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In addition to Monolith's Lithtech games, such as Shogo: Mobile Armor Division and Blood 2, they also acquired several games from other companies. These included Get Medieval and Rage of Mages.

Get Medieval suffered from several problems. The largest among them by far, however, was that the graphics were primitive but still taxed even a Pentium 233, causing it to lag when a lot of small undetailed monsters were on the screen. This is no good for a Gauntlet clone. The multiplayer component, due to this lagging and other lagging inherent to multiplayer games, was next to useless. I must admit, I didn't have a very high view of Monolith after playing Get Medieval.

Rage of Mages unfortunately suffers from the same problem in the single-player game. The graphics seem fairly low-quality, yet the game runs at a sluggish pace. The multiplayer, fortunately, seems no more laggy than the single-player game. If the game were sold as an RPG, this slow pace might be acceptable, but it's more of an action/rpg/strategy weird hybrid, with not enough interaction for an RPG, not enough options for a strategy game, and not enough speed for an action game. Don't get me wrong, Rage of Mages is in no way a bad game. It just seems like it tries to be too many things at once, and therefore can't really excel at any of them. Read on, and I'll try to explain this in more detail.

Gameplay:

You start by choosing either a fighter or a mage, either male or female. You can then customize your stats, and choose a starting skill. For fighters, this is a weapon preference, and for mages a magic preference. This skill will start at level 10 (no small feat to obtain through gameplay), but all other skills will start at 0. Note that fighters will never learn magic, and mages will never learn weaponry.

Gameplay is fairly simple. You walk around the map, and click on things to attack them. If you're a mage, you can select a spell to cast, otherwise as a fighter you'll simply attack with whatever weapon you happen to have equipped. The chance to hit is dependent on your skill with the weapon or magic you're using...at the beginning of the game, you'll miss a LOT. Skills are increased by a successful hit on an enemy with the appropriate weapon or magic, and the skill will actually go up a level when a certain amount of XP is earned through use of that skill. I spent over an hour trading arrow shots with an orc, retreating when weak, and raising my bow skill from 2 to 6 so I could actually kill it. Healing is automatic. If you're doing something, you'll heal more slowly than if you sit still and wait. Buildings appear to have hit points, but in my experience can only be killed with a mage.

After creating your character, you embark on the required first two quests. These quests are the same for all characters. Upon completing the tasks, which are of the "drag this person to this town without them dying" variety, and can be quite easily solved by leaving the escortee at the starting location and clearing out the entire map first, you reach the town, and the "real" game starts.

In town, you can visit the weapon shop, and sell the loot you picked up off dead bodies to buy yourself better weapons and armor. You can also obtain quests, NPC heroes, and mercenaries. Mercenaries cost money and cannot have their equipment taken or upgraded. Heroes are generally free, and can have their equipment changed, but only appear at set intervals. Quests will send you to a new area, and you can choose which quest to undertake.

This mix of strategy, RPG, and action has its faults. Your character moves VERY sluggishly...I had to turn the game speed to maximum for the game to be bearable to play. Even then, it will take a while to get where you're trying to go. For an action game, it's not paced correctly. To survive, your character has to spend far too long "pacing" (raising your skills by fighting continuously), reminiscent of the old Final Fantasy games. And for an RPG, there's a distressing lack of a coherent plotline near the beginning of the game, which may cause players expecting an RPG to give up in frustration. Also, unlike most non-Ultima VIII rpgs, there is very little interaction with the world around you. For example, in the second quest I came across a magic well, which I could click on as if it were a character or building. I tried everything possible to do something with the well, to no avail. I also came across a man hanging from a gallows in an abandoned village. Why was he there? We don't know...the game provides no background as to these sorts of things when you come across them. I am left to wonder why these things were put in the game if they serve no purpose.

I also have to deduct points for the horrible translation. Many supposedly humorous tidbits appear at various stages of the game, but they're not very funny, and not translated from the original Russian very well (this game was originally the Russian game Allods). It really loses something in the translation.

Multiplayer is somewhat better. You can run a server and either play on it or simply host it. Other players then join and create games, selecting one of the special multiplayer maps. There are no "quests" per se in multiplayer, just killing, upgrading, then killing some more. However, it's so simple it's fun. A major bug in the release version, where if the server died, his equipment would vanish instead of dropping in a bag, has been fixed in the version 1.1 patch. It's unfortunate that a bug of this magnitude was not caught in testing. All in all, multiplayer Rage of Mages is a lot like Diablo, and can be fun with a bunch of friends.

Longevity:

The single player game, by virtue of the sheer length of time it takes to get your skills to a usable level, will take many hours to complete. Once you've completed it with a fighter, you can try again with a mage for a different experience. The multiplayer component makes Rage of Mages into an interesting diversion that can be picked up anytime for a bit of fun, as long as you don't delete your characters (and don't cheat...). And at only around a 200 meg install under FAT32, it can sit idle on your hard drive until ready to be played again.

Controls:

Controlling Rage of Mages is very easy and intuitive. You can select as many of your characters as you want, and left-click to order them to attack a target, protect a target, or "swarm", which tells them to attack everything evil in a certain radius of a target. Units can be grouped together with hotkeys, a la Red Alert or Starcraft. Unfortunately, no unit can belong to more than one hotkey group at a time, so you can't make a group of all your heroes, all your mercenaries, and a large group of all your units...the engine just doesn't support this. I found it difficult to transfer items from one character to another...they usually ended up falling to the ground instead of transferring to their inventory, so I had to have the other guy pick it up. Also, units don't always respond instantly to your commands, which can result in their untimely demise if, say, they're being shot at. These may seem like minor things, but they add up and can be rather annoying in the heat of battle.

Graphics:

The graphics in Rage of Mages are nothing spectacular. In the 640x480 default resolution, the ground textures look "pixelated", somewhat like the walls in the original Quake (before GLQuake). The trees look somewhat blocky as well.

On the plus side, the character graphics are fairly well done. A "paper doll" portrait of your character serves as an inventory interface, and clearly shows what weapons and armor are equipped. If you look closely (they're kinda small), you can see the same details on your character in the main view - he'll look different depending on what armor he's wearing or what weapon he's wielding. This holds true for monsters as well, and is a handy way to judge what you're up against. Overall, I'd have to call the graphics functional, but not extraordinary.

Sound:

The sound is even more mediocre than the graphics. Sound effects are not very distinctive...it's difficult to tell the orc's "oof" from your character's "oof", so you can't rely on the sounds for help in combat. The voice acting, as is typical in most games nowadays, is mediocre.

The music is loud and seems very out of place for this kind of game. It feels like it would fit more in something like Quake than in an action/RPG. RPGs demand more subdued music than is available in Rage of Mages. If I had to pick a weak point of RoM, it would be the sound.

Overall:

Pure action fans or pure RPG fans will both be disappointed by this game, as it does not do enough for either genre. MUD/UO players used to monotonous, repetitive skill raising might not mind that aspect of Rage of Mages, and for them it would be somewhat more enjoyable than it was for me. I can tell that this isn't a horrible game, it just requires a lot more patience than it makes me want to put into it. There isn't a lot trying to keep me in Allods (the world of Rage of Mages). If the characters moved faster, skills were a bit easier to increase, and there was more interaction with the world, I'd have enjoyed it a lot more. If you have a bunch of people on a LAN who would enjoy some mindless hack-and-slash, Diablo style, then Rage of Mages would be an excellent choice. Otherwise, I might not recommend it. However, it is unique, and will hopefully spawn more attempts at this sort of game. As it stands, it won't be everyone's cup of tea, and I'd recommend trying the demo at www.rageofmages.com out before buying the game.