We dived into the domestic strategy hybrid where you turn from wizard to god and checked how much of that divine fantasy Ironward delivers already in early access.
Who doesn’t love a good power fantasy? Starting from humble beginnings, expanding, trampling opponents and eventually standing on top of the world while everyone else is eating out of your hand. It is the core of every good 4X or grand strategy game. But rarely does that sense of power build on magic instead of steel, and that’s exactly why Atre: Dominance Wars interested me more than I expected.
Behind the game is the home studio Ironward, the same one that brought us quite solid tactical titles from the Red Solstice series. Now, it seems, they have rolled up their sleeves to the end: in addition to jumping into futuristic waters with the ZeroSpace game, with Atreus they are sailing into a fantastic environment for the first time.
It is a somewhat unusual hybrid – part real-time strategy game, part turn-based game, and part god-game where you grow from an ordinary wizard into a deity. And having just recently spent evenings with Heroes of Might and Magic, the thought of what the home team could get out of something that aimed for that same feeling was more than enough to make me bite.
Buried in runes
First of all, you need to set expectations. Like any early access game, Atre is not a complete game in terms of content. You currently have the first three campaign missions, skirmishes against AI opponents, online multiplayer for up to 32 players, and a map maker.
Let’s start with what is currently the thinnest – stories. You play as a sorcerer who has ascended to become an Elder, a semi-divine being whose goal is to learn new magic, subjugate rivals, and eventually ascend to god status himself. All of this takes place in a fractured fantasy world that is slowly being consumed by a phenomenon called The Merge.
The campaign gradually introduces you to the mechanics through three missions, but the plot itself is quite basic so far and serves more as an excuse for a tutorial than a reason to continue. I leave room for the full campaign to realize its potential, but judging by the first three missions, I’m skeptical. It is certainly a game whose mythology is intriguing, but it lacks specific characters that the player would have something to cling to. The avatars you control are mechanically interesting, but emotionally empty, so the world feels more like a skeleton waiting to be dressed.
The bigger problem is actually the way the game teaches you to play it. The story in these types of games usually serves as an extended tutorial, which is not a lucky thing here, given that you only have three missions. So, if you jump right into the skirmish, you will be very confused, and the campaign will only teach you the bare minimum. The bulk of the tutorial and much of the key information is hidden in menus that you have to read without in-game context. You can be like me and think you’ll get by with the knowledge of other, similar games, but the game has some really unique systems and mechanics where you need a good understanding of the material to have any success.
The good news is that the Ironward team is well aware of this. They even went to the trouble of publishing detailed instructions for all important mechanics on the game’s Steam page – at least until they are adequately implemented in the game itself. An out-of-game guide is never an ideal solution, but at least it shows that the problem is being actively worked on, which in early access is half the battle won.
From dusk till dawn
Once you break through that initial wall of misunderstanding, you discover that underneath is a really good strategy game that has two layers. The real-time one where you cast spells, direct heroes and their armies to explore the map and conquer settlements, and the turn-based one when two heroes meet or when you attack a building.
The real-time segment of the game is truly a living contagion. The settlements you conquer become the backbone of your empire: in them and the surrounding villages you build buildings that produce units, population and, most importantly, mana. Magic mana is practically everything here: you use it to build, recruit, research new spells and units, and, of course, cast spells. Along the way, you level up the heroes and push them into different specializations.
Each party thus requires a different plan: will you press early with an army, slowly build mana and wait for stronger spells, or pump the population and squeeze the opponent in the late game? Skirmish quickly gets you into that grind of “one more move” (even though you’re not technically playing with moves) that even Heroes of Might and Magic wouldn’t be ashamed of.
Turn-based combat is there for clashing heroes and their armies. Before the conflict, you arrange the units from left to right, thereby also determining the order in which they will attack, and in each round you choose which one strikes first and which opposing unit. One golden rule is to place rangers behind melees, but beyond that there are almost no positioning considerations. Once deployed, the units can no longer move or have any effective range, so it’s mostly down to clicking on opposing armies with no real dynamics.
The only aspect that gives some mechanical depth is the fact that units are not cut down to the last soldier, but their morale is reduced until they flee the battlefield. On paper, it sounds elegant and even realistic – if you conquer a city with a large but poorly motivated army, you will not exterminate it, but force it to flee. In practice, however, there is a somewhat shallow logic of rock, paper and scissors, so the fights quickly become repetitive, especially when you clear the same type of enemy in the same building for the hundredth time. There’s also auto-combat that skips you having to manually do the skirmishes, and the fact that I enjoyed using it speaks volumes – when you don’t mind skipping a system, it’s usually not what carries the game.
It would be significantly better if the artificial intelligence was smarter. On the lightest difficulty setting, she is strikingly passive and will almost never take any of your cities, even when she is many times more powerful than you. At higher settings, it’s almost as if he’s cheating, and on some fora, in a short time interval, he can build a huge army without penalty in his settlements and tirelessly cast spells as if he has unlimited mana. At the same time, he attacks without real logic and without the feeling that there is some kind of meaningful plan behind everything. Admittedly, the developer has already announced a major intervention in this matter, so we won’t have to wait long for repairs.
What’s great about the whole system is that power fantasy aspect at the heart of the magic system. Magics are researched, leveled and combined, and in the later stages they begin to come together in real synergies that can mean the difference between defeat and victory. This is not a fantasy RTS where wizards are a generic aspect of a fantasy setting. Magic is involved in the economy, settlement expansion, the military, and the long-term plan. With it, you can temporarily improve your own units, weaken your opponent’s, speed up certain aspects of production in settlements, or cast devastating elemental effects on the environment and opposing heroes. I admit that I haven’t fully explored all its depths myself, but it can already be seen that it could be one of the strongest things the game has to offer.
The highlight of the entire system is Ascension. There, by completing special tasks that support one of the deities, you can rise to the status of a god and open the door between worlds, and during this period you get absolute power and magic that literally changes the map itself. That feeling is exactly the fantasy of power that makes me drool personally – the moment when you go from being a humble wizard to a force that shapes the world.
This is somewhat balanced by the fact that the door can also miss powerful opponents who will complicate your life more than mundane AI opponents. All of this is further spiced up by The Merge, a mechanic that gradually swallows up the playing area like in a battle royale game, forcing you to constantly adapt to new conditions and paths on the map.
Considering how flawed the AI is right now, multiplayer strikes me as a far more interesting way to really test this strategy. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anyone to try it with, and there were no open games with strangers, so I can’t make a final judgment about that part. But the game supports up to 32 players, and all that depth of avatars, mana and magic is most promising precisely when someone who knows what they’re doing sits across the table.
Bang for buck!
Atre: Dominance Wars is already a good strategy game that needs only a few fixes to be great. The ideas are there, but so is the execution: the strategic core is solid, the magic system is excellent and gives a real sense of power, and the skirmish knows how to glue you to the chair long into the night – and all this is signed by a home studio that clearly knows what it’s doing. What remains is the tuning: the story is only a hint so far, the combat and artificial intelligence cry out for refinement, and the first few hours of learning can be more discouraging than it should be.
With a price of 25 euros, I will recommend this interesting hybrid without any problems – as long as you are aware that it currently comes with all the usual pains of early access. If you want a rounded campaign and a complete package, add it to your wish list and come back in a few months. But if you’re ready to learn all of its systems yourself and put up with some unpolishedness, Atre can already swallow your evening before you blink, and when it comes to strategy, that’s exactly the most reliable sign that something’s right.