Worlds of Magic: Planar Conquest Review

Worlds of Magic Planar Conquest is a 4X turn based game available on Xbox One, PS4 and PC, with an earlier and lower quality version already available on mobile devices. When you first start to play the game you have a few different options, you can choose quick start, single player, battle arena and tutorial. The tutorial starts off going through all the basic controls, after which it explains the commodities in the game such as gold, food and mana.

Planar Conquest is set out in a grid format. In the single player mode, some squares contain resources such as fertile soil, wild animals and others contain nearby inhabitants and structures that you can attack. You can explore nearby features of the game such as other populations and you can also manage your own cities and armies, amongst other things, from the menu in the bottom right corner. You can set up posts throughout your settlements to protect the citizens as well as making changes in your land such as altering taxes for example; higher taxes will gain more gold and lower taxes will mean happier citizens. You can also cross between the seven planes in the game: Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Shadow, Paradise and Prime, as well as choose from the many different species of characters to play as.

The game play behind planar conquest especially when you first start off can be fairly tedious; The other settlements near to where you start have much better equipped armies so you really don’t stand a chance of actually winning a fight, other than the one in the tutorial of course. This means there’s nothing else to do aside from build your city and explore the nearby realm. Another issue that makes it hard to win fights when you first start the game is that there is no guarantee of which soldiers will actually be fighting, but rather a list of possible guardians, this also means you don’t have any idea of numbers so there’s no real way to prepare before you actually start the fight. The simple addition of some kind of strength stat would fix this issue so you would have at least some rough idea of what you were up against. I do understand that some mystery entices players to explore, but there is such a thing as not enough information. This issue isn’t a game ruining issue, it just means it gets a little annoying and quite a bit boring from time to time in single player mode.

The Battle Arena part of the game allows you to first select the battleground, then to select your army with a maximum of 16 slots available to you and another 16 slots available to the enemy side. Allowing you to select your own enemies allows you to choose how difficult you want it to be depending on whether you have just started playing the game or if you’ve been playing for a while and decide you really want a challenge. If you’ve never played this game before some skills may be a little bit difficult to get the hang of at first, but it can be enjoyable after you discover your own play style. Personally I preferred the Battle Arena game mode, as it was quite easy to pick up and the amount of characters is so vast that it was interesting and each time you play it the game can be something completely different.

The game itself is very colourful, it looks well designed and I haven’t managed to find any visual errors or issues whilst playing the game. The artwork on the loading screens is really quite nice to look at too. The soundtrack on worlds of magic planar conquest suits the game play quite well and it is nice, though some parts of it can seem a little generic. It sort of sounds like the same background music you get on every mystical theme game at the moment.

Getting back to what I said earlier, this game is known as a 4X game, so that’s exactly what I’ve tried to do; I’ve explored the realms in Planar Conquest, I’ve expanded my city and my army, I’ve used what knowledge I have of turn based games to try to exploit the AI and win at least one battle. And finally we get to the last X in a 4X game, exterminate, which I think maybe a little harsh for this game, it’s hardly the best fantasy game I’ve played, and at just under £25 it’s not the best value for money either, but if you really love this kind of game maybe it’s something for you. The bottom line is if you’re a big fan of fantasy games and you see Planar Conquest is on sale, you might have some fun with it.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation 4 code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.