I got Warlock and Age of Wonders and like Warlock better. Age of Wonders disappointed me. If there are real improvements from Shadow magic, they seem superficial: the campaign is slow and boring and pointless (oh noes my brother is dead, better clear these random bandits out of an unrelated ruin!) At the same time Warlock makes me nostalgic for Fall from Heaven 2.
Warlock feels a lot like Civ 5 and a lot like the effort to remake Fall from Heaven 2 for the Civ 5 engine (those of you who don't know Fall from Heaven, the critically acclaimed Beyond the Sword mod: get it now: get Civ IV and Beyond the Sword (can't be more than 20$ now) and download Kael's free mod from the civfantatics forums (and when you are done playing it for eight months get the mod mod Masters of Mana and play for eight more) and enjoy the best fantasy 4x on the market
Warlock has some nice fantasy elements, heroes treasure and world moulding spells (volcano!!!). I like the slight modifications to civ mechanics (units and buildings are separate queues, buildings actually correspond to a spot on the map and demand a population point etc) I really like the world hopping: simple mechanic but so engaging.
The bad: Poor Ai means that war is just camping a gate to their homeworld and slaughtering anything that comes through.
The races are not super distinct (again no FFH2 insanity of warring evil clown folk, dead god of winter worshippers, pirates, vampires, and angelic/demonic civilizations you have to summon and switch to mid-game), and sometimes nonsensical:e.g. I capture a city on a dangerous mana world and after some buildings invest in a super expensive local wizard troop, when I get the local races super expensive wizard on the field of battle I learn that damn near everything on the plane is completely immune to their damage type. Question: how the fuck did this civilization survive before I conquered it?
The religions are impossible to tell apart (apparently I am supposed to remember the full pantheon of 10 or so gods without a wiki or in game explanations of how the faiths interact) and any wizard can pretty much do what every other wizard can do (thus eliminating the FFhesque situations of running one hilariously broken exploit into another hilariously broken exploit and seeing fun emerge!)
The magic/research tree makes zero sense. You can't seem to get divine favor unless you dedicate whole cities to it, so I only get into divine spells end game. Most spells seem functionally useless:why would you slightly debuff an enemy unit instead of just killing it? Why would you research a way to dispel a debuff on your own units instead of reaching the means of summoning a volcano by their capital city? Why why why? Furtheremore, after a certain amount of research you are arbitrarily locked out of a tree with no warning. By end game you will literally be stuck pouring research into nothing. Basically the magic in the game comes down to macro landscape manipulation, summoning shit and occasionally casting a shadowbolt at a tough roaming monster. No fun magic exploits like FFH2 Balseraph puppet-mind-control spam or whatever, pretty straightforward.
Basically, yeah good, but I hope expansions and fixes are forthcoming. Also terrible optimization: my computer is a monster and it goes into full fan mode as soon as I load Warlock up: alt tabbing to use the internet is almost impossible.