Battle Mages lets you play a wizard who is in control of a group of units. The wizard-entity can be trained in different aspects of wizardry and commanding which will allow him to cast more spells or train more troops. The catch is that the wizard can't stray too far from him troops or else he'll loose mana continiously, meaning your camera is always centered on the troops that you control. You'll be following your troops around maps where you'll take up quests to gain new items and experience, the former used to upgrade troops and the latter used to upgrade both the wizard and the troops. Most maps feature towns that need to be defended from hostile towns and as you're going along minding your own business you'll often be called back to defend a town. Once a map is finished, you keep your unit and wizard progress and move on to the next map where the story continues. Although the idea of the game is great, it just plays so incredibly slowly. You can easily spend several hours on a map and all you will really be doing is watching your troops move from place to place. Even speeding up time doesn't really make much of a difference, it still takes far too long. Only for die-hard fantasty-RTS/RPG fans with a lot of time on their hands.

I'm no strategy gamer but did enjoy this title. It's very minimal and without "micro-management", the main reason why I did enjoy playing. RPG elements are related to your character dev. with "military" skills or more "magic" oriented ones. Choose wisely at first but up to the end of the adventure you should be able to rack up enough exp to max out all your main stats. There's a good selection of spells to learn but you'll most likely end up using the same ones after a while (the "freezing" spell is quite useful in advanced maps). Graphics and sounds are OK but don't expect very detailed landscapes or troops. Talking of troops, there's a good variety and most unit can be upgraded once. One negative note; your army will be "renewed" most of the time at the beginning of a new map, sadly losing some good equipment and upgraded troops in the process. All in all a good, somewhat easy and average length game for the price but not targeted at the experienced “strategy” gamer looking for a complex title.