Age of Wonders 4 is a 4X turn-based strategy game developed by Triumph Studios and published by Paradox Interactive. It’s the latest instalment in the Age of Wonders series, following the 2019 release of Age of Wonders: Planetfall.

Age of Wonders 4 is set in the realm of Magehaven, a magical plain in between worlds where godlike beings known as Godir roam. When passing through Magehaven’s World Gate, Godir can access different worlds on the Astral Plane and play a role in the mortal empires down below. Whether it’s ruling an empire, fighting alongside allies, or exploring different lands, Godir are always in search of new knowledge and experiences. Once they’ve played their role on earth, Godir ascend back to the Pantheon, where they keep an eye on everything happening down on the Astral Plane.

An Age of Wonders 4 playthrough starts before your first unit even moves across the world map. The game allows you to design your very own faction from scratch, picking unique traits that define your people, their looks, their origin story, and their magical affinity. There are six affinities in Age of Wonder 4: Order, Chaos, Nature, Materium, Astral, and Shadow.

As well as designing your faction, you can design your realm, meaning the map you’ll be playing on once you start your game. A realm can be customised from the size of landmass to the climate, fauna, and flora that inhabit the land. You can take your pick from realms including frozen plains, bone-dry deserts, and even a volcanic landscape that changes shape over the course of your playthrough. Inhabitants range from your run-of-the-mill wild animals to demonic forces and undead fiends. Environmental effects allow you to make changes to any other free cities appearing on the map. These are neutral cities that can be negotiated with, much like city-states in Civilization. You can also alter the map’s natural environment further, whether it’s including more volcanoes or increasing the occurrence of arctic blizzards.

The most important things you’ll choose before starting a game, however, are your ruler and a starting magic tome. Your ruler is the hero unit that will head up your entire empire. You can choose from two categories of ruler when you start a game: a chosen champion, who has been elected by your people, or a wizard king. Both come with different bonuses in-game: while a champion has a bonus of relationships with free cities, for example, a wizard king will come with a bonus of mana production – the resource that you need to cast different kinds of spells.

Tomes of Magic, in turn, function in a similar way to research in Civilization or Technology in Humankind, and allow you to unlock new spells, abilities, and summoned units over time. The pace at which you can research new spells depends on your level of knowledge, a resource generated by your cities that can be increased by building city structures like libraries and research posts. The spells you unlock can include ones that can summon magical units to pad out your military, slow down enemy units or help break through their defences, and ones that can be used by a hero on the battlefield. Once all of that is done, you’re ready to start your game.

While this level of customisation may be a lot for some players, the sheer level of variety when it comes to options for determining your realm, your people’s backstory, and picking your ruler, is impressive. Not only does it allow players to mix and match gameplay modifiers, it also gives diverse players a range of ways to express themselves. If endless customisation is not your cup of tea, though, don’t fret: the game also comes with many pre-made factions to choose from, from cursed Toadlings to Shadowborn Elves. No matter your experience level, you’re bound to find a faction to suit your preferences in Age of Wonders 4.

Once you start your game, the core mechanics of Age of Wonders 4 are much like other titles in the turn-based 4X genre. Set on a tile-based map, you explore your surroundings, found cities, manage resources, and focus on building a vast and legendary empire to outshine all others. Similar to titles like Civilization or Humankind, there are different ways to achieve victory: you can either go the military route and ensure you control the biggest surface area on the map, outlast all others by having the highest score at the end of the game, or obtain the magic victory by building a seed, root, and heart magical province improvement in your cities and becoming the most powerful magic ruler in the realm. One of the most interesting aspects about finishing a game in Age Wonders 4, is that your hero will ‘ascend to the pantheon’. This means that you’ll unlock pantheon points depending on how well they did. Then, they’ll become available as a recruitable hero unit in later games, too.

Unit-wise, Age of Wonders 4 comes with two different types of military units: generic military units, which include shield, support, and melee units, which are able to defend, attack, or support other troops, and hero units. Hero units function in a similar way to generals in the Total War franchise; they have the ability to head up armies, govern cities, and use spells and abilities in battle. As you progress through the game, you’ll have the opportunity to hire new heroes or add enemy heroes to your ranks, but only after you’ve defeated them in battle and had them do time in your capital’s prison.

In between gameplay, you’ll receive trade offers from other rulers and requests from any vassal cities under your control. Sometimes, the head of a vassal city might approach you with a question about their empire – in one of our playthroughs, a ruler asked what to do with their unruly child – or other times they may simply ask you to attend a feast in their realm. Your available choices will depend on your affinity and your individual hero’s skills. If you’re unable to make a positive choice, your relationship with a city-state will be negatively affected. On top of this, you’ll also need to keep an eye on your relationship with other rulers. While the diplomacy system in the game is relatively standard – you can form alliances, denounce leaders, or trade resources – other rulers may have their own agenda. If so, they can choose to fabricate a grievance against you before taking you to war. Whether you want to fight it out through diplomacy or in battle is up to you.

In this sense, the most impressive aspect of Age of Wonders 4 is perhaps also its weakness in a way: there’s so much to explore, consider, and keep track of in the game that the sheer number of menus that track your magic tomes research, empire skills, diplomacy, victory progress, and city resources can feel a tad unwieldy at times. Especially for newcomers to the series, this level of content may be intimidating, particularly at first glance. Added to this, selecting units and forming armies can sometimes be clunky, too: removing units from merged armies, for example, isn’t possible. Instead, you’ll have to disband the units you want to remove from your army before adding different ones.

That said though, the game comes with extensive tooltips and accessible tutorials to get players up to speed, and the number of concepts in Age of Wonders 4 speaks to its ambition as a game. Age of Wonders 4 weaves together intricate systems that, at their best, feel responsive and fresh. Several elements in the game are directly informed by the choices you make early on, which injects a nice dose of roleplay into the game’s core gameplay experience. The result feels dynamic and accessible without ever tipping over into being overly didactic, which undoubtedly speaks to Age of Wonders 4’s clever design.