DLC REVIEW: ‘Age of Wonders 4: Primal Fury’ Continues Expand A Stellar Strategy Game (PC)

The beasts have been unleashed in the latest content pack of Age of Wonders 4, “Primal Fury.” This is the third DLC in the Age of Wonders 4 Expansion Pass and follows the same structure as others. This new DLC will be familiar to players with the Expansion Pass since Age of Wonders 4: Primal Fury adds additional new tomes of magic, two new physical forms, new realm content, a new culture, new mounts (the sabretooth and crocodile), new spells, and more general features. “Primal Fury,” much like its predecessors, “Dragon Dawn” and “Empires and Ashes,” is here to expand gameplay options and player customization. Which all generally add more to the game’s replayability.

“Primal Fury” allows players to become one with their wild side to control the environment around them. The new Primal Culture introduced in the DLC highlights this as one with the environment theme. This Primal Culture is quite unique and brings a ton of flavor for players to play with. Like the Feudalistic Culture, players can choose a “subculture” of this culture that gives different versions. The seven “Subcultures” represent Primal Animals, like the Storm Crow, Glacial Mammoth, and more spirit of your favorite animal. Each of those Primal Animals links to a different terrain and damage type, impacting how you play from building to combat.

Primal Culture is about controlling the terrain around you to grant buffs to your cities, new wildlife units, and the new fearsome Stormbringer units, like elephants, advantages in navigating the world map. There are other faction traits and race transformation spells that connect the player to the terrain already. However, they are limiting since they are realm-specific or affinity-specific, which forces players into a specific path in order to utilize terraforming spells.

For example, making a faction that can make farms in the snow and travel better in the snow can be tons of fun. However, when you don’t play in a realm with snow, your faction ends up with a huge disadvantage. This is one of the biggest things that Primal Culture helps you overcome. It also allows for more terrain-focused factions to be played in more realms. Age of Wonders 4: Primal Fury also adds new elements to the game: Primal Dens.

Dens are around the world map linked to the different Primal Animals for players to capture and channel their power to help terraform the land around them. This encourages expansion, first and foremost, with each Primal Animal “subculture” giving the player unique buildings. These buildings help enhance culture in cities and the environment. But the best part is that the Dens also passively terraform the land in their domain.

With Dens, if you are playing as a snow-based faction, you can play in a jungle or ash realm without impact because your Throne City will begin terraforming to snow. Thus, any bonuses that the faction gets from snow can be used to your advantage immediately.  Whether that is building a farm or having your units move more quickly. This also leads to interesting interactions with other factions in a single game. Someone may be terraforming snow all around, while another faction is terraforming the swamp, leading to some intriguing gameplay.

This new animistic and environmental Primal Culture wouldn’t suffice if there weren’t some beast to go with it. There are six new wildlife and compositions adding to the variety of units players will encounter in the game. Plus, there are also two new physical forms: Lupine and Goatkin. Lupine is an anthropomorphic dog/wolf, while the Goatkin forms are a goat version, more akin to forest-dwelling satyrs. Much like the Lizardfolk and the Warbird Avian Form from previous DLCs, these new forms come with new traits that add to the customizing of unique factions.

Two need additional Tomes in the Age of Wonders 4: Primal Fury DLC. The Tome of Fey Mists adds the environmental theme, allowing players to conjure up mists to protect and strengthen their armies. The Tome of the Stormborne gives players control over storms and a major race transformation of the fearsome Nagas form.” These two tomes add more options for players and expand the ever-growing tome library in Age of Wonders 4.

The Tome of Stormborne plays into the new realm in the “Primal Fury” pack, the Stormwreathed Isles. As the name implies, the terrain is a Tier III realm with fey-inhabited islands and storms with two distinct “Primal Fury” features. The first is the Hostile Seas effect, which makes Sea Storms a permanent feature at all times. With the exploration of a large piece of the game to see different areas of the map, the realm of Hostile Seas impacts how easy it is to send out scouting units.

The Hostile Seas make traveling difficult, causing units to lose health and giving them other debuffs for each turn they embark on the seas. Players need to pay attention to their scouts, and “auto-exploring” is almost impossible as your scouts will most likely, unfortunately, kill themselves from traveling the seas.

The second feature is the “Primal Dispute”—much like in the “Dragon Dawn” DLC realm, The Ashen War—there is a violent dispute between two Rulers, Godir Serena and Nimue. Players must pick between either choosing a Goddess’s side or abstaining—and let war figure it out. The realm does have the win condition where players must either defeat one Ruler and alliance with the other or defeat both Rulers.

In addition to the new DLC, a new Wolf Update is also coming to Age of Wonders 4. A free update, it launches with the Primal Fury content pack and adds quality of life and gameplay improvements. These large free updates are standard now and released alongside a content pack. So, while they are not in the content pack, they do make gameplay changes and thus are worth touching on. There are four significant items in the Wolf Update, along with general bells and whistles quality of life updates.

The first gameplay element of the free Wolf Update is War Bounties. These allow players to take or create bounties for others to complete. Both player and AI Rulers can place bounties on cities, outposts, or victory condition structures that offer completion rewards. That said, the biggest update takes place in Hero Recruitment.

The content update also raises the Hero Cap. Formerly linked to the number of cities owned, that structure is now officially going away. Instead, the Hero Cap increases automatically throughout the game, no matter how many cities a player has. Players can also speed this up by spending imperium to increase their Hero Cap immediately. To balance this change, a new Hero Stack debuff called “Leadership Clash” occurs now when players have more than one hero in any given army.

The last two significant features in the Wolf Update are the reworked Necromancy system and Pantheon Expansion. The former diversifies Raise Skeletal variants among other reworks. The latter allows Ascended Rulers the option to pick an Ascension Trait to take with them along all the Race Transformations from their game. This makes reusing a Ruler enjoyable and gives players the feel that the Rulers were played with before.

Overall, Age of Wonders 4: Primal Fury gives players new content that is the same but different to dive into in this award-winning fantasy strategy title. This is the third DLC, and while these DLCs all add the same type of items, such as new Tomes, cultures, races, and more, Triumph Studios and Paradox Interactive have done a great job of making each one feel unique.

I have enjoyed how each DLC has enhanced one or two of the affinities for players. The environmental manipulation and utilizing terrain in Age of Wonders 4 have always been there. Here, though, players were “forced” into that path to be able to utilize it. The new Primal Culture allows players to interact with terrain regardless of their realm or affinity focus.

Age of Wonders 4: Primal Fury is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and on the Xbox Game Pass, and PC now as part of the Age of Wonders 4 Expansion Pass.