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Planar Conquest - FInally a MoM-alike worth playing - but fatally flawed

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I picked up this title a while ago, and at first was very excited. It's clear that somebody finally actually made a MoM-alike that's actually a lot like MoM. Unlike most of the early attempts, you are the big wizard in the tower, not on the battlefield, and your decisions about magic are the central focus of strategy.

The game setup screens had me really excited. It's presented differently but the choices are extremely similar to those in MoM - anything that wouldn't be infringing is practically verbatim, but the presentation is clearer and cleaner. The big change is the larger and interlocking array of spell schools, which are more or less lifted from recent games (IIRC it's straight out of Sorcerer King). In fact, the most striking thing about these screens is that they are still basically low-resolution, though higher than the ancient original. I think they are 1024x768x16.

And the gameplay itself is very similar, with some new ideas stolen from the HoMM series, which works really well.

But after a few minutes of play, it all falls apart because the developers didn't consider the usability of their interface. They were obviously too enthused about making their main screen 3D and "pretty" (if you like busy and low-resolution rendering). It ends up being confusing and visually cluttered, with too little information easily available and too much useless detail. The view angle is so shallow that you can't really get a feel for the actual map geometry, and that it can be very easy to click on the wrong square if there's something on the square in front of it.

And the clicking. Argh. There are no map tooltips, and the right mouse button does nothing. Double-clicking while an army is active means move there, while double-clicking while no army is active gives a popup with what should be on the tooltip. This virtually guarantees that you will end up sending an army to some object that you just wanted to figure out the identity of.

To some extent, the horrible mouse UI is explained by this being intended as a multi-platform release - except that even on a touch screen this would be the wrong way to do things. The tooltip should come up on the first tap, and the second tap on the same location should be confirmation - the way most touch-screen strategy games work.

I can't think of a better example in my experience of a potentially-great game that was made unplayable by purely UI choices. War of Magic had bad gameplay and only a mediocre UI; Distant Worlds had a lot of opaque concepts and slow gameplay that I am pretty sure would have ruined the game even if the UI was better.

I'm glad I bought this game to support a true MoM-alike, but goodness, people, did you ever get it playtested by somebody objective?

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