Planar Conquest

Planar Conquest is a turn-based 4X fantasy strategy game in which you build armies, research spells, and expand across interconnected planes of existence as one of eight playable races. The core loop is familiar to anyone who spent time with the classic Master of Magic: settle cities, recruit units, level up your Sorcerer Lord, and eventually grind your rivals into dust through military conquest or magical dominance. The multi-plane structure is the headline feature, giving you an overworld plus additional dimensional layers to explore, raid for dungeon loot, and eventually control. On paper, that is a compelling premise. The depth of decision-making is where Planar Conquest earns its most honest praise. Spell research trees are genuinely broad, and choosing whether to invest in summoning godly creatures versus buffing your standing armies versus developing city infrastructure creates real strategic tension across a full campaign. The D20 OGL combat system gives individual battles a tabletop-adjacent feel, with unit stats, terrain, and spell casting all mattering in ways that reward attention. Race selection also meaningfully changes your opening build order: a high-elf run is a slow economic grind toward late-game spell superiority, while a chaos-heavy faction pushes you toward early aggression before economy pulls rivals ahead. For newcomers to the genre, the honest answer is that the tutorial is thin. It covers the mechanical basics but leaves you to discover a lot of important interaction rules through failure. If you have any prior time with Master of Magic or Eador, the genre shorthand will carry you. If this is your entry point into multi-plane 4X fantasy, expect a rough first few hours. The AI is another persistent problem. On standard difficulty settings it plays passively, allowing you to consolidate power without much pressure, and it rarely leverages the multi-plane mechanics with the same aggression a human opponent would. Cranking difficulty is the standard workaround, but that substitutes stat inflation for genuine tactical challenge. Technically, the game received post-launch patches that addressed some stability issues, but the mixed Steam review score reflects a launch that struggled to meet expectations set by the Master of Magic legacy it was openly chasing. The mod ecosystem is minimal, which limits long-term replayability compared to genre competitors with active community tooling. At its best, a full campaign with a well-chosen race and Sorcerer Lord build can run fifty hours-plus and deliver the satisfying late-game snowball that strategy fans grind toward. At its worst, it is an unpolished tribute act that never quite closes the gap on its inspiration. If you have exhausted Master of Magic and want something scratching a similar itch on modern hardware, Planar Conquest is a serviceable option with genuine mechanical depth underneath the rough edges. Keep your expectations calibrated to an indie release with a small team budget and you will find more to like than the Metacritic score suggests.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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