Age of Fear: The Undead King – the return of good old goblin hunting

     – by NathanH

FACT: almost no-one makes the good old’ fantasy turn based strategies anymore. Everyone’s producing Starcraft clones by the dozen. The world missed the depth of strategy found in a really solid turn-based strategy game  – with lots of goblin hunting, of course.

Enter Age of Fear  (www.age-of-fear.net), a truly awesome return to this model of gaming. Built by a small team of strategy lovers, Age of Fear is a polished, commercial indie that aims really, really high. It brings back everything we loved to the table – goblins, mages, knights, dark knights, and the poor foot soldiers – tied in with an interesting story.

 

The first thing that impressed me was the insane amount of options on how you can play the game. In the options screen, you can change tons of in-game rules to suit it to your liking. Nobody else may care much about the options menu, but I do. There is also 3 difficulty levels: novice, inexperienced and master. I chose novice, as I suck at these types of games, but love them anyway. There is also three modes: quick battle, the single-player campaign and multiplayer. Quick battle is, from what I noticed, used for replaying old campaign missions.

I chose the single-player campaign, as from what I can see, the multiplayer is a bit complicated to set up and I simply do not have the time. Or friends. Just kidding! So other than seeing the setup screen, I have not tried the multiplayer. There is, I guess, two single player campaigns, The Tale Of Sir Edward, and Rise Of The Necromancer. I chose Sir Edward, as the other guy sounded too evil for my liking. When the single-player campaign started up, I was agape at the amazing quality of writing that was used for the intros to the missions. It felt very poetic and would sound great in a novel. “But darkness does not sleep. It only lies in wait for men to forget and lower their guards.” Whoa. Epic.

I was prepared to spend the whole time reading the in-game story, but this is a video game review, so I had to move on. The game starts out with you using your gold to recruit a miniature army. I am a noob, so I spend my gold on random people instead of thinking it through. Once in, I finally begin to start slaying goblins, after a fairly good tutorial that shows me the ropes. The gameplay rules are tight and fun, and the AI isn’t stupid so it really adds to the strategy. It almost reminds me of a strategy RPG, but without levelling. All your units have their own names, the combat system seems to use dice rolls, and you go from battle to battle, with the game having a heavy emphasis on story. Reminds me of the days when strategy gaming was about true tactics, and not merely clicks-per-minute.

You may be a bit turned off by the simplistic presentation of the game: the simple menu with a black and white image for the background… the simple little tunes that hum in the background, but don’t let that stop you from playing Age of Fear. Here, the simplicity tends to bring out the gameplay instead of hiding it beneath loads of whizzbang graphics.

The game doesn’t seem to use much music besides in the Menu, but it sure uses lots of good sound effects, from the sounds of birds to the growl of hungry monsters. However, the minimal voice acting (for the battle cries and such) sounds a little wonky and awkward, almost like the guy doing the voice acting wasn’t sober. As I inferred before, the graphics are simple, but rather stylish and get the job done. Just don’t expect anything mind-blowing. The character portraits for the units and such are pretty impressive though, I must admit.

You can get a lot out of Age Of Fear: The Undead King, with a promised 30 battles (I am not there yet, I am just going by what the site says!) and some good replayability with the added multiplayer. It truly is a great game for the real strategists of the world, but if you aren’t however part of this demographic, you may wish to stay away. If you are part of this demographic, this game was designed for you. This is a definite game for lovers of goblin hunting and true, honest to goodness strategy, as long as you are willing to pay 15.79$ for it. The game does come with a demo though (making it a shareware indie title!). Age Of Fear: The Undead King is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Check this game out now at: http://www.age-of-fear.net/

About the author:

   NathanH is Indiegraph’s point man for interviews, but he’s pretty versatile –  he occasionally sends in detailed reviews of good games that he stumbles across. When not writing for Indiegraph, he maintains his web comic over at cavemanrock.blogspot.com.