variety of spells you could use. So if you feel like playing a 3d real time strategy, then this is still a good game.


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