Holy good goddamn. It's the year 2000 and I'm playing WarCraft on my Game Boy.
Well, not exactly WarCraft. Blizzard is too busy missing deadlines on WC3 to worry about porting their original flagship series over to the World's Most Successful Portable Gaming Platform Now and Forever. Warlocked is WarCraft shrunk down in every way and steam-ironed into a super cute, super smooth portable real time strategy mini-epic. And I hope Blizzard is pissed that they didn't think of it first. (Even though, technically, they did.)
Assuming you're aware of how WarCraft works, I won't bother to explain Warlocked's two opposing factions, city-building, fog of war, mining-and-deforesting and dragons. It's all here, and it's all very familiar.
You just wouldn't think that this would be possible, given the Game Boy's limited control scheme. Well, the interface of Warlock is deliciously simple. You have a cursor hand - which, by the way, is the slickest-scrolling cursor I've ever seen on a GB game - that you wave over your units. You select with the A button and then wave the cursor over something else. If the cursor changes into a different icon, that means your selected unit can perform an action... mining gold, attacking, etc. Warlocked has distilled the silly, over-hotkeyed Blizzard paradigm into clear, red wine.
Hell, they even managed to squeeze in a team grouping feature. Plus a surprisingly wide selection of voice samples for clicking on guys and giving orders.
Naturally, you're not going to see the complexities of the pc hit here... there's no boats or workshops or catapults (and you can only have one dragon at a time). But you get just enough cutesy, super-deformed units to fill your dot matrix screen and wage miniature bloody wars.
Given that pokemon has officially passed into continuous franchise status, we even get a slight poke-influence. As you run from level to level, you'll rescue/capture randomly powered wizards that will join your army. Certain wizzes will only work the humans; others solely for beasts... and some you'll only get by trading wizards with another Game Boy player. And they can die permanently, which gives me the chills.
The wizards themselves range from mildly interesting (Icewiz turns enemies into melting snowmen) to incredibly invaluable (Mysticwiz heals beast units). You can only summon 2 to 3 wizards per level, so wiz management is pretty important in the higher levels. Choosing the right wizards for your attack plan will really speed things up and save you precious resources.
There are two ways to play multiplayer. Via link cable, you can play a vs. game on one of several multiplayer maps. Exactly like WarCraft's battle.net. Via infrared port, you can exchange pre-manufactured armies and then pit your home team against the visitors. In this mode, if you win, you get to absorb all the pieces of the enemy army. But if you lose, your army is deleted.
Graphically, Warlocked is wonderfully colorful - an obvious Game Boy Color-only cart. The units themselves look like they just walked out of a Zelda game... and they have great pain animations, so you can tell at a glance who's about to bite the pixel.
The game is disappointingly quick; only 25 or so levels per faction. I suspect the designers were planning on you getting a lot of play out of the multiplayer modes (and poker and tile puzzles, see sidebar!) And the little armies tend to become easily confused on long walking commands, so you have to step them through troublesome terrain.
Those complaints aside, it is a wonder to see an rts on Game Boy. It's a shining example of the possibilities this genre can achieve in such a small scale. I think this game is a prelude to the advances we'll see on the next Game Boy iteration.
