#RAGE OF MAGES 2 NECROMANCER PORTABLE#

In most RTS games, convoluted terrain maps and an ant-like AI result in a sort of towering Babylon of angst, as your armies simply cannot and will not move where you direct them to move, instead getting traffic jammed around rocks, trees, and especially, especially bridges. This alone makes the game far more tolerable than one might expect.īut most importantly, Rage of Mages II solves one of the real-time strategy genre's most glaring problems: pathfinding. The terrain is interesting and varied, and the individual mission maps are hand-built, detailed, logical (apart from a whimsical sense of scale) and diverse. On the flip side, there are a few clever design decisions worth pointing out. 'Begone Encumbrance! You are not needed in the world of Roleplaying Lite!' You can truck off all this loot to an Allod Shop and trade it in for some nicely rendered and suitably diverse mithril helmets and fireball scrolls.

#RAGE OF MAGES 2 NECROMANCER PORTABLE#

Fortunately, your characters are equipped with invisible portable holes, because hauling off a dozen axes, plate armor vests, and 40,000 pieces of gold has no affect on their movement rate. This one character must stand exactly over the treasure bag to pick it up. For starters, you have to unselect your combat group and pick just one character. Once a battle is complete, you are confronted with the laughably painstaking task of gathering loot. Real-time makes a farce of the round-by-round decisions of classic roleplaying combat, yet this game tries to err more towards the character-oriented, inventory-laden combat of old school RPGs rather than the army-oriented melees of a Warcraft II. Playwise, though, the distinctions hardly seem to matter - just throw everybody into the melee and hope for the best. You have your basic dichotomy between magic and steel, as well as hand-to-hand or ranged attacks.

Thankfully you can group units ala Command & Conquer with a CTRL+NUMBER keystroke, so you do have some modicum of control over your units. It's all real-time though, and that's the only real challenge - mindless creature after mindless creature is thrown at you in a desperate, last ditch effort to hold your attention. Essentially, you control one or more heroes and frequently some hireling mercenaries in an overhead, strictly grid-based 2D perspective. Having no choice but to accept these quests, you set off through the gate into the main game itself. The poorly worded text and homemade English voice-overs only add to an aura of unintended parody.

And if by bad luck or malice you click on the same tavern-dweller again, you are forced, as in the most primitive of adventure games, to listen to their entire, multi-screened spiel once again. It is presumed you will help them, so saddle up adventurers. They will talk about the necromancers, orcs, or squirrels that have over-run their village, kidnapped their first-born, and scrambled their wits. You start in the 'Allod' and really, the only place to go is the tavern. An 'Allod' seems to be a pair of 2D map screens, one representing a town with three hotspots - tavern, shop, and gate - and one representing an overland region. From the intro, we learn we are in an 'Allod'. And I like the Tolkien-type stuff.īut game we must. Obviously the Eastern Bloc has some catching up to do when it comes to the rarified art of fantasy world-building, because this is a hopelessly cliched mish-mash more geared to inducing chuckles than awe. The swords-and-sorcery fantasy world is explained in a most cursory manner, reminiscent of some old TSR hack-and-slash module like 'The Keep on the Borderlands', but the explanatory text is even more confused, since it's translated from Russian. You are then dropped into a well-nigh incomprehensible background milieu. You then modestly tweak their stats (having no discernable effect on the ultimate outcome) and then give them a name. You 'customize' a hero by choosing a Male Warrior, a Female Warrior, a Male Mage, or (surprise, surprise) a Female Mage.

The cut-scenes are similarly indistinct, but on the other hand, if you're still gaming on a Pentium 166 then, bless you Tiny Tim, here's a game that might actually run on your crotchety old system. The dated 2D sprites are fuzzier than year-old strawberries and your heroes' penchant for wearing orange capes calls to mind such epic outings as Deer Hunter and Don't Shoot the Guy in the Safety-Orange Vest. The artists over on Warcraft III will get a good chuckle out of this one.

Rage of mages 2 necromancer