"Behold the power of invisible flying warships!"

Graphics: 8
Sound Effects: 5
Music: 7
Originality: 10
Play Control: 10
Challenge: 9
Replay Value: 10
Overall: 9

In Master of Magic, you take control of a powerful wizard in the land of Arcanum. As the leader of a race of beings, it is your responsibility to make them thrive and prosper, and eventually take over the world (have you noticed that wizards always want to take over the world?), but it’s not so easy. There are a lot of other powerful wizards who have the same goal, and destroying you is high on their list of priorities. Fortunately, you’ve got some powerful spells, interesting units, and more than a few ways of casting your foes into some other dimension where they can’t bother you any more.

Good Points:
Master of Magic is a strategy game, and a good one at that. It’s very customizable, letting you choose the difficulty, land size, number of enemies, and what kind of magic you want to use. And there we have the great part: the magic. There are five types of magic that you can use, with dozens of spells found in each type, offering a huge variety of strategies and tactics. You can choose to start with special advantages called retorts, pick what race you want to control, and basically tailor nearly every aspect of the game to your specific desire.

Bad Points:
There aren’t many, but flaws do exist in this game. Without the magic system, it would just be a simplified version of Civilization, with more emphasis on military conquest than anything else. The AI could use some work; for example, the computer will often walk right past an undefended city in order to attack your most fortified city with an attack force that’s half of what they would reasonably need. There are some severe balance issues as well. Users of Chaos magic have the overwhelming advantage near the end, and High Men are by far the best race, since they’re the only ones who can make the Paladin unit, one of which can defeat an entire army of lesser units. Plus, diplomacy is nearly useless, which is truly a shame, since it could have been fun to play enemy wizards off of each other.

Graphics:
Accustomed to modern games with 3D effects, I’m not especially impressed with the graphics, but they do their job, and do it well. You can easily discern the difference between units, and some of the spell effects have some damn cool graphics. The spell Call the Void, for example, blasts an enemy city with a mushroom cloud, while the spell Zombie Mastery displays the fallen rising from the dead in a very unwholesome way.

Sound Effects:
Sadly, the Sound Effects are just about the worst part of this game, which I guess is a good thing, since I’d rather have bad sound than bad play control. Nonetheless, the sound is pretty pathetic. Most spells make a sound that vaguely resembles static fed through an amplifier, and that’s about all the sound effects you’ll hear. It’s a shame, to be sure, since the potential for lots of cool sounds coming from different spells was wasted.

Music:
The music, thankfully, is better than the sound effects. The music is quiet and moody, and works well in a fantasy setting. Unfortunately, most of the time, the music refuses to work whenever I install the game, so I can’t tell you much more than this.

Originality:
Master of Magic is one of the most interesting games I’ve ever played, and one of the most in-depth. There are so many aspects to the game that it’s hard not to like it. There’s city building, magic research, empire expansion, and military combat, all in one game, and combined in a way that makes it seem altogether natural. Master of Magic offers a little something for everybody in a way that few other games have done before or since, by combining aspects of other games in a way never before considered.

Play Control:
Master of Magic has excellent play control, in the sense that it’s very easy to do what you want to do. There are several different screens, and they’re all easy to navigate and control. An easy point-and-click interface makes it simple to control your empire with a few clicks of the mouse, and that’s important when you’ve got an empire spanning half the globe.

Challenge:
If you play through Master of Magic and think it’s too easy, you can change any one of the customizable features to make it more difficult, and of course the reverse is true if you think it’s too hard. When you can set almost every aspect of the game, finding the proper difficulty is not a tricky task. Even on higher difficulties, however, the AI is pretty pathetic, so you’ll be able to take advantage of its many flaws if you feel the need, which you most certainly will at higher difficulty settings.

Replay Value:
I’ve played Master of Magic for untold hours, and I have a pretty short attention span when it comes to games. There are five different types of magic, each with dozens of spells, and there are over a dozen different races you can choose as your followers, meaning each game will take a different strategy to win. With this kind of sheer variety, it takes a long, long time to ever get tired of Master of Magic, and even when you do, you’ll probably find yourself reinstalling it a few months later.

Overall:
There aren’t many games that can hold my attention like Master of Magic can. Sure it’s old, and has some design flaws, but there’s something about it that can attract even modern gamers to the simple pleasure of conquering the world with a mixture of military might and arcane knowledge. It’s difficult to think of another game that is more engrossing or addictive, and I mean that in a good way. If the purpose of games is to entertain, then Master of Magic lives out its purpose in a way seldom matched.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/07/02, Updated 09/07/02