The Old God has left the world and the pretenders are awakening and coming out from hiding. You start the game by designing one of the pretender gods that will compete for true ascension to godhood. The type of god can range from a magically powerful arch mage to an ancient kraken or a mystic monolith that people pray to. Your pretender controls one of over sixty different nations and with the help of that nation he will spread his word and battle the other pretenders. Dominions 3 is a turn based strategy game. You can play single- or multiplayer (1 - 23 players) with simultaneous turns. There are more than 1500 different units, 600 spells and 300 magic items in the game. The game also features a medieval musical score by Erik Ask Uppmark and Anna Rynefors, both awarded the title of Musicians of the Realm by the Swedish Zornmärkeskommiten. Dominions 3 is a highly detailed game and a 300 page pdf manual is included in the download.
Proof that old school gaming lives on. Substance, depth, vision, endless replayability, Dominions 3 has it in spades.
Not for Dom3 the modern flashy graphics (though the graphics it uses have a certain charm of their own), the instant gratification and the quick congratulatory pat on the back upon completion of the pre-set and narrowly defined goals of some nebulous storyline. This game is what you make of it.
If you give it the time, what immediately comes across as an impenatrable layer of complexity, slowy but surely resolves itself into a tapestry of almost infinately variable possibilities, each unit, each spell, each magic item, each god and each nation all arrayed before you ready to be combined, arrayed and rearranged for any of a multitude of tasks that you could imagine for them.
Bound together with a rich and intriguing history revealed in the various objects descriptions throughout the games 3 ages, and possessed of that most damning and endearing quality of the turn based strategy game, be prepared to lose many an evening, day, and night to "just one more turn".
Not for the faint of heart, nor those looking for a quick fix to kill an hour or two, the more you put into it, the more it will keep giving back to you. The way strategy was always meant to be, no flash, no pomp, no hype, just the tools you have to hand and the power to let your imagination guide them to victory.