A couple dozen races and something like 2,000 units are meticulously detailed… not visually, because they are all ugly little sprites that might barely be coloured differently, but by pages after pages of statistics. The first thing that’s immediately noticeable about the game is that there is so much depth to it that no human being could be realistically expected to experience everything Dominion offers. And with so many play options, here is one of those rare games that rewards genuine strategic thought. This game does ask for a healthy dose of imagination). There’s something epic about marshaling massive armies of fantastic creatures (fantastic in my mind, at least. The process of going from a complete newcomer to being comfortable with the game is not an especially rewarding one.īut once I got there I was glad I did. Slowly but surely I got the hang of it, and I’m no longer fighting with the interface and rules and instead concentrating on the strategy now, but even as a strategy game veteran I’m not sure whether I would be inspired to get to that point were it not for the fact I am reviewing the game. For almost everyone, this means the game is broken, but for the small percentage of players that need a another 4X strategy game that they can look past these flaws, there’s something quite compelling about Dominions 4.Įven after spending a couple of hours playing the game I wasn’t entirely sure I knew what I was doing, and I was losing regularly to enemies for reasons I didn’t really understand. In fact, the game is genuinely inaccessible, and breaks all kinds of game development rules around aesthetics in getting there. Sprites barely animate, the map is a blot of colour broken up into regions via lines, and watching the combat play out is like pulling teeth as units stutter along at a snail’s pace. In fact, the game would have been considered ugly 20 years ago. The menu interface is from about 10 years ago, and the graphics are about 20 years old. Am I showing my age to say I actually remember doing that with the strategy games of old (like, say, Civilization 2?) It’s a game that I actually needed to delve into its manual to understand how to play it… and the manual is over 100 pages long.

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