Retroboy
7th Oct 04, 3:47 PM
Year of release:2003
Development House: JoWooD
Publisher: Encore USA (North American Version)
Website: www.spellforce.com (http://www.spellforce.com/)
**************************************
Game score: 86 / 100 (Overall Score)
Graphics: 4 / 5
Sound: 4 / 5
Gameplay: 5 / 5
Concept: 5 / 5
Execution: 4 / 5
Controls: 3 / 5
Enjoyment: 4 / 5
Replay ability: 4 / 5
Difficulty: 4 / 5
Learning Curve: 4 / 5
Patch version: 1.38
Bugs: 1 / 5
Modability / Community support: 2 / 5
Review
Let’s start with the box. It’s a nice box. It’s got yer basic scantily-clad nicely-mascara’d under-armoured fireball-spewing shapely sorceress babe with a rather nice patookus on it, separating the good elfish girlies in the pretty green forest on one side from the evil armies of big monstrous orkibibbles in the wretched lava plains on the other. So if the cover is that neat, how’s the game?
Well, it’s a lot like the cover. And that’s a good thing.
The single-player experience successfully merges the genres of real-time strategy with a simple role-playing game, and adds a beauty and style of play that makes it quite appealing if you can get beyond its occasional flaws. And with a long campaign and support for PvP and co-op multiplay, it moves from 'appealing' to 'compelling'.
The game is set in a post-apocalyptic earth (the magic-apocalypse kind, not the nuclear-apocalypse kind), when a big nasty event alluded to in the opening cinematic has ripped the land into a series of small widely separated islands. There are four basic types of people in this game – free citizens who are pretty much normal people except that they spend their time standing about in the same spot forever and occasionally selling stuff or handing out quests, monsters (what the hell do they EAT on these tiny islands, anyway?), ‘masters of the rune’ (you’re one of ‘em), and the runebound, of which there are two types – heroes, and races. Now this gets hard to explain, so bear with me.
A ‘master of the rune’ (that’s you, because the big hero wizard dudie from the opening cinematic just gave you a whopping promotion) has the power to use runes by activating specific monuments found on the landscape. Think of a rune as a pokemon ball of sorts: you can summon a creature or creatures when you both have the right kind of rune and control the right kind of monument. You can summon a party of heroes by using up to five hero runes at a hero monument, or you can build an army. To do this, first you find a race monument, and then use it to summon workers (one of human, elf, dwarf, orc, troll, or dark elf). These guys then harvest lumber, stone, foodstuffs, iron, and magical elements as raw materials to build your base. Its buildings allow you to unlock and upgrade various forces for an army that you can summon one at a time at your racial monument – it’s sort of a “mother ship”. These heroes, armies, and buildings are permanently linked to both you and the monument, so if you leave that island through a gateway, they cannot follow you, and they disappear.
So here’s why the game is fun: every island starts completely over with you alone, resulting in a neat variety of missions for you to perform. You’re all by your lonesome when you first arrive at an island, but you usually find either a hero monument (so you can summon a party to accompany you and play the equivalent of a dungeon crawl) or a race monument (so you can summon an army that you fight with in real-time strategy format), or sometimes both. Then you clean out the island, capturing waypoints along the way so you can teleport back later, and doing the occasional quest in the process. It’s a great way to make a game a solo adventure, a party-based adventure, and a real-time strategy all in one.
Bundle this all up with a fairly decent contiguous storyline (that won't win any prizes, but it's an excuse to play at least...), a novel skill-allocation system for leveling up, a pretty thorough library of paper-doll weapons and stuff for both you and the heroes in your party to wear, a clever four-school magic system, a decent soundtrack, and some good graphics for a year-old game, and you have a winner – with a few irritating points.
The game could use some polish in a few areas. First, it’s most definitely not for the micromanager. Although you control your main character and can dictate when you want your accompanying heroes to cast spells, your ability to command your army is limited to one of two actions – ‘go here’, or ‘attack this’. As a result, you often find your spellcasters automatically unloading everything they have on the first single orc to stroll within range, and they have no magic power left to whale on its pet dragon with. Oops. Pathfinding could use some work, and there’s terrible acting and writing that sometimes flogs the game. Jowood has found some spectacularly bad voice actors that make you very glad the dialogue is spelled out as the characters speak it (even though what the characters sometimes say is quite different from the subtitles). Finally, you have to run around. A lot. I’ve found that waiting for my character to hike across cleared real estate is a really good chance to sort out my inventory.
Other bits and pieces: Controls take some getting used to – the camera has a bit of an odd zoom function, but it’s more than adequate for your purposes. The game is rather easy on middle difficulty, so I recommend switching to ‘hard’ for the challenge unless you don’t want one. There’s the occasional odd quest bug, but a journal for the most part helps keep things sane.
Modding support is zilch on this game – no tools are provided. However, JoWood has already milked the successful-in-Europe franchise with two expansions (that you can’t get in Canada! Grr…), and we can hope for a platinum version that combines all three here in America, at very least. The first expansion comes with a random campaign creator, but it's of limited appeal since it doesn't generate quests.
…and I’d buy expansions if I could. Although this is most definitely not a hard-core RPG, it has a lot of mixed elements that almost get the whole thing right in that most difficult of game genres, the hybrid. There’s already talk of a SpellForce II, and I’ll be grabbing it VERY quickly if it appears.
Good stuff: novel concept and gameplay; nice scenery; good job of combining genres
Bad stuff: horrible voiceacting and dialogue; lots of walking; not a lot of in-combat strategy
Reviewer System Specs:
CPU: Athlon 1600
RAM: 1Gb
Video Card: Radeon 9600 @ 1280x1024 32-bit
Sound Card and Speakers: Integrated sound
-- Retro
Development House: JoWooD
Publisher: Encore USA (North American Version)
Website: www.spellforce.com (http://www.spellforce.com/)
**************************************
Game score: 86 / 100 (Overall Score)
Graphics: 4 / 5
Sound: 4 / 5
Gameplay: 5 / 5
Concept: 5 / 5
Execution: 4 / 5
Controls: 3 / 5
Enjoyment: 4 / 5
Replay ability: 4 / 5
Difficulty: 4 / 5
Learning Curve: 4 / 5
Patch version: 1.38
Bugs: 1 / 5
Modability / Community support: 2 / 5
Review
Let’s start with the box. It’s a nice box. It’s got yer basic scantily-clad nicely-mascara’d under-armoured fireball-spewing shapely sorceress babe with a rather nice patookus on it, separating the good elfish girlies in the pretty green forest on one side from the evil armies of big monstrous orkibibbles in the wretched lava plains on the other. So if the cover is that neat, how’s the game?
Well, it’s a lot like the cover. And that’s a good thing.
The single-player experience successfully merges the genres of real-time strategy with a simple role-playing game, and adds a beauty and style of play that makes it quite appealing if you can get beyond its occasional flaws. And with a long campaign and support for PvP and co-op multiplay, it moves from 'appealing' to 'compelling'.
The game is set in a post-apocalyptic earth (the magic-apocalypse kind, not the nuclear-apocalypse kind), when a big nasty event alluded to in the opening cinematic has ripped the land into a series of small widely separated islands. There are four basic types of people in this game – free citizens who are pretty much normal people except that they spend their time standing about in the same spot forever and occasionally selling stuff or handing out quests, monsters (what the hell do they EAT on these tiny islands, anyway?), ‘masters of the rune’ (you’re one of ‘em), and the runebound, of which there are two types – heroes, and races. Now this gets hard to explain, so bear with me.
A ‘master of the rune’ (that’s you, because the big hero wizard dudie from the opening cinematic just gave you a whopping promotion) has the power to use runes by activating specific monuments found on the landscape. Think of a rune as a pokemon ball of sorts: you can summon a creature or creatures when you both have the right kind of rune and control the right kind of monument. You can summon a party of heroes by using up to five hero runes at a hero monument, or you can build an army. To do this, first you find a race monument, and then use it to summon workers (one of human, elf, dwarf, orc, troll, or dark elf). These guys then harvest lumber, stone, foodstuffs, iron, and magical elements as raw materials to build your base. Its buildings allow you to unlock and upgrade various forces for an army that you can summon one at a time at your racial monument – it’s sort of a “mother ship”. These heroes, armies, and buildings are permanently linked to both you and the monument, so if you leave that island through a gateway, they cannot follow you, and they disappear.
So here’s why the game is fun: every island starts completely over with you alone, resulting in a neat variety of missions for you to perform. You’re all by your lonesome when you first arrive at an island, but you usually find either a hero monument (so you can summon a party to accompany you and play the equivalent of a dungeon crawl) or a race monument (so you can summon an army that you fight with in real-time strategy format), or sometimes both. Then you clean out the island, capturing waypoints along the way so you can teleport back later, and doing the occasional quest in the process. It’s a great way to make a game a solo adventure, a party-based adventure, and a real-time strategy all in one.
Bundle this all up with a fairly decent contiguous storyline (that won't win any prizes, but it's an excuse to play at least...), a novel skill-allocation system for leveling up, a pretty thorough library of paper-doll weapons and stuff for both you and the heroes in your party to wear, a clever four-school magic system, a decent soundtrack, and some good graphics for a year-old game, and you have a winner – with a few irritating points.
The game could use some polish in a few areas. First, it’s most definitely not for the micromanager. Although you control your main character and can dictate when you want your accompanying heroes to cast spells, your ability to command your army is limited to one of two actions – ‘go here’, or ‘attack this’. As a result, you often find your spellcasters automatically unloading everything they have on the first single orc to stroll within range, and they have no magic power left to whale on its pet dragon with. Oops. Pathfinding could use some work, and there’s terrible acting and writing that sometimes flogs the game. Jowood has found some spectacularly bad voice actors that make you very glad the dialogue is spelled out as the characters speak it (even though what the characters sometimes say is quite different from the subtitles). Finally, you have to run around. A lot. I’ve found that waiting for my character to hike across cleared real estate is a really good chance to sort out my inventory.
Other bits and pieces: Controls take some getting used to – the camera has a bit of an odd zoom function, but it’s more than adequate for your purposes. The game is rather easy on middle difficulty, so I recommend switching to ‘hard’ for the challenge unless you don’t want one. There’s the occasional odd quest bug, but a journal for the most part helps keep things sane.
Modding support is zilch on this game – no tools are provided. However, JoWood has already milked the successful-in-Europe franchise with two expansions (that you can’t get in Canada! Grr…), and we can hope for a platinum version that combines all three here in America, at very least. The first expansion comes with a random campaign creator, but it's of limited appeal since it doesn't generate quests.
…and I’d buy expansions if I could. Although this is most definitely not a hard-core RPG, it has a lot of mixed elements that almost get the whole thing right in that most difficult of game genres, the hybrid. There’s already talk of a SpellForce II, and I’ll be grabbing it VERY quickly if it appears.
Good stuff: novel concept and gameplay; nice scenery; good job of combining genres
Bad stuff: horrible voiceacting and dialogue; lots of walking; not a lot of in-combat strategy
Reviewer System Specs:
CPU: Athlon 1600
RAM: 1Gb
Video Card: Radeon 9600 @ 1280x1024 32-bit
Sound Card and Speakers: Integrated sound
-- Retro