‘Fantasy Empires’ – If ‘Total War’ Was ‘Risk’ and Also From the 90s
Fantasy Empires was very ambitious for its time and holds up fairly well, if you’re willing to put in the work.
Not too long ago, SNEG publishing company released 8 classic D&D retro video games. Well, they are out and I’ve been playing through each of them one by one. We’ll be reviewing each of the titles over the coming months, so keep an eye out for those.
We begin with Fantasy Empires since it has good reviews and I had never played it before. It’s a competitive area control game, similar to games like Risk. However, there are also empire-building aspects like Total War III. You have to construct buildings and train new recruits. But, there are elements wholly unique as well.
Fantasy Empires Overview
Alongside your standard troops, you can also train heroes like Fighters, Elves, Clerics, and Magic-Users. This was AD&D, back when Elf was a player class. These heroes gain levels through combat and quests. You can send these heroes on quests to discover magic items. Some of these items they will use themselves, like magic weapons, amulets of protection, displacer cloaks, and more. But some items, like crystal balls, are sent to your army to use to spy on other players, for example.
The different terrains of the regions will determine which units you can recruit there. You can only recruit Elves in forests and Dwarves require mountains. There’s also diplomacy, forging alliances with neighbors, sending aid to help them stand against a common foe. Then use necromancy to piss off your allied neighbors so they attack you first, retaliation strikes that wipe your goody-two-shoes neighbors off the map. Then, use their reanimated corpses to take over the common foe you once helped them beat back. You know, all the standard stuff.
But the real appeal for many players will be the real-time combat. Just like in Total War, rather than simply comparing combat strength and rolling a die, any combat is played out in its entirety. The player controls a single hero and can run around hacking and slashing their way to victory. Meanwhile, your other troops will go (hopefully) slaughter the enemy as well. But, you can always choose to simulate the battle and let the computer do the work for you.
Overall Review
Fantasy Empires is a fun game. I had a good time playing it, and I’m not hugely into wide wartime strategy games. I really love the idea of having both generic troops and full heroes. Being able to send heroes out of quests to recover artifacts is a great addition. The number of spells and magic available make for a lot of options on how to engage different enemies in different ways.
The game’s biggest drawback is its general clunkiness. Finding information can be somewhat tedious and a lot of things the game flat out won’t tell you. When I started playing I couldn’t understand why my troops would keep dying turns after I sent them into neutral territory. Turns out, you have to build Keeps in order to prevent random rioting citizens to fight back against your troops’ station in their territory. The mechanic makes sense. But the game does not make any mention that this is happening.
Plus, there’s no easy way to see how many troops you have in each region easily. Each region must be clicked on individually to see who is stationed there. On top of that, if you move troops into a warring region, there doesn’t appear to be any way to double-check how many you sent. And lastly, you want to recruit more units every turn, because it’s that kind of game. But it’s just very time-consuming having to go through the process of recruiting for each of your regions with a training Armory.
Again, overall, Fantasy Empires is a lot of fun. There’s just enough content to really be able to dig into it but since it’s a pretty old game, it doesn’t haze the tons of added bloat a lot of games have. It would really benefit from a remastered version for some UI polish.
So, if you’re a fan of games like Risk or Total War 3, but also love that classic retro D&D feel, you might love Fantasy Empires.
