Eador: Masters of the Broken World Overview

Snowbird Games’ turn-based strategy/RPG Eador: Masters of the Broken World was free on Steam not so long ago, which prompted the editors over at PCGamesN to pick the game up and give it a spin. This resulted in an article that offers a general overview of the game’s Heroes of Might and Magic-inspired mechanics and notes a certain satisfying degree of difficulty. An excerpt:

If you’ve put in the hours with Heroes of Might & Magic in its many forms, there’s actually a lot less to learn about Eador than it would appear. You control a Hero on the world map who can be levelled up and equipped with new gear, and most importantly can recruit armies to fight alongside them. This basic principle, along with the side-on hex grid of the turn-based combat itself, works just like Heroes. You go in with a bigger and better army, you generally prevail by virtue of numerical advantage. And if you don’t have the edge on manpower, your Hero’s spellbook can thin their ranks a bit with magic missiles and the like. Simple.

But the thing with Heroes is that it could get a bit formulaic after a while, in ways its developers probably never intended. If you had access to Archangels, recruited from Griffin Conservatories and Portals of Glory, let’s face it, you’d basically won the campaign. Similarly, if you learned the elusive Town Portal spell you could teleport between any allied towns, negating the need to drop coin on big town garrisons and gaining supernatural map traversal speed. Again, you were basically invincible.

‘Basically invincible’ aren’t words that float around in your psychological lexicon at any point while playing Eador. There are simply too many variables for that, and you get the sense that it’s exactly as intended: there’s no formula for success. For starters, the titular Broken World is split into shards, each with their own quite particular requirements and priorities. You’re not trying to dominate one big, rolling map but instead a series of self-contained scenarios. What works on one shard – Warrior Hero, lots of swordsmen – might be useless in the next. More than that, it might not even work so well on the next hex tile. So you don’t really develop a ‘go-to’ strategy. And you figure that out by dying over and over again.