Eador: Masters of the Broken World Review
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Eador: Genesis was a game which is clearly built in the Heroes of Might & Magic mold. Created by Alexander Bokulev, a lone Russian programmer working for 3 years almost entirely on his own, it gained a modest following, and those who did play it recognized it as an undiscovered gem. Snowbird Games, with the collaboration of Bokulev, recognized this potential and have now brought us an enhanced remake of Genesis with Eador: Masters of the Broken World.
Eador: Masters of the Broken World (or just Eador: MotBW for short) is still just as good a strategy-RPG as the original one, with extremely deep and interesting mechanics, and more complexity than might initially meet the eye. But unfortunately, it's hard to fully recommend just yet. Read on to find out why.
Story
The premise of the game is that you are what's called a Master - an immortal being of incredible power and influence, who inhabits the Astral Plane. Once, all lands were connected to each other as a single planet, but a great cataclysm split it into pieces, and now those pieces drift about as Shards within the Astral Plane. As a Master, you compete with other Masters who inhabit "the Astral" to assemble the Shards of the broken world into a new whole - but as each Master represents a different ideology or has the interests of certain races of mortals in mind, they are constantly in competition with each other; thus the world is continually reformed and broken once again.
Eador: MotBW shares almost everything in common with its precursor, including all its story, units, races, and the vast majority of its game balance too, so if you've played Genesis then this will be nothing new. Even so, the game's story and writing, even though translated from the original Russian, are actually very interesting and well-told, riding a fine line between humor and intrigue very effectively. This is a rare thing to see in a strategy game, but it keeps you motivated to return to the game and pick up the next piece of the puzzle, or get some more background information on a new Master, or other snippet of lore.
One of Eador's most interesting ideas is how your low-level actions influence the greater events and story of the game; this is accomplished with its karma system. Most actions you take while fighting other Masters for control of a Shard will steer you towards chaos or order - rely on summoning undead or hiring thieves to do your dirty work, and you will push yourself in a more chaotic direction, while the opposite is true if you help your citizens peacefully and rely on lawful units like priests and knights. Your karma will influence which Masters become your allies and enemies, which also eventually leads to multiple endings to the campaign.
Strategy Gameplay
The gameplay of Eador: MotBW is effectively split up into three different modes. The first is the Astral Plane itself, which takes the form of your mission hub. Here, you can examine the details of your empire (including which Shards you have captured), talk to the other Masters that you have met in your adventure (some of whom will refuse to speak to you based on your karma), and selecting which Shards to stage your assault on next, which start out very small but grow larger and involve more Masters simultaneously as the game goes on.
Part of claiming victory comes down to preparation, and the Astral Plane also allows you to pass turns to gain Energy, which can be spent on giving yourself starting bonuses when you invade a Shard - but as other Masters can take a Shard for every turn you spend on the Astral Plane, often it's wise not to waste time unless you really need the boost. As you conquer new Shards you will gain access to new structures and units to use, so you always have something new to look forward to.
The second level of gameplay is the strategic map view you get when you invade a Shard. Every Shard has a different type, and some even have special properties - a World of Sand is entirely covered in desert, for instance, and thus there are bigger stamina penalties on your units, while a World of Rust will make your heroes' weapons and armor corrode and break quickly, so properly choosing a strategy for the specifics of each Shard is very important.
Each Shard is arranged into a large hex grid, with each hex on the grid called a Province. A Province consists of a terrain type (swamp, desert, hills, etc.), a population of inhabitants (humans, barbarians, elves, etc.), possibly a special resource (iron, wood, etc.), and finally, any number of locations to visit, ranging from dungeons where enemies dwell, to NPC-run shops selling magical items, to special encounters that will affect the Province permanently.
You start each Shard with a Stronghold, which is your main base of operations. Unlike the Heroes series, you don't find new towns to conquer - what you start with is what you get, but if you capture an enemy's Stronghold it will become a powerful high-value Province. In your Stronghold, you build structures, recruit heroes and units, and can repair or purchase your hero's equipment. Interestingly, the Stronghold can only hold so many buildings in each district, so you'll need to plan ahead what you want to build rather than just build everything available to you. Every turn that passes, you'll gain an income in gold and gems - "normal" and "magic" currencies respectively - but depending on your expenses you could actually find yourself losing that income if you don't take steps to keep your economy balanced, which helps prevent players from growing too quickly.
To make progress on the Shard, you'll need to effectively capture a line of Provinces leading to your enemy Strongholds, and lay a siege to knock them back into the Astral Plane. However, things are rarely so clear-cut - many Provinces have those special resources that you'll want to pick up depending on the units you build. What's more, many of them will be populated by very high-level inhabitants, making it a challenge just to capture and hold even a neutral Province.
You will also need to spend some time exploring your held Provinces with your hired heroes, as doing so will help increase Province income, will lead to combat that will level up your heroes and units faster, and could provide you special bonuses, like uncovering a hidden grove full of treasure, or a gem mine. You can even uncover quests to do for the NPCs living in a given Province, which will then let you form an alliance with that group and even build their special units and buildings in your Province. Once you have a Province captured, you'll be able to hire guards for it and build buildings on it, augmenting its income and capabilities (faster movement speed through it, greater population growth, etc.); of course, picking the right investments for each Province is important, and you can easily waste your money by not taking advantage of what a Province has to offer you.
What's more, for each turn that passes, you'll have to deal with random events that can occur. Often these events are related to your previous actions on a Shard. If you receive news of necromancers raising corpses in a Province's cemetery, for example, you will have the choice to deal with it in a number of ways (usually paying gold or gems for various services), or simply ignoring it. It doesn't stop here, though. Just because you paid to have the problem solved doesn't mean it will be solved - those adventurers you hired could run away with your money, for instance, requiring you to them make another decision on how to deal with them. Furthermore, if you choose not to act on the threat of those necromancers, a few turns down the line you might receive word that they are amassing an undead army and waging war on the towns of your Province. These events are a ton of fun, have a lot of variety and unexpected twists and turns, and really make you feel like your choices matter.
If there is one complaint to make about the strategic side of the game, it's that it's quite slow-paced and can often come across as repetitive. The campaign length has been decreased in Eador: MotBW compared to Genesis, but because you start each Shard from zero, with the only progression coming from the higher-level units and buildings you gradually unlock, it's not an unfair complaint. It would have been nice to see even more unique modifiers given to Shards that result in different objectives - for example, you win for being the first to form an alliance with an NPC faction, or you have a limited number of turns to win.
Combat Gameplay
It's worth spending some time first talking about heroes and units in Eador: MotBW. Heroes come in four classes (Warrior, Scout, Wizard, Commander), and are valuable and very powerful units which involve themselves directly in combat - unlike the ones in Heroes of Might & Magic, who only cast spells and provide passive benefits to your troops. Heroes are required to conquer and explore the Provinces around the Shard, so at least one is needed from the beginning. Unlike Heroes of Might & Magic, however, the price of new heroes goes up with each one you buy, so you will never have 10 of them running around the map - usually 2-3 is enough. What's more, there are few non-combat activities to take part in, and the strength of your hero is much more closely tied to the strength of your army, which means that there is no need for "farming" heroes whose sole job is to pick up resources.
Both heroes and regular units level up over time. Experience is gained for combat, but you'll also get it for having your hero explore Provinces, which makes exploration that much more useful in the early game. With each level, a hero's attributes will go up randomly, and you'll also get to choose one of two skills to level up. These skills are specific to each type of hero, so Scouts will get skills that let them see farther on the Shard map, while Warriors will get bonus melee damage or movement speed. Standard units will similarly gain level-ups as they survive battles and kill enemies, as well as promotions, which are trade-offs that increase the unit's expenses but can make it much more powerful - though a single unit is rarely going to be a direct match for a hero.
The specific build of your hero can be further augmented by equipment, either purchased or found by defeating enemies, and it's even possible for a very powerful hero to forgo an army entirely, provided he is built he right way. Equipment does need to be periodically repaired, so this also puts a limit on how much you can go conquering and plundering in one session.
The battles in Eador: MotBW take place on a hex grid map, but unlike the strategic Shard view, the hexes are much smaller and more numerous, similar to what you'll see in the Heroes of Might & Magic series. The specific terrain of each is somewhat randomly generated, but influenced by what type of Province you're in - if you are playing on a desert Province, you can expect anything from wide open flat ground, to jungles and oases in your way. The terrain features themselves have tactical considerations in battle that must be used to your full advantage if you want to succeed. Putting your units on hills, for instance, gives them a defense bonus and ranged attack bonus, while putting them in forests will shield them from the enemy's ranged attacks.
One also has to take into account the morale and stamina of each unit - lose too much morale and your units will cower and flee, while if they run out of stamina then they won't be able to move or attack. Depending on the terrain, both of these can be exploited to your advantage - forcing an enemy army to march through a desert to reach you, for instance, could leave them exhausted and easy prey.
Last, your hero and your units will have various spells available to them. These spells often are enough to turn the tide of battle, when used effectively, and there are a wide variety of strategies open to you. One of my favorites was to build a mage hero and then unlock necromancy and summoning spells, allowing me to field huge armies of demons and zombies without having to pay the usual costs, but I could just as easily have focused on direct damage spells, or buffs and debuffs. Generally speaking the less direct route with magic is the most useful, however, so you can't simply rain fire and ice from the heavens on your enemies and expect to win without issue.
It goes almost without saying that Eador: MotBW is a slow-paced, difficult and fairly complicated game, even compared to other games of its type, and you will need to use every advantage you can get in order to succeed. You can get away with mistakes early on, but this is one of those games where mis-managing your economy, or not using the right spell at the right time, or not fielding enough heroes to deal with the threats you face, could make victory difficult if not impossible. But, when you learn how to most effectively fight your battles, and build your economy, it's extremely rewarding.
Presentation
The biggest change in Eador: MotBW over the original game boils down to presentation. The game's graphics have gone from being 2D sprites straight out of the mid-90s, to full, high-detail 3D polygonal models. For the most part, this is a positive change. While the original game's graphics had a lot of personality and charm, it's hard to deny that they still look dated, and the limited screen resolution was definitely a concern. Eador: MotBW is one of the best-looking strategy games I've seen recently, with gorgeous and lush landscapes, a watercolor art style that isn't too realistic but not too cartoony either, very accurate and dynamic lighting (with a full, albeit entirely cosmetic, day/night system), and some great spell effects and unit designs.
The game's soundtrack is also fantastic. While it's pretty much identical to the original game's, the music is full of memorable orchestral melodies that definitely take me back to the golden age of RPGs; the soundtrack alone is enough to get you through the slower parts of gameplay that can occur. It's a soundtrack I'd actually recommend listening to on its own, not just in the game itself, which is a rare thing to see these days. The sound effects themselves are less impressive - totally competent, but there's a distinct lack of any voice work or even voice samples for the human units on the battlefield.
Unfortunately, Eador: MotBW does have some regressions next to the original game. The user interface is the biggest one. While Eador: Genesis did not have the greatest UI ever, it was completely functional. Eador: MotBW replaces a lot of the easy-to-reach buttons with context-sensitive and mouse gesture-style overlays, which can be a bit of a pain to get to appear reliably. There are also a few strange conventions here and there, like the way you have to queue up buildings for construction in the Stronghold interface. It's nothing you won't get used to with time, but the cumbersome UI can definitely slow down an already slow-paced game.
The biggest single problem with Eador: MotBW, unfortunately, is one I've avoided talking about this whole time because the core game is so good, and that's the bugs. The simple fact is that Eador: MotBW was not complete when it was pushed out the door. I understand this was because of a contract signed with Valve in order to get the game put onto the Steam digital distribution platform, and I can understand why the developers wouldn't want to give up that kind of exposure and sales for the game; however it doesn't change the fact that Masters of the Broken World is simply kind of broken.
During the course of my two weeks reviewing the game, I encountered a wide variety of problems. These ranged from things like uncovering enemy heroes which had insanely high stats for their levels, making them unkillable death machines, to unwinnable Shards thanks to buggy terrain features keeping me permanently separated from the enemy's Stronghold, to karma - one of the biggest campaign features - not carrying over to the Astral Plane, to arena battles I could watch in on but not quit out of our skip, and which went on literally forever due to the combatants healing more damage than they could deal, to increasingly long turn times for AI characters as each Shard went on (taking 2-3 minutes per turn on some of the bigger ones), to simply seeing the AI give up entirely after a certain point and not even trying to fight back against my assault. In fact, as of this writing I am still not sure if the AI cheats or not, and if so, how much - for all I know it's intentional, or a bug.
It is worth pointing out that Snowbird Games have been working very hard to get the game back up to speed. They have issued at least six patches since I began to review the game upon release, and these have fixed a number of critical bugs as well as usability features. I have very rarely seen so many effective updates issued in such a relatively short period of time, so I do have to give credit to the developers for standing by their game. But, the fact remains that it clearly was an unfinished product, and that's not something that's acceptable in my mind, without full disclosure being given to those spending their money in the first place.
Conclusion
If you are in any way a fan of strategy-RPG games, ranging from Heroes of Might & Magic to Age of Wonders, or even if you enjoy turn-based strategy games such as Civilization, then I think Eador: Masters of the Broken World is just about the perfect game for you. While it is slower-paced than some of these games, and the initial difficulty level is fairly high, the amount of depth in all aspects of the game makes it a contender for one of the most interesting and fun strategy games or RPGs that I have played. The game's creator originally made Eador: Genesis as a love letter to his favorite games, and he really did succeed at making a game that combines some of the best aspects of all of them together.
However, the fact of the matter is that the game is still very buggy. It's getting better with every patch the developers release, and I have a feeling in a few months I'll be able to wholeheartedly recommend the game - but as of now, you'll have to make a decision as to whether it is worth putting up with some major bugs and glitches, some of them literally game-breaking, in order to have fun. At only $20 USD, Eador: MotBW is very affordable, and that might be the tipping point for you - but it's also worth considering that the original Eador: Genesis is nearly the same game, lacking only a few additions, balance tweaks, and of course, the updated graphics. It simply might be the better buy for you if you don't mind searching the Internet for fixes on how to get it running smoothly on your new quad-core system.
At the end of the day, Eador: Masters of the Broken World stands as a strong and highly enjoyable strategy-RPG which can easily go toe-to-toe with the best in the genre, provided you are not opposed to spending a large number of hours getting familiar with the game. With lots of replay value, an extensive campaign with multiple endings, and some very well balanced and challenging combat and strategy, Eador is the best of many worlds. It's just a shame it released in the state it did, and I can only recommend the game right now for those who have faith the bugs will be squashed in the coming months, or those who simply don't mind putting up with them.
