There's a lot of fancy tinsel in the margins of a game that is ultimately about having a big enough army to win. It was either somewhere around AoW3 or Planetfall where the series stopped being compared to HoMM in favor of being compared to Civilization, which I don't think is entirely fair, but right now AoW is maybe trying to have its cake and eat it too, with mixed results. There's some solid meat and potatoes in there, but they're all tossed into a mushy, flavorless stew. The pantheon is a major regression from Planetfall's Galactic Empire mode, and the game is peppered with UI/UX shortcomings and minor bugs that pull me out of it.
It's an easy enough problem to ignore in the early game where the brisk pace can cover for it, but once things slow down a bit, I find myself remembering that this just isn't a nice place to be, which tires me out and pushes me away - compare the sterile landscapes of AoW4 to the beautiful and properly fantastical visuals of AoW2 (this problem is a holdover from AoW3, which reminded me of the rough transition-to-3D suffered by the similar Heroes of Might and Magic series). City development is in a good place, the tactical combat is as good as ever, and different culture/tome combos feel sufficiently different, but I'm finding the whole thing completely charmless.
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