The Game
Myth III: The Wolf Age is a strategy game with a storyline that follows a set of characters in the Land of Myth. The game is made of a series of missions where you control a team made up of soldiers and wizards of different types to hack away and otherwise destroy various evil creatures. You direct the various troops by selecting one or more and move them through the terrain. Battle comes as you approach enemies and you direct your attacks. Gameplay is from an aerial, angled perspective that lets you see a fairly wide scope of area. You can adjust camera zoom and pan to get a broader view, which you will find you do a lot of. It's very helpful to assign different troops to keys rather than having to rely on selecting them with the mouse, especially in the thick of combat. Rather than the strategy games where you have workers who build up your resources, you start each level with a set amount of fighters, although you may gain additional troops during the level.

The Wolf Age is a good continuation of the Myth series. It advances the level of graphics realism, at the expense of requiring a faster computer than the older games. In storyline, it is a prequel to the earlier Myth and Myth II: the Fallen Lords games, set some 800 years or so before the other games.

I've got an 800 Mhz LCD iMac that the family fights over, and an old Wallstreet that nobody but me wants to use. While I could play the game on the Wallstreet, the slowness, jerkiness, and coarse graphics made it pretty unpleasant to play. What a difference in appearance when I switched to the iMac. Play was smooth and characters were very detailed. However, even with the faster machine, the ending in some of the cut-away scenes was lost. This became important since directions on what to do in the next level are only presented in the cut scene spoken by the narrator. On the level I most recently attempted, I was never sure what the final goal was since the cut scene would conclude before all the speaking was done. Other levels also required quite a bit of my wandering around to find the objective of the mission, but that may have been my own obtuseness.

Initial setup was a little difficult when the disk couldn't be read at first, but some washing with soap and water cleared up the smudge or whatever caused the problem. I then downloaded the update to the game and play commenced. The game does not provide much built-in help. Besides the lack of a summary of mission, as mentioned above, some of the keyboard commands are not listed anywhere within the game. For example, the function keys for speeding up or slowing down action (critical with my age-impaired reaction time) were not listed in the game, although I remembered they should exist from the older games. The documentation includes some aid, but key definitions should be listed (if not editable) within the game.

The game allows online playing against opponents on the internet, but I haven't tried it yet. I expect that there is a lively community competing against each other, but I'm not at a point where I want to embarrass myself out there. Instead, I've enjoyed it as a chance to seek out and destroy ugly looking fiends, while keeping my troops alive till the end of the level.

Summary
Myth III: The Wolf Age is a good strategy game without the time-consumption of using workers to plant crops, build buildings, make troops, etc. Visual control gives a good view of the battleground and camera direction is pretty easily controlled. Storyline moves apace, giving a variety of missions. Computer minimum requirements are heftier than previous Myth games, but the graphics are nice. Overall, I recommend it if you enjoyed the earlier games, or games such as Warcraft or Civilization.

Pros

• Good graphics
• Similar play to previous Myth games
• Good fun fighting bad guys

Cons

• Higher computer requirements
• Inadequate in-game help
• Difficult selection of characters with mouse

Overall Rating

4 out of 5 Mice