Magic & Mayhem

The year is 1999, the monitor's humming, the Sound Blaster is beeping from the speakers, and I'm trying to figure out how the hell to defeat my opponent's sorcerer who just wiped out half my army with a single spell. Magic & Mayhem from Mythos Games — a title that flew a bit under the radar around here, but anyone who caught it back then spent more nights with it than they'd care to admit.

The game builds on a classic story foundation: young wizard Cornelius sets out to find his uncle Lucan to become his apprentice, but instead of a warm welcome, he finds an empty house and a mystery to unravel. The setting is fantasy without major surprises — a medieval world full of magic, monsters, and old rivalries. Genre-wise, it's real-time strategy with an emphasis on wizardry, closer to Warcraft than to a pure wargame.

The heart of the game is assembling your spell book before each mission. You can't take everything — you choose a limited number of spells, and this selection determines how the entire battle unfolds. You summon units, hurl fireballs, manipulate terrain. Units behave mostly autonomously, so much of the work comes down to knowing when and where to cast the right spell. The controls are acceptable for the time, though occasionally the interface feels like it's deliberately throwing obstacles in your way — especially when rapidly switching between spells in the middle of combat.

What Mythos Games did well was atmosphere. The maps have character, each location looks distinct, and terrain actually influences tactics. The music served its purpose without unnecessary fanfare. On the flip side, the enemy AI hasn't aged gracefully — nowadays you'll breeze through it once you figure out a couple of tried-and-tested spell combinations. The story unfolds decently by the standards of the time, but don't expect a narrative that'll move you to tears today.

I remember Magic & Mayhem as a game that had more ideas than resources to polish them all. The spell book system was fresh in 1999 and still works as a foundation for engaging decisions. Today I'd recommend it to anyone who loves RTS games from the turn of the millennium and doesn't mind that the shine's worn off in places. It does not run in the browser here — the page carries a description, screenshots and the release data.