Age of Wonders 4 - Review

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Explorminate checked out Age of Wonders 4: Primal Fury:

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Age of Wonders 4: Primal Fury Review

With Eldritch Realms already on the horizon and even more premium DLC confirmed after that (a second season of DLC is a first for the series!), let's look back at the Wolf and Primal Fury era.

Hungry Like the Wolf
Well known for being the sickest animal to have painted on the side of your van, Wolf is also the name of the latest Age of Wonders 4 (AoW4) content patch because research shows decimals are confusing. It's probably better to hand out goofy names because Triumph's versioning mathematically seems like barely any progress has been made (Wolf is "only" 1.006). This is certainly not the case.

Triumph listed five "highlights" for this patch. How'd they pan out?

Mutiny on the Bounties
"Bounties" was a brand new feature added in Wolf whose purpose is to essentially paint targets for other rulers, not just vassal cities. In short, you're shown a list of potential targets and may choose one, then choose to offer a small, moderate, or great reward in either gold or mana.

On creation, the Bounty is given a time limit and offered to all eligible rulers in the game. Other rulers may then decide to either accept the bounty or ignore it - neither is binding nor must a bounty necessarily be accepted to be completed. From the human player's point of view, accepting one just adds it to your quest tracker. If an AI ruler accepts your bounty, they will let you know and offer updates on how their progress is going.

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Wrap It Up
Wolf was the first time in AoW4 that I've felt like the game respected me as a player enough to not separate every single choice into tiny modular pieces, and it's so much richer and more satisfying for it. Creativity and memorable gameplay is not found in boundless options for expression, it's found in tightly restricted situations where choosing one thing means sacrificing six others.

But did it bring AoW4 to the lofty heights of end-of-life Planetfall, or AoW3, or Shadow Magic? Just asking that question makes me feel like a kid in the backseat while driving on a family vacation because the question is also the answer: No, of course, we're not there yet. But from what's been revealed about Eldritch Realms thus far, AoW4 finally ascending to Triumph's pantheon might be as early as the next exit.