The strategy/RPG mixture Rage of Mages is one of the most popular games of 1998 that has played a big role in changing the course of the entire video game industry…

… In Russian-speaking countries.

And while it was also popular in some neighboring lands like Poland, internationally Rage of Mages didn’t even win Gamespot’s ‘Best Game No One Played’ award. At least it WAS nominated.

To be fair the Gamespot review in particular was actually pretty positive, which makes sense given the nomination, but overall the game’s international reception both among the press and players was pretty mixed at best. 

One of the reasons why Rage of Mages was much better received locally is that after Tetris it was, if not the first, then at least one of the first video games developed in the region to get a widespread global release. Not to mention it was made in just 15 months and released literally against all odds.

It’s the definition of a makeshift game. Everyone was gathered up in a four-room apartment, there was an agreement with a kind old lady neighbor to cook for everyone while the members of the team would help her with getting products on the market and take everything up to her floor, her name by the way is in the game’s credits, all while the founder of the entire endeavor was crashing every dev gathering AND publisher office possible in the US directly to sign a contract and get a stable budget necessary for a global release. Of course, at the time even the Russian-speaking player base didn’t know any of that, but after the game came out they still felt a sense of communal pride which has influenced their appreciation for it.

What’s more important for the discrepancy in reception is that many international outlets, and therefore players reading them, didn’t know how to categorize Rage of Mages. Surprisingly enough it was beyond explanation, going as far as being called a console-style RPG and compared unfavorably to Final Fantasy VII.

The resemblance is uncanny.

But we can notice some other curious reception differences. For example, international outlets would focus on how similar Rage of Mages was to Warcraft II, while local ones would instead point out that impression was deceiving as the two games have barely anything in common, except maybe for the fact that both were developed by companies with snowy/wintery names. It should be noted that locally everyone pronounced the development team of Rage of Mages as ‘Neevahl’, being transliterated into Russian.

Funnily enough though, according to developer interviews, in 1997 the Rage of Mages tech demo was actually shown to Blizzard – and they were so impressed by how the team managed to combine the RTS and RPG genres together successfully that they said it could even be turned into Warcraft III. Though due to Blizzard developing everything in-house no collaboration happened. We all know that in the future the company would go on to make their own Warcraft III RTS/RPG mix, which was considerably different in its priorities, so of course without confirmation it is impossible to know if the Rage of Mages showing had some influence on that decision and direction, if any at all.

But I think it’s nice that Blizzard’s developers encouraged such genre experimentation even back in the day when not all international players would. Many felt that mixing the two genres was not appropriate, and an RPG that controls like an RTS can’t work or won’t satisfy any fan base. Russian-speaking players, on the other hand, were absolutely fine with it. This difference in perception and expectations is of course caused by an absolutely separate evolution of video game culture in the post-soviet space.

Console gaming wasn’t really a thing. There was a popular NES bootleg called Dendy that appeared in the early 90s, and at some point a clone of Sega Mega Drive a bit less so, but this was mostly a PC space, which of course influenced a lot the types of games that were played.

Then, the local populace was mostly unaware of the genre differentiation that got accepted internationally. People were coming up with their own definitions. For example, what’s traditionally known as ‘adventure games’ were called Quests. Because that’s the word most often found in Sierra Entertainment’s titles and they were REALLY beloved. But this moniker applied mostly to text or point and click games – the more actiony third-person titles were called ‘brodilki’, or ‘walkers’ if translated directly. “Action/adventure”? What the hell is that? And this ‘walker’ title would apply to many games that others would know as ‘platformers’. People just didn’t think about genres the same way.

And because there was absolutely zero presence of consoles in the vein of Nintendo 64, while platforms like PlayStation wouldn’t get popularized until much later and even then in a mostly pirated form, seemingly seminal titles like Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, and heck, the already mentioned once Final Fantasy VII, were pretty much fully ignored alongside any of their potential influences on the local game dev space.

So there were no perceived genre standards or commonly accepted principles, which meant nobody bothered with figuring out if Rage of Mages is an RPG or RTS or how fitting RTS mechanics are in RPGs… everyone just went, oh, it’s got role-playing mechanics and elements from strategy games. Cool, let’s do this. And so they immersed themselves into the world of Allods, which is actually part of the game’s original Russian title – ‘Allods: The Seal of Mystery’.

‘Allod’ is a pretty specific term, historically meaning an inalienable piece of land with full exclusive ownership, one that doesn’t have another lord reigning over them. However, and I’m not sure where this information comes from as I couldn’t find any concrete source, but it is said that if the owner of the land would leave their Allod, they would lose their right of ownership. This might have been an aspect that would appear later as part of a transition between allods and fiefs, I’m not well-versed enough on the topic to say for certain.

Whatever the case, this is the meaning that Rage of Mages has upped to the extreme. As part of its fantasy world’s backstory, a cataclysm has shattered the planet into tons of different islands that were being consumed by the Astral. The Great Mages have found a way to hold the Astral back, but at the cost of having to stay on their islands forever, lest they start getting consumed again, hence the name Allods. I suppose the apocalyptic nature of the lore is what has led to the international Rage of Mages title, though to be quite honest I don’t fully understand how exactly it’s supposed to fit.

While the world is now shattered into tons of floating islands, communication between them still persists, and travel is possible thanks to portal magic. That’s how at least two warring Empires have continued their existence for over six centuries – Kania and Kadagan. They both have a particular interest in the neutral Allod of Umoir, the biggest one there is as its Great Mage Skrakan was responsible for discovering the knowledge of how to shield the lands from Astral in the first place. However, for several dozens of years now Umoir has been under some powerful spell that doesn’t let anyone or anything out, though it still lets people in. It is absolutely unknown what is happening on the island, but the Empires being Empires of course think that Skrakan has discovered a powerful weapon or spell, and have begun sending expeditions with the purpose of retrieving it. We are going to be playing as the members of the latest such expedition from the Empire of Kania, and throughout our journey we will unravel the mystery of Umoir.

This aspect of taking a down-to-earth grounded notion and then twisting it into something more surreal is what gives the game’s worldbuilding so much charm. There’s no better example than one of the first enemies you encounter. I present to you… the Squirrel. You don’t expect a squirrel to be an enemy in a game, but it is. You don’t expect a squirrel to be huge, but it is. And you don’t expect a squirrel to look like it’s related to a rabid dog on crack. But it does.

And yet it’s not cartoony, or overly stylized. It’s a very realistic crazy huge goggle-eyed squirrel that wants to crack your nuts. Perhaps the actual gameplay graphics are not particularly pleasing, aesthetically speaking. While players in 1998 were impressed by the technological implementation, we can’t deny that there’s a lot of brown all over the place, the units, humanoid at least, look like they could be from absolutely any game out there, animations are choppy unless you crank the speed up to the max, it’s… not that good-looking of a game, honestly. Wouldn’t blame anyone who’d want to call it generic just based on that.

The music is sure to raise some eyebrows too.

The soundtrack never really settles on a particular style, and any single song can change the entire core of its melody at any point – be it tonality, rhythm or instruments. Plus there’s not that many music tracks so they might start feeling repetitive as you play more. 

But they will still entrench themselves into your mind, playing in your head over and over again as well even though you might not necessarily like the tunes in the first place.

Still, I can’t deny there’s a certain charm to that ambiance.

There’s grunge, something unsettling, the music is epic but also not quite right – like the world of the game itself. Allods are held together only by the will of the Great Mages. Something happens to the Mage, everyone dies. Nobody can feel truly safe. The gameplay part might look somewhat generic, but the music actually does a great job of providing a particular sense of identity to the game, constant tension and a certain kind of weirdness.

As do the close-up portraits of various units shown on the right side of the screen. You look at them and what might feel standard as a unit sprite gets its own specific flair in portrait form, with somewhat of a slavic undertone to boot. And that’s not only because the game’s Ogres look like some bearded hairy drunkard named Boris you’d see every day on the street – the human characters’ art style and their clothing clearly draws inspiration from the culture of the region the developers were from.

Writing too, although you wouldn’t quite tell that from the English translation. It’s not like in the original version everyone talks like they’re from Kyivan Rus, but there’s a lot of particularly distinct dialect that wasn’t attempted to be represented in translation. At least the voice acting wasn’t totally butchered I guess, but it’s nowhere near the quality of the original version.

This might sound weird, but while in the 90s and early 2000s many English video games would struggle to find professional voice talent, for games that were developed or translated into Russian this amateur approach was actually the exception. Games would employ many professional actors who were known for their movies, voice dubs as well as years and years of experience in theatrical performance. This elevates the perception of even the most minor of characters. Listen to this gate guard who has just a single paragraph of text which we hear only if we try to exit the main city without a quest.

[Russian Voice Acting]

At this point understanding the meaning is not important, but just based on the voice, intonation, clarity, even this random guard sounds larger than life. Now, let’s listen to the English version.

[English Voice Acting]

What’s more, even though the English translation has retained the meaning of the dialogue, it did so very directly, without any pizzazz. And this is the case pretty much all across the board, which also has led to the loss of humor and sarcastic irony. So I suppose I can add the English translation and voice acting to the list of reasons why Rage of Mages reception varies across regions. If Russian-speaking players got distinctive text that’s acted out like a theatre play, international gamers got a dry version of the Simpsons characters instead. Though for what it’s worth, with the GOG version it is really easy to add Russian voice acting to the English version by taking the Speech.RES file from one language, copying it somewhere, and then replacing the file after switching languages.

It doesn’t fix the issue with the text translation, but it’s something, and I would say it’s important as these aspects really influence the enjoyment of the world, atmosphere AND narrative. Even though the premise is interesting and the world-building aspects are really cool, without this larger than life feeling brought by writing and voices, what we’re left with is paper-thin characters and a plot that makes sense only barely, being full of contrivances and coincidences.

TECHNICALLY Rage of Mages is a bit of a detective story since we need to understand why Umoir is in the position it’s in, and also TECHNICALLY information unravels bit by bit until we get the full picture, but it all just… happens. There’s barely any foreshadowing for anything, which makes it difficult to appreciate any pay-offs.

For example, you receive a mission to deliver a cure from a plague to a village. And it just so happens that its denizens know the location of a treasure in a place that’s sacred to them, but as thanks for saving the village they let you know where it’s located so you could take it. While going to find the treasure, you just happen to stumble upon the knight Brian hunting for bandits. He wasn’t a part of the Kanian expedition but joins your party still, because it turns out that some time ago Brian just happened to find a dead body with a letter that happened to be sent to Skrakan himself, which said the envoy with the letter is also in possession of a Magic Cloak that would undo any curse cast upon Skrakan and a Scroll to activate that cloak. But when Brian found the body both the Cloak and the Scroll were already taken by bandits, so now you have to find them. When you receive a seemingly unrelated plea for help with lifting the siege on a castle, at the end of the mission one of the attackers who runs away just so happens to be wearing that exact cloak, and… well, you get the drift.

There’s too many coincidences, which is especially noticeable when the writing is as straightforward and focusing more on transmitting information than flair as it is in the English version. Because of this coincidental style of story progression even moments that are supposed to be as powerful as BETRAYAL fall flat.

Out of the four members of the Kanian expedition sent to Umoir, one happens to be a traitor. Since at the beginning you choose to play as any of these four characters, who exactly the traitor is depends on that initial choice – the story is linear but the roles are switched around so you yourself will never be the traitor. And that betrayal literally comes out of nowhere – there’s been practically zero foreshadowing that would help understand the reasoning behind that action, and after the mission it’s not going to be mentioned ever again, even though you would spend a huge chunk of the game with that character, equipping and leveling them up. At least the betrayal works from that progression perspective, and honestly it’s a very brave and admirable choice to make that happen. It really is a shocking stab in the back due to all the time investment you get to put into the characters you control.

And I’m NOT kidding when I say TIME investment. Rage of Mages has experience points, but it doesn’t have a concept of levels per se. Each character has four main attributes, but outside of equipping enhanced items, after setting the attributes up you can’t change them in any way. So you’re directly responsible only for the ones of your main character you choose at the beginning.

However, what every character DOES have, is skill points. With different weapon categories – swords, axes, bludgeon-types, pikes and ranged if it’s a warrior archetype, or with the five schools of magic if it’s, respectively, a mage – fire, water, earth, air and astral. Every successful hit with the respective attack type adds XP that affects only the skill in question. So put it simply – hit with swords a lot, sword skill points increase, nothing else.

And herein lies the first big unbalanced part of the game’s mechanics and we didn’t even go that deep yet. To level a skill up, you need to perform the related move successfully. For not all, but most of their spells, mages don’t need to have specific targets on the map. This means that as a mage, you can just cast spells on the ground and get XP points. 

Fun times! And even though enemies have different resistances to various schools of magic depending on their type, when a spell IS cast on them it can’t miss regardless of the effectiveness and will give XP.

Warriors CAN miss. Because each of their attacks makes a roll based on the offense stat, the result of which has to be higher than the enemy’s defense stat. And only in the case when the weapon hits will a warrior character actually get XP. And this works only on enemies. If you try to be a smartass and hit your own units, the game won’t reward you with any points. So the only way to grind it out as a warrior is if you manage to find and somehow break the AI of an enemy unit to be able to hit them continuously without any of you dying, especially the party member as such a death would lead to a game over. While the AI does try to be advanced and act relentlessly, to the point that some enemies can follow you across half the map while chasing, and retreating when health is low is part of standard behavior, breaking it is not THAT tricky. Making sure everyone survives though is.

Now, you might ask, WHY does one need to grind anyway? Rage of Mages is a linear game with some optional quests, every mission takes place on its own map with a set amount of enemy units on it which means there’s a concrete finite amount of potential XP points one can receive. SURELY everything was calculated accordingly? No. It’s a first game of its kind the dev team worked on and it was made in 15 months. It wasn’t. It REALLY wasn’t.

Every now and then, a new main character joins your party, the group that traveled to Umoir got separated when teleporting in but the others didn’t lose time and would progress without us. Their XP and skill stats upon joining are a representation of what kind of power level your characters are expected to have by this point. And without extra grinding, even if you do kill ABSOLUTELY every enemy on each map you visited, your XP and skill stats undoubtedly are going to be twice smaller.

Now, to be fair, there is a way to avoid grinding – with money. In the hub city of Plagat which you visit between missions, there’s a school where you can pay to increase any skill you want. The prices though eventually get REALLY ridiculous, and even if you spend absolutely everything you have, it won’t be enough to reach the expected skill level either.

One might think that maybe spending money in the shop on equipment is a better, more sensible investment. But that’s only partially true. You see, the way the loot system works in Rage of Mages, is that with some exceptions, the items you receive from bags dropped by humanoid enemies are EXACTLY what they had equipped. Which might not always be the highest quality gear available at the moment, but it’s still oftentimes useful. You can sell it if you don’t need it, and more importantly – Rage of Mages puts powerful relative to your current level items as exploration rewards. So why do you need to spend tons of money on some really high quality gear like a Crystal set, when you can find one and a half of full sets worth of crystal equipment by exploring? With enchantments on them to boot.

It’s not that you shouldn’t buy anything in the store. There’s books that can teach your Mages spells, it might be worth investing in weapons for warriors to make sure your offense stat gets higher, but spending money on whole sets will eventually make you feel like you’ve wasted it since you found something better during a mission. Also, on a side note, the inventory and equipment interface overall is fine and easy to use, but can feel a bit clunky because to compare items you always have to point at them and wait for a stat pop-up to show-up, there’s no other easy way to directly compare things. And sometimes there are small items like amulets which are hidden under other character clothes so you can’t even point directly at the amulet you’re wearing without taking armor off or switching amulets around.

Sometimes stuff like this can get annoying, though to be fair eventually I found myself more often than not worrying about just the big main equipment and not the small one, and the reason for that is one thing that you SHOULD spend money on instead of training or store – mercenaries. As you progress through the game, the city tavern is going to get increasingly more populated with warrior and mage squads that you can hire for a single mission. Now, these mercs don’t have XP and you can’t equip them the way you want. But, they upgrade their skills and items between main missions themselves, always having the appropriate power level relative to the overall enemy difficulty at this point in progression. Of course they also become more expensive, but thanks to all the loot you find that you can sell, and in general the money you get as quest rewards, usually you can still not only get all you’ve spent on mercenaries back, but also end the mission with a profit.

And you don’t lose the game when a mercenary dies, besides – their squad gets gradually regenerated while completing main missions anyway. The supposed downside to mercenaries is the fact that, given the skill system specifics, if they’re doing the work for your characters then your party doesn’t get XP. But considering that XP is somewhat problematic anyway – who cares, right? For a big chunk of the game your party consists of 3 warriors and 2 mages. That’s just too many characters to level up, there’s not enough enemies OR money to provide a steady supply of experience points to everyone. So why do you have to bother with trying to use tactics and strategy to defeat enemies using pretty much constantly underleveled characters… when you can just hire some appropriately leveled dudes and dudettes and just smash through opposition that way? Side note, Allods are a world of equal opportunity – among enemies and mercenaries you’re going to encounter if not as many then at least almost as many women as you would men, both as mages and warriors – both melee and archers.

And once you discover the power of these mercenaries, you can just complete most levels by pointing to an undiscovered location on the map and asking them to go there in attack mode so they’d fight everything they encounter on the way. It gets a bit boring, even though ironically once you start abusing that system it’s difficult to go back. Ah, wonders of dominant strategies.

It is a shame, because even though the level design is not necessarily something consistently amazing, there’s a lot of things that try to make the whole experience more tactical and varied when you play with a smaller team. On a core level the aspects of terrain type and elevation matter a lot as both affect the speed of units. Elevation also greatly influences the line of sight. Time of day though doesn’t, because it’s a toggle-able graphical option so it’s not involved in any way mechanically. Then of course there’s various flanking opportunities and choke points like bridges that the game wants you to take advantage of.

But then there’s a number of special decisions that are ingrained in the quest design of the missions. A map might have ogres that are REALLY strong and kill you very easily, but there’s a potion which makes them weaker. To lift a siege you need to find a way to dispel a curse put on a dragon who’s friend to the ruler of the castle – after which together with a swarm of bats he flies to assist his ally. Need to defeat a heavily fortified bandit camp? Well there’s a captured villager who has an army of tamed turtles that you can control with an amulet you have to retrieve from bandits who stole it. Or… you just hire a bunch of mercs and stomp through the mission with the fastest game speed possible because there’s not much need for micro-management in this situation. Forming groups with shortcut numbers, setting up formations, tracking everyone’s health to make sure they retreat when necessary, casting spells depending on the situation, also with shortcut assignment? Who needs that! Two buttons and you’re good, no worries with making sure that your heroes attack the appropriate targets, don’t stand still while getting hit, or don’t auto-heal because you forgot to remove the staff from them so they auto-attack instead.

All that being said, Rage of Mages is not devoid of smart ideas. Traps that you can get past with invisibility. Trolls that you can defeat by taking advantage of their large size and the fact that they can’t fit into dense forests or small ravines. You can lure different monsters to fight with each other because enemies aren’t all friends. All these elements create a sense of immersion – it’s not just stats and numbers, there IS a role-playing aspect to the experience, creativity that you can employ.

It’s just Rage of Mages didn’t find a way to balance that with the RTS part, the ability to command big armies. But do you even need big armies? Rage of Mages doesn’t know the answer. Despite the lack of XP sources, most of its levels are designed to be approachable with just your hero squad. One of the notable exceptions is the very last level, where you have to defeat the Demon from the Outer World – an absolutely unsurprising reason for the Umoir lockdown, but without any explanation why Skrakan has experimented with portals to the Outer World in the first place. The Demon has enslaved under his will tons of creatures of the highest level variation, and their massive amount makes you wonder if this mission was ever designed to be completed without mercenaries. But it’s the last quest, so you can just spend ALL your money and hire ALL the mercenaries to go after the Demon with a massive army of your own.

It definitely works from an atmospheric perspective, and it’s the only mission where a large amount of mercenaries doesn’t feel like it robs you of tactical possibilities. Except when you actually reach the Demon in question, who was clearly designed for a fight with but a small squad of heroes. Despite his boasting, a merc army takes him down like a punk.

And the line your heroes say after that victory feels surprisingly appropriate for the entire Rage of Mages experience. The feeling of exhaustion. Which I didn’t feel when I played this game as a child. I loved it so much and completed it so many times. In our second grade drawing class we had a freeform topic once, and I drew a scene inspired by Allods. The teacher was so impressed with the originality of every creature I depicted that I didn’t have the courage to tell them it didn’t come from my imagination, but rather was taken from a video game I love to play. And I didn’t know it at the time, but Rage of Mages was an important step towards the beginning of my game developer journey.

But the thing is, I realize now that back in the day I never completed Rage of Mages without cheat codes. I suppose that’s why I didn’t feel exhausted – when met with some poor balancing on the part of the game I’d just cheat my way through and continue enjoying it without any regrets. Perhaps there’s something that could be learned from the child me’s attitude. I just embraced the creative and previously unseen aspects of the game while ignoring everything that was blocking that, charting an epic tale through the world of Allods that doesn’t stop at the single player campaign.

What has definitely helped to make the game a phenomenon, well in local regions at least, is its multiplayer – the only remnant of the game’s original incredibly ambitious concept as an MMO RTS. The mode, which you can play by yourself too because everyone can create a server, is simplistic and unassuming. You create a character, go on a map, kill enemies to gain XP, find loot and money to buy more equipment, go on a different more difficult map, rinse and repeat. It’s just progression for the sake of progression, though because you can actually replay maps over and over you never get to the situation where you just don’t know how to get more XP like in single-player. Besides, having someone else to play with definitely helped with the game’s longevity as well as the formation of the community surrounding it.

Which has a considerable amount of international players as well, I don’t want you to think that the game was absolutely shunned. Just that globally it was considered far weirder than in the regions close to the development studio. Though ironically, as much as Rage of Mages was a phenomenon there, it was also forgotten relatively quickly. After some time, everyone would still remember and appreciate it, but barely anyone would play it. That’s not because people instantly became tired of the game, no. It’s just that within a year, it got a sequel. And oh boy. Remember how I said that in Russian-speaking countries and neighboring regions Rage of Mages was one of the most popular games of its time? Yeah, that’s nothing compared to the popularity of the sequel. But that’s a discussion for another time.