"Greatest. DOS strategy game. Ever."

First off: If you have Windows XP or 2000, have fun trying to get this to work. If you don't know what you're doing, it can take more than an hour.

However, if you have Windows 98/95, you're in for a blast. This game is truly a masterpiece. 6 types of magic, over 10 races to have as your base civilization, and hundreds of spells, and maybe a dozen or so portraits for your mage to boot (and one has boobies!).

You have the basic choices of Chaos (Fire, lightning, all that good stuff), Nature (Nature stuff... Yeah), Sorcery (countermagics, air type magics, and illusionary) Life, Death, and Arcane (the basic stuff, everyone gets it). Instead of just choosing which base to take, you get ''picks.'' Each pick gives you a book in a certain type of magic of your choice, or you can take a supplementary skill. For each book you have in a magic type, more and more spells are open to your wizard. The additional skills are what really makes the game unique for each game. You can choose to be an expert at making artifacts for your heroes to use, you can be world famous, or you can be more focused in a certain type of magic. There are quite a few choices, and my favorite, ''Myrran,'' allows you to start on the other of the two planes of existence, and opens up 5 more races to chose as your starting race. You can be a focused Chaos mage, or you can have all the types but one, because you can't take both life and death. Conflicting types, I guess.

GAMEPLAY - 10/10
The whole meat of a strategy game, how well the game itself plays. And this one does it wonderfully. There are spells to enchant your units, your cities, the world, and other types of spells, like summoning heroes, which are pretty much super-powered units. The world map resembles that of Civilization (c'mon, you know Civilization!), meaning it's an overhead map, and you move a square at a time. You can have up to 9 units stacked as a square, and if they engage in a battle, they will function as a team. You can choose to let the game auto-battle (not recommended) or you can choose to move your units yourself (recommended). You can have pikeman, swordsman, shamans, warlocks, and all sorts of units, some use magic, some use melee, and others use arrows and rocks. In battle, you can also aid your units by casting spells, such as Lightning Bolt, Psionic Blast, or Doom Bolt. Okay, well, those more hurt the enemy, but that still helps, right? I guess, if you're a sissy, you can take Life magic, and heal or something, but who really cares about that, when you can just blow the enemy up?
Anyway, you also have your city management, where you have your base of operations, and where you build new structures to create more powerful units, and to give yourself more gold. Hey, you like gold, right? You can use this gold to pay your troops, buy shiney items from merchants, and to recruit other units. You can also convert it into mana, so you can continue casting your spells of doom.

GRAPHICS/SOUND 7/10
I wish I could give a 10 in this area. I really do. All I can really rate are the graphics, since I can't get the sound to function on Windows XP. While not beautiful, the graphics did hold up rather well to the test of time, and you can count the individual units in battles. The spell effects are rather nice, though.

Replayability 10/10
Limitless. Every map is randomly generated, you can take different spellbooks (or, even no spellbooks!), you can have a different number of opponents, and even the spells you get with the same number of spellbooks can differ. This game really will keep playing different every time.

FINAL RECOMMENDATION
Well, if you can find it, buy it. I managed to pick mine up from a friend. I'm aware you can find this for free, but that's illegal, and we don't want to be doing that, right? And if you can somehow find this game for rent, well, ''lose it.'' You'll want it more than those jerks, anyway. Classic treasure, this game is.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 01/24/04