Age of Wonders 4 lets you build high-fantasy civilizations — at a cost

Immediately after starting Age of Miracles 4, I decided to create a custom race of molekin for the tutorial realm – a swarming, mana-channeling people ruled by High Matriarch Enam’ru Onimole. I might as well have created a race of feudal toads or venomous halflings, but as a selective isolationist when it comes to 4X strategy games, the idea of ​​building my empire underground and emerging as a horde of gophers sounded irresistible. Unfortunately, there’s great hubris for getting too creative before learning a game’s systems and synergies, and as a result the proud mole folk of Holemind have paid a high price.

This is the first Age of Wonders game since 2019 Planetfall, and a return to the series’ original high-fantasy theme after nearly a decade. Like its predecessors, Age of Miracles 4 features a single-player story-focused campaign, tactical turn-based combat, and a global spell system. It’s my first time playing an Age of Wonders game, but playing within the 4X genre is largely learning how to apply the same titular principles: explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. Once things started to click, I wholeheartedly embraced the 4X school of justification that leads an otherwise serene and unaffected person to ruin – if not their own, then surely someone else’s.

The real magic of 4X games lies in seeing it happen: the erratic response of a hostile civilization or the revelation of a fatal weakness no one saw coming. It’s times in multiplayer when determined friends become rabid foes (and vice versa). It’s like sinking into an esoteric state of victory for hours and being stabbed in the back by a bunch of primitive hermits. There’s a wonderful kind of emerging storytelling that emerges in these games, and in theory, Age of Miracles 4 should provide fertile ground for fragments of fantasy sagas to take root.

behavioral, Age of Miracles 4 is pretty unremarkable – it does what you’d expect it to do most of the time, sometimes a little too predictably, at least on easy and normal difficulty settings where I could play several games through to the end. But as the first 4X I’ve played with a much more developed RPG story, Age of Miracles 4 pushed me into new territory.

As in previous Age of Wonder games, there is an agenda system for alignment between good and evil that influences the nature of random events, public perception, and socio-economic and combat benefits (cannibalistic factions are always evil). From the world of Magehaven, the Godir, a functionally immortal band of wizards, explore other worlds and recruit new heroes: unique units needed to found cities, launch sieges, and explore the wonders of the map. Each game takes place in a realm with different environmental conditions or special scenarios (e.g. an undead curse or a constant state of war). The player starts with a small army and a ruler who can be mortal or Godir depending on their backstory. Winning allows the ruler to ascend to the player’s Pantheon, where they can be summoned to appear in subsequent playthroughs.

The campaign story features two opposing factions within the Godir – the Orderly Covenant and the chaotic Shad’rai Alliance – and features familiar faces from previous games, such as elven princess Sundren of the dysfunctional house of Inioch. The player begins each chapter as an agent of the Covenant or the Shad’rai, tasked with finding rogue Godir or investigating strange phenomena.

Image: Triumph Studios/Paradox Interactive via Polygon

While Covenant and Shad’rai are not explicitly pushed as good versus bad, it’s hard not to associate them with that simple duality. For example, in the third story realm, the player must search for a magical artifact for the Shad’rai. It’s harder to play a well-aligned faction here because the Empire is in a perpetual state of war, which better supports an evil agenda if the player takes a straightforward approach to plunder, vassalization, and conquest.

The good/evil agenda can be a useful system in a regular game, but feels undermined by the story’s lingering moral overtones. Of course, I want to believe that a cannibalistic hero named Nekron the Risen can somehow fulfill the goals of the “good” covenant – but in practice it feels inconsistent to reconcile Nekron’s inherent wickedness with a noble cause. I tried to force him to be good to see if anything interesting came out of it, but like most 4X mistakes, it ended up being a waste of time and resources as it doesn’t take advantage of his racial advantages. For all the broad potential 4X games have to tell emerging stories, Age of Miracles 4 is not the best candidate to play with for this purpose.

After my failed frankenmole experiment during the tutorial, I started the first chapter with a preset faction – the First Elves led by Zaethyl Silverleaf (a dead end for Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel) – and it was a huge relief to have functional synergies . I built a huge, thriving empire thanks to the First Elves’ affinity for nature and animals, and made quite a bit of progress in the Astral affinity tree; when I finally unlocked the Astral Relay Building, a gold-raising structure in the mid to late game, it was easy to maintain a massive army to achieve a military victory.

Image: Triumph Studios/Paradox Interactive via Polygon

I also dabbled in several other factions: Dwarven ruler Tugrum Hammerhall was unsurprisingly production-oriented, making it easy to pull off major building projects like the all-important Wizard Tower – a unique building in the capital that unlocks powerful city features. Experiments with Cinren Tolrath – ruler of the elven Ashborn Hedonists – were less successful, mainly because I had become so enthralled with the success of my previous money-making approach that it was difficult to integrate Cinren’s strengths into my newfound greed . All the factions I tried – with the exception of the aforementioned Nekron, which I left early on – felt well-rounded and cohesive, with the potential to thrive under different playstyles and affinities.

The combat system is mercifully flexible, offering both auto and manual options; encountering enemy units on the overworld map activates a turn-based battlefield instance that broadly depicts the terrain on the map hex. I grew to like the auto option as a nice time saver to blast through unavoidable low risk fights. This reduced a lot of tedious clashes with small marauders and helped me focus on bigger battles, which can take up a lot of time – there’s a cap of three armies on each side, but it’s still a lot of careful maneuvering, spells and positioning that become even more complicated with barriers and environmental hazards. In the overworld, the game really wants you to pay attention to army formations and hex features, which means carefully moving each unit one by one. This got really old in the third chapter, which involves a lot of massive military movements.

There are plenty of minor frustrations: when looting new hero gear, for example, the “open hero screen” prompt shows the player’s ruler by default, even if their gear slots are all full. This meant unnecessary steps to access my minor heroes list – a small but meaningful quality-of-life adjustment when you consider the high base level of micromanagement in 4X games to begin with. Two units can’t switch hexes, which occasionally caused Big Mistakes. Finally, characters using two-handed weapons can’t also have a mount, which is stupid; if you’re going to borrow that heavily from the most successful high fantasy adaptation of all time, you have to let elves use staves on horseback.

Image: Triumph Studios/Paradox Interactive via Polygon

Despite the pain of learning a full 4X in a week on deadline, Age of Miracles 4 is a lot of fun as a solid entertaining amalgamation of familiar things that I love. It does a fantastic job of injecting heartfelt humor and sprinkles of cheese into its high-fantasy setting; clicking each unit produces hilarious grunts and approaches to “hey” that are great bits of audio dork in a seemingly serious genre. The true-to-life scenarios that pop up during gameplay are fun distractions too, like dealing with your citizens’ neurotic superstitions, or deciding whether to turn down someone’s dinner banquet. However, I hit a wall after about 30 hours of play, mostly due to the increased combat difficulty in the fourth chapter, which didn’t sit well with my single-minded attempts at a magical win.

Age of Miracles 4 isn’t as well-oiled as my old 4X ball-and-chains – Civilization 5 And 6 – but even in the moments where the writing seems to go in three different directions at once, it has the right mix of charm and heart to smooth out the flaws.

Perhaps my focus on the story mitigated the excitement of seeing the computer screw me up; perhaps the tuning agenda, while useful for a moralistic fantasy setting, undermines the chaotic spontaneity that usually makes 4X games so delightful. Maybe it would just be more unpredictable in a multiplayer setting because no one will sabotage you in 4X like a friend. The reality of 4X games that no one likes to admit is that they’re not that much fun if you don’t win, so half the battle is keeping new players engaged while they learn how to improve. Providing the drama of an immortal pantheon is enough to keep me around, though I’m not sure for how long. If the replay doesn’t kill you once you start struggling through higher levels, maybe the looters will.

Age of Miracles 4 will be released on May 2 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed using a pre-release download code from Paradox Interactive. Vox Media has partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find additional information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy here.