Whether the hype was goosed by the developers or only by the gaming media has never been resolved - and it's mostly irrelevant. It is the mediocrity of the first Age of Wonders that makes the second so amazing. Age of Wonders 2 is the highly polished final copy made from the earlier game's rough draft.

Any fan of the fantasy/strategy genre should be able to pick up Age of Wonders 2 easily. All the stuff you would expect is there, plus a whole lot more. It's just not always obvious where it is. The interface is designed more for ease of use, rather than ease of learning.

If you are truly green to this kind of game, it might be a bit tricky to get your bearings. The tutorial doesn't explain much, and the manual (although big) is missing lots of things you'd like to know. Some features and options seem to have escaped documentation and you just have to try them to see what they do. If you understand the philosophy of the epic scale fantasy strategy game, it all falls into place nicely. If this kind of game is new to you, you'll learn a lot in your first gaming sessions. Fortunately, even the hard lessons are fun.

Your in-game persona takes the form of a wizard. And while it's a fully functional unit, you won't want to send it into combat much. Instead, the wizard is most effective holed up in a wizard's tower, casting powerful spells throughout his land. Hero units, which are periodically available for hire, bring the war to your opponents - and help extend your wizard's range.

But the game is not called Heroes of the Age of Wonders; the backbone of your army - and your empire - is plain, fighting units. Able to attack or defend anything on the map, these pawns improve with combat experience and each of the 12 races has several unique units. Unlike the HOMM games, it's not about making the biggest stack of armies, it's about making the best. As you develop (and conquer) additional cities, you can produce improved, even elite, units.

What sets Age of Wonders apart from similar games is you can get up to three stacks of troops into a single battle, if you are clever. When you initiate combat, stacks adjacent to the initiating stack's hex, get brought along. The power of this feature didn't really strike me until the AI brought a stack of close combat fighters into my city, with a stack of archers right behind it.

Veterans of Age of Wonders will be pleased to see that almost all of the many features survived the upgrade to Age of Wonders 2. The few that were dropped, actual maps for little dungeons, for example aren't likely to be missed for long. A lot of features that just didn't work well in the first game have been vastly improved this time around. In the first game, for example, you needed a battering ram to break into a walled city. Now, although it helps, it's not a requirement. You can beat the doors down with conventional troops. Also worth noting is the reduced size of the battle map. Combined with the closer placement of opposing units, it turns the combat system from boring and tedious to an exciting and tense experience. You'll want to command more battles yourself, and you'll have more fun doing it.

The game ships with a long, difficult campaign, several freestanding scenarios and a campaign builder for ambitious players. What's not included is a random scenario creator. After you play the game a while, it's fairly obvious that a hand made scenario will be much better, because there's just too much stuff available to make decent random levels. A small scenario is decent sized, while a huge one tends to be epic in proportions.

The AI is very good, and the developers promise it does not cheat. Although it's really good at what it does, it's can't do everything. I have been unable to get the AI to build cities from scratch, even when set up situations where that is the most logical thing to do. It's great at stealing cities from you though, and has no trouble developing them once it's got some.

And while eye-candy means less in strategy games than other genres, it's worth noting that the spell effects are about as good as you can expect to see in a turn-based strategy. The sounds are nice and sharp too. You'd be hard pressed to find a better looking tile-based, strategy game.

Because the focus of AOW2 is more on capture and conquest than empire building, it has a certain war game feel. Without the empire building aspects of Master of Magic, it's hard to see AOW2 as the true heir to that legacy.

That's irrelevant, though, as Age of Wonders 2 has moved the series from being an "also ran" fantasy strategy clone to becoming a great game in it's own right.

-Phil Conrad