Age of Wonders

I think I patched it with a special mod to get it to work. If you don't want to do that, it's best you use an old system, not Windows 10. I have not tested it on 11.

There are some downsides to this game, it's slightly more polish over substance, though it does have substance. It's an epic game, but with faults. The main ones I can think of are: repeating dialogue box telling you something hasn't worked - you can ignore; enemy army marches on your army, doesn't allow time to regroup (though this works to your advantage when attacking).

Maybe the second criticism is a little harsh, as that's the turn-based mechanics, but it pays to have 'ninja' reflexes as you can often click madly and you get out of it if your clicks are well-positioned. Still, you shouldn't have to do this, and I mean, you really have to click REALLY FAST. Aside from this it is good you never need your keyboard, in normal gameplay, and the slightly tedious bit is the repeated 'clicking' to service your armies, and then there's the as-ever-horrendous build ques! Those are the downsides.

Good points: music, story, characters, etc.

Very enjoyable - Would recommend for anyone who wants a fairly complex turn based strategy game
The UI is about what you'd expect from a game this old, but there's a surprising amount of variety with plenty of factions, units, and abilities for heroes and units

The tutorial is a bit lacking and you will probably find yourself missing info on how to progress in your empire building, but there are plenty of guides online to help you out

Sidenote: If you get the error "exception during MapViewer.ShowScene" when trying to start any map through the tutorial, campaign or random maps, there is a fix for it on GitHub and googling the error will bring it up as I don't want to post links in a steam review

Love this old game. The game play is simplistic and easy to pick up with what is going on. The different paths you can take in the story means you can try and complete the game in a number of different ways.

Best

Pros
a wonderful throw back 4x game
fantastic customization for your heros
12 different races that all feel unique
2 campaigns with multiple split paths
cons
Map error crashing game (there is a fix for this but i am lazy)
autobattles where entangle/entangle strike skill/spell are used crash the game

NO BIG BUG

Game crashes now. Don't buy it.

It's a classic. Great Gameplay with decent unit development

The sweet addiction of just one more turn. Pure nostalgic bliss in hex form.

Ultimate Death Knight Simulator:
I cast pestilence
I cast death storm
BOOM instantly turn the map into a rotting hellhole.

Best game I ever played, Made me addicted to Fantasy

the one that started it all.

Still like some of the game play in this original version of age of wonders 1 over 2, 3, and 4.

Worth checking out.

One minor con is you can't run in windowed mode.

Very old and enjoyable gameplay similar to Heroes of Might & Magic series. It has a lot of nostalgia elements today because of its simplicity on one side and complexity on the other. It has problems on modern computers to run, so you have to run it with compatibility mode and also apply unofficial fix, to prevent ingame crashes.

Game is outdated and should not be bought to play it on modern systems since it crashes frequently.

Great strategy game. Downloaded when I was a teenager thinking it was a hentai game but it was a good surprise.
Many paths to follow regarding your character build and the choices you make in the story.

Spent countless hours in this game 20-25ish years ago

"In the first days of the world all living beings were ruled by the elven court..."

This is the best turn based fantasy strategy game ever created.

Keeps crashing.

Highly addictive turn based rpg/strategy. I loved it ages back when it was new, and turns out I still love it. The graphic and effects indeed are aged, but who cares.

game does not work

the only age of wonder i experienced was the joy of hitting the uninstall button

I never played Age of Wonders when it came out, so this is my first time playing. And it shows that you can enjoy a 25 year old game without nostalgia factor.
-The campaign is quite unique for its time, and even to this day, because you can make grand choices like Will you help the Dwarfs or the Frostlings. And this of course changes the story. Simply unheard of in a strategy game. The story/script is full of character, describing details of one's culture or relations between the races.
-I didn't like the music at first, because it's different from what I'm used to. There's lots of flutes and plucked instruments to give you that medieval vibe. And melodies that sound a little alien to me. But it slowly grew on me and now it sits comfortably in my list of favorite game soundtracks. My favorites are Content Workforce and March of the Halflings. Both have very cheerful rhythmic melodies. Battle music, especially Races At War, is more tense, but nothing outspoken. It fits the relaxed genre of Turn-Based Strategy. Actually the title music is the only bombastic piece in here, and was an instant favorite for me. Man, I've never heard such convincing, forceful drum beats that seem to radiate an Unreal level of confidence that i imagine a fantasy leader would have.
-The sound design is highly effective. You can almost feel the impact of a unicorn stamping an orc archer into the ground, just from the sound alone. The groans and death screams are also hilarious because of how clear, loud, and blunt they are. All in all, very over-the-top late 1990s, if you're old enough to have played those games.
-I generally enjoy these tabletop style turn-based strategy games, simply because the numbers are so intuitive. Quantities rarely exceed 20, so you have a much better grasp of the unit capabilities, and can literally make calculated decisions.
-The other thing is the experience concept. Each unit can level up by making kills, and the first level increases the accuracy and HP by 1, which is a pretty big deal for the cheapest units that have 4 or 5 of each. This leveling up of units creates a sense of progress and attachment to your soldiers. Sadly, units can only lvl up twice in this game.
-Another interesting thing is that you can bring soldiers from the previous map to the next, though I haven't really understood which units become available for that.
-There's also dungeons to explore where you can find weapons that give bonuses to your heroes.
-I also really like that the cities are fixed in AoW. You can't build more cities or expand them beyond their size, and this makes the cities and maps more memorable and the capture of a city more impactful. Not to mention it simplifies the gameplay a lot. How annoying is it to find new cities in places where there were none and having to conquer those as well.
-but THE big unique selling point of AoW is the turn-based battles. I've been looking for games like this, but haven't found anything so far. The turn based battles, which load when two or more armies meet, make the game feel so much more alive and less abstract, it's the biggest attraction of this game series for me.

A big downside of AoW is that it's old, which means the graphics are very low resolution. But you can clearly see there's a lot a great art underneath the pixelated surface, more so than its contemporaries. Every pixel gives you a glimpse into this beautifully drawn fantasy world.
The controls are also outdated. Clicking and moving units is both done with left mouse button for example. And I wish right click would exit the city, but instead you have to click on that tiny EXIT button. A lot of these minor things make it very uncomfortable to play on a Steam Deck. So I stream it to my desktop, but that introduces a bit of lag, and may stutter or even stop entirely when the connection isn't optimal.

Despite that, AoW still has very compelling gameplay and an epic soundtrack. You might say it has aged wonderfully. I would've played hundreds of hours more if I didn't have such a massive backlog of games to play, including AoW sequels. So now, onwards to AoW2!

Also, they should change the Steam Deck Compatibility rating, because, funnily enough, it only runs on Steam Deck and not on Windows. You just need to select Proton 4, as mentioned in the Guides. There was only one time the game broke and that was when the enemy killed my leader, which was frankly hilarious. It seemed like, instead of going to the Game Over screen, that final attack was so powerful it crashed the whole freakin game giving me a fatal error!!

Amazing game, but it crashes almost continuously, I have uninstalled and re-installed it and having the same issues... even with the memories I may have to stop playing because the crashes are far too common

Hey hey people. I got this after watching Sseth review. I just played the intro. Pretty good so far. I like the music and the gameplay. The cutscenes are terrible but everything else seems decent. Ill update my review after putting more time in. It kinda plays like one of the rpgs with the grid movement.

This Game COULD be so fun to play but it ist just CRASHING (campaign does not even start). So, unfortunately, do NOT buy.

best game ever made

OLD BUT GOLD

Age of Wonders is an epic fairytale classic.
I owned the box edition along with Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne and Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic back in 2004, so it's somewhat of a nostalgic title for me.
To get this to work on Window's 10, I had to install the AoW MapViewer ShowScene Patch and set compatibility to XP Service Pack 3, Disable Full-screen optimisations and Run this program as an administrator.
Also, for configuration i had to untick Allow Resolution Changes and Use Direct3D. However, the game would still crash every now and then.
Manual saving unfortunately becomes very important to progress without losing your entire game to a corrupted or deleted autosave.
Anyway, its a really fun game if you can get it to run.

Game is unstable, and the only way I can get it to run disables the ability to save game

A classic of 3x strategy, Always worth a play

The 'Steam' version will crash to desktop more than anything.

Can't seem to get the 'Steam' version running more than a few minutes.

The original CD version (which I do have as well) will work for the first few missions, then hard crash out eventually late into the mission directly after the 'overland trade route'.

The CD version used to work find on Windows 98, xp, 7, and 10, but now it doesn't on 10 or later.

I have looked extensively for support options in the AoW community, none of which work to make either the CD or the Steam versions work with out persistent crashes that make the game ultimately unplayable.

Not terribly excited to have paid $6 for something that doesn't work; that seems like a nostalgia scam.

Until there is a real 'fix' I have to say I cannot recommend this game. :-(

The game itself, when it works, is one of my favorite amalgamations of simplistic story, hero character development, variety of path changing choices, and combat/unit variety. I do enjoy the blend they made, and of the AoW games I have tried, this is the one that I keep coming back to and want to play more of, no matter how many times I have completed the game.

What are your thoughts?

ːduranceleftːːdurancerightː

Goat game that I play again every couple of years. Get the patch to stop it from crashing on modern systems. Custom scenarios online so you never run out of content.

Pretty nice game. With atmosphere and charm

This shit is unplayable as it constantly crashes. the game is 11/10 but the crashes are infuriating, fk steam for selling this game in this state

it doesn't work.it just crashes

I bought a new chrome book and decided to download steam and the new remote app. but none of the install and the play games buttons work with the click of a mouse. I'm concerned that converting to a new Samsung system is not yet worth it plus every time I try to contact the steam contact nothing works. I'd like to reach out and have help fixing these issues please call me at 1 705 946 9094 or [email protected] I have just bought age of wonders 1-3 and woiuld love help

Very entertaining, somehow difficult at first. Pretty fun strategies and customization. Must download a fix from an external source in order for it to work on windows though.

It's exactly the game I remember spending countless hours in a LAN party playing. What more could I ask for?

Game crashes after a few minutes and waste my time . i wanted to like this game as i'm a huge fan of the franchise . But how can i give a game a chance that does not even work.

The very best of the serie. The graphics, the music, the writing, they all reigned supreme.
The subsequent games have diminished in all aspects from this one (however implausible it might sound).
It's just impressive to witness such a downgrade.
Noteworthy, the game pocess the best written campaign of any strategy game I've ever played, and the reason comes from the inherent quality of its narrative, but also the various branching of the story that depend on the player choices.

Most older games suffer bad rep. on steam, mostly because their release are kinda bugged, or cut of content.
Which often explains why they don't get the positive reviews they ought to get.

Epic atmosphere of fairy tale

Download the patch to make this playable and have fun!

One of the best classic games ever made. The only problem is finding a system that can run it today without issue, as most modern computers are bad at emulating the classics. However, if you get it working, this is amazing.

Impossible to get running without an awful level of work (and then only mostly works), this sorta crap should not be allowed on the store without a massive disclosure about issues to run it on modern systems.

Avoid unless you are happy to try and get it running by wasting far more time than it should take, only upside is paradox hasn't pushed its aweful launcher into this game

its great

Obviously this is an old game, but still holds up well if you like the new AoE games, this explains more of the lore! Obviously not as good as the third or fourth, but honestly the cutscenes are very obviously a labor of love, that intro was longer than most 'modern' games. Great game and I suggest it if you enjoy turn based strategy / AoW in general