Fantasy Empires

I thought I had the same problem as AlterEgo45: the game will crash (lock up) when saving. It happened after an hour of play trying to save over my previous game: game seemed to freeze and only option was to force quit. WHAT WAS ACTUALLY HAPPENING: game was in "edit the save name" mode. However there's no blinking cursor to indicate this. Mouse does nothing while it's waiting for input. Wizard at the top is frozen. You have to hit ENTER (or edit the name) to confirm you want to keep the same game name in that slot. (similar thing happens in character creation) This is 100% against design patterns for modern software so beware.

Fantasy Empires is an ancient game from 1993. It's a Dungeons and Dragons branded turn based strategy game with realtime troop battles (a full 7 years before Shogun: Total War... and nowhere near as good!). You create a Dungeons and Dragons (Basic edition) character, pick your class (Fighter, Magic User, Cleric, Thief, Dwarf, Elf), then get to raising your army and taking over territories. There's spells and magic items, as well as a lot of different units. It's a whopping 30 years old at the time of this review. The game runs in DOSBOX and lacks proper 4:3 aspect ratio and support for any modern gaming display resolutions, hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge. It's fraught with problems, too. If you alt+tab or have a screensaver, the game will freeze and you lose your progress. It's clunky, locked resolution, but at least there's mouse support (sometimes). Fantasy Empires is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at an eye watering $10 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. Seriously, for $10 you can get a Total War game. This is 100% gouge, and that's totally uncool. As the old saying goes, you can't go home again.

I loved this game way back when... I gave it a lot of hours. It also aged fairly well as it was pretty simple as long as you simmed the battles - the real time battles were broken anyway. For me it would probably be worth $10. I wouldn't recommend it at that price to someone else unless they really loved the game in the 90's. That is, it would be worth $10 to me if it worked properly. It doesn't work properly. It plays well and then when you try to save, sometimes it will save and sometimes it will lock up and you have to close it in task manager (and it doesn't even give you the courtesy of successfully saving the game before that). I wouldn't pay a nickel for this game as is.

Great game! Still holds up fairly well despite being 30 years old. Battles are a bit hard to actually play out are a pain as the game lags badly when there are many models on screen. You can simulate battles though, so not a huge issue.

Just as hard as I remember. I keep forgetting to save. Maybe that's the hardest part. That and always building keeps. Keeping up the keeps. Upkeep....

If there was a modern recode and rerelease of this game it would be a smash hit like you rarely see. This genre practically disappeared which is a shame. Buy it at 40% off which it regularly goes to! And get Dark Legions too, from Silicon Knights.

We need a remake/sequel to this

Fantasy Empires ist eine alte Strategieperle, die man heute wirklich mit etwas Geduld angehen muss. Hat man sich aber reingefuchst, entfaltet es seinen ganz eigenen Reiz und macht überraschend viel Spaß. Klare Empfehlung!

It's a great classic turn-based theater-level fantasy wargame, set in the classic D&D world of Mystarra (BECMI). Well worth the price and Steam did a great job getting the DOS emulator working correctly (Unlike GOG did.)

Old-school AD&D Second Edition game. Decent for its time, and not a bad nostalgia run.