Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

Warlocked delivers a surprisingly deep real-time strategy (RTS) experience on the Game Boy Color, striking a balance between resource management, base building, and tactical combat. Players alternately step into the boots of Queen Azarel’s elite Human forces or Chief Zog’s primal Beast horde, each side offering 30 distinct missions. Early levels ease you into the game’s mechanics with straightforward objectives—gather gold, chop wood, and train units—before ramping up the challenge with multi-pronged objectives and hidden wizard encounters.

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What truly sets Warlocked apart is its magical twist. Scattered across battle maps are more than 20 unique wizards, each wielding a single, game-changing spell. Whether you prefer converting enemy units to your cause, unleashing skeleton armies, or turning foes into harmless chickens, these arcane abilities add a compelling layer of strategy. Timing a spell right before a critical clash can quickly turn the tide, encouraging players to scout maps thoroughly and plan their wizard hunts.

The pacing of missions remains brisk, alternating between exploratory skirmishes and tense siege scenarios. Base-building feels intuitive on the Boy Color’s button layout: one button selects structures, another queues units, and a simple cursor lets you navigate the battlefield. The game avoids overwhelming you with too many building types—focusing on a core set of forts, lumber mills, and gold mines—allowing you to concentrate on tactics rather than micromanagement.

For those craving head-to-head competition, Warlocked supports two-player battles via the Game Link Cable. As you progress through the single-player campaign, new battle maps unlock for use in multiplayer, providing fresh arenas for strategic jousts. This system rewards dedicated solo play by granting more diverse and balanced maps when you challenge a friend—extending the game’s lifespan well beyond the initial 60 missions.

Additionally, Warlocked’s infra-red trading feature lets you build custom armies from saved single-player resources and exchange them with friends. It’s a clever way to share your hard-earned squads, experiment with different unit compositions, and challenge each other’s design philosophies. This personal-army mode transforms Warlocked into a portable tabletop RTS, where each battle can be as unpredictable and personalized as you like.

Graphics

For a handheld title released in the early 2000s, Warlocked boasts remarkably vibrant and detailed visuals. The Game Boy Color’s limited palette is used to great effect: lush green forests, scorched earth battlefields, and murky swamp sections are all distinctly shaded, making map types easy to identify. Each faction has its own color scheme—icy blues and silvers for the Humans, earthy browns and fiery reds for the Beasts—so you never lose track of your units amidst the chaos.

Unit sprites are small but well-animated, conveying movement and combat through a handful of frames. Infantry troops march confidently, siege engines lumber forward, and wizards stand out with robes and glowing staffs. When spells are cast, the screen briefly flickers with subtle color shifts or particle effects—a neat touch that heightens the sense of magical power without slowing down gameplay.

Buildings and terrain features are crisply defined, ensuring that placements and choke points are always clear. Wooden palisades, stone keeps, and magical towers each have unique shapes and hues, helping players rapidly assess map layouts. Even on the Boy Color’s tiny screen, battlefield icons and menus remain legible, thanks to thoughtful UI design that avoids clutter.

Multiplayer maps maintain the same graphical fidelity as single-player levels, with balanced layouts and symmetrical designs that look just as polished in link-cable duels. The trade-off for Warlocked’s visual richness is occasional slowdown during large-scale battles, though these hiccups are rare and seldom detract from the overall experience.

Overall, Warlocked’s graphics punch well above their weight class, proving that a handheld RTS need not compromise on visual clarity or style. The game’s aesthetic choices contribute directly to both its playability and its charm, making each mission feel like a miniature fantasy war unfolding in your pocket.

Story

Warlocked frames its conflict around a classic fantasy struggle: Queen Azarel’s Human kingdom versus Chief Zog’s Beast horde. Though the narrative is not heavily cinematic—there are no fully voiced cutscenes—it unfurls through mission briefings and in-game text, painting a clear picture of each side’s motivations. Azarel fights to reclaim her realm from Bestial invaders, while Zog seeks to crush Human civilization under relentless claw and fang.

The campaign arcs for both factions are well-paced, offering parallel but contrasting perspectives on the same war. Human missions often focus on disciplined defense, fortifying keeps and rescuing villagers, whereas Beast stages emphasize raiding, ambushes, and brutal frontal assaults. Playing through both sides reveals small story flourishes—betrayals, magical discoveries, and escalating stakes—that keep the narrative momentum alive across 60 total missions.

While the story is straightforward, the inclusion of wizard characters adds color and intrigue. Snippets of lore accompany each new spellcaster you encounter, hinting at rivalries, hidden agendas, and ancient evils. This flavor text is optional but rewarding, transforming the quest for powerful wizards into its own side narrative.

Between missions, you’ll read dispatches detailing the aftermath of your victories or defeats, lending weight to your strategic decisions. Even without fully animated cutscenes, Warlocked’s story manages to evoke a sense of epic scale, as each successful siege feels like a meaningful blow against your enemy’s war effort.

Ultimately, the narrative may not rival high-budget console epics, but it provides just enough context and motivation to make every mission feel consequential. The clear conflict and diverse mission goals create a satisfying throughline that encourages players to see both sides of the war to its dramatic conclusion.

Overall Experience

Warlocked stands as one of the standout strategy titles on the Game Boy Color, offering an enthralling mix of base-building, resource gathering, and magical warfare. Its dual campaigns provide ample content, while the quest for hidden wizards ensures that each mission contains an element of exploration and surprise. The intuitive controls and well-designed interface make complex RTS mechanics accessible on a handheld device.

Multiplayer features—via Game Link Cable and infrared trading—elevate the replay value significantly. Whether you’re duking it out on a freshly unlocked map or swapping your favorite army compositions with a friend, Warlocked fosters a sense of community and competition that few portable titles of its era could match. Trading custom-built armies with friends turns each skirmish into a personal showdown of strategic creativity.

While the graphics and audio are inherently constrained by the Game Boy Color hardware, the developers have maximized the system’s capabilities, delivering clear visuals, smooth animations, and atmospheric sound effects. Minor slowdowns during large engagements are a small price to pay for the scale of battles on offer.

The game’s narrative, though not groundbreaking, effectively frames the conflict and motivates players to push through 60 missions of escalating difficulty. The magical twist—powerful one-shot spells and a cast of over 20 wizards—keeps the gameplay fresh from the first mission to the last.

In sum, Warlocked is a must-own for fans of strategy games and retro handheld experiences alike. It proves that with smart design and a few magical surprises, an RTS can thrive on the Game Boy Color, providing hours of tactical enjoyment and cooperative fun. Whether you’re a seasoned strategist or new to the genre, Warlocked delivers a portable war front you’ll want to revisit time and again.

Retro Replay Score

8.1/10