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Game Informer Review
Little brings joy to my life like seeing an existing genre taken in a completely different direction. SpellForce does just that, and even does it pretty well. Like a lot of original efforts, though, it's a bit rough around the edges and has a number of flaws in execution.
SpellForce basically consists of two interwoven games – one where you're trying to build up your avatar (a fully-statted warrior whose development is totally up to you), and another where that champion leads your massive armies into battle. These elements integrate rather well, but within each are a multitude of little flaws that make for a somewhat jarring experience.
The RTS portion of the title, which is mostly very well-done, suffers from one problem that almost utterly kills my enjoyment of it: Unit AI is freakin' terrible. In particular, the attack-move command barely works at all, making babysitting your armies a full-time job. If you have enough micromanagement skills to pay the bills you'll be fine, but RTS newbies will need a bit of patience to get the hang of it.
There's a lot of things to praise this title for, as well. The persistent single player world, where sub-quests span several maps and characters appear throughout the story, is very cool. The interface is smooth and easy to navigate. The depth of customization for your avatar is immense. Unfortunately, without the execution to match these great ideas, SpellForce is merely above-average, rather than excellent.
Concept:
Inject some RPG flavor into a real-time strategy stomp-fest
Graphics:
Nice – especially the lighting from buildings at night. Tons of detailed models
Sound:
Good overall, except for the glaringly awful voiceovers
Playability:
Having the option to select an enemy and then tell your groups to attack it is great
Entertainment:
If you don't plan to go online with it, this is a fun new take on RTS
Replay:
Moderately High
Rated: 7.75 out of 10
Editor: Adam Biessener
Issue: March 2004
2nd Opinion:
SpellForce was engrossing enough to make me want to keep playing, but also unpolished enough to make me feel like I was being punished for doing so. The game pulls off a few unique ideas pretty well, but it surprisingly fails in several of the areas that are critical in an RTS. The interface with your avatar and heroes is unique, and allows for easy management of your key units during battle. If you aren't directly controlling them all the time, though, the AI makes some alarming errors. The story is well-conceived and deep, but the plot is advanced through voice-acting that is, at best, shameful. The missions are intricate and fun, with some impressive strategy and broad gameplay options, but as I progressed I ran into little hang-ups (like the AI) all over the place that kept me from liking this game as much as I wanted to.
Rated: 7.75 out of 10
Editor: Joe Juba
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great RPG, good RTS, quality control stinks,
By
This review is from: Spellforce (CD-ROM)
Spellforce is probably the best RTS/RPG combo ever, essentially combing Warcraft II (build a big base) with Heroes of Might and Magic (get a hero to go kill something). I'd give it 4 1/2 stars if I could, knocking the 1/2 off for fairly bad quality control, no real explanation of game mechanics, and a slightly annoying UI.Basically, you play an avatar going out to save the world. The character development is actually quite neat - you aren't limited to classes like wizard or fighter; rather, you get to pick up skill classes like heavy weapons or death magic. This allows some really interesting combos that vary the difficulty level dramatically - playing an archer/white mage specialist is not something I'd like to try. Like Warcraft, you go through about 20 or so maps in the single character version. To solve them, you're allowed to summon either units or heroes, with the heroes being classed into 6 skill sets (warrior, archer, etc). The mainquest is relatively straightforward, although it seems to me trying to solve the game without doing the subquests is near impossible. Still, one of the most compelling games I've been locked into for a while. I have 3 nitpicks. First, the quality control on this is atrocious - having a couple of subquests in German (the developers are in Germany) would be amusing, except that it took months upon months to get version 1.10 to even get several quests working. Yet, they still haven't fixed that. Second, even looking at the 'official guide' you still don't get much in the way of game mechanics, which is really disappointing given the uniqueness of the engine. Comparing heavy to light weapons damage, for instance, is impossible. Finally, its very difficult to control units at times; I found myself simply seperating heroes individually to even get close to reasonable combat (e.g. your mage doesn't go in to punch the bad guy, which the AI seems to like to do rather than zapping him.) Still, great game despite the teeth grinding. Looking forward to the expansion pack, which has already been announced.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Flawed, but otherwise great RPG/RTS,
By
= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
This review is from: Spellforce (CD-ROM)
Spellforce is one of those games that makes me really want to like it, and that would be truly awesome if but for a few very irritating problems. All in all, I must say that playing the game was a mixed experience- there were great moments, and there were times I felt like cracking the discs with a sledgehammer. Despite these, I would recommend the game for any RTS player that also has a taste for fantasy.
The game introduces some truly unique aspects to the old (in both time and overuse) RTS formula. You create a character- the avatar- that is your `hero' for the game. This unit is exceptionally powerful, levels up with experience, and can equip items. This might sound like Warcraft 3, but suffice to say that it holds much closer to the traditional fantasy RPG norms than that game (there's a paper doll, for one, and you get to pick skills at level-up). You find runes to summon worker units and unique heroes, which are basically weaker versions of your avatar. You can also find plans for buildings of any of six races. When you discover a monument of a particular race, you can then summon workers and build a base, which is what one would expect of a typical RTS. The main difference is that you can command armies of multiple races, if there are monuments available. There are also many quests in the single play campaign, which yield experience and items (some of which are very powerful) as well as providing some break from the typical `build up your army, kill everything on the map' deal. The world is somewhat persistent, though resources respawn when you return to an area. Since I'd say the game was generally quite good, I'll start off with the positives: First and most noticeable, the soundtrack is great and the opening cinematic fantastic. I wish there was more than one combat track, but otherwise this was one of the better game soundtracks I've seen- likewise for the introduction. The sound in general is well done. All dialogue is spoken and the voice acting is at least passable all around (and sometimes quite good). The graphics are second to none. This is truly a beautiful game, and the locations are varied and breathtaking. Some of the larger cities in particular look great, especially from third person perspective. Units look great- especially the 'titan' unit each race can deploy once. The single play campaign is generally well designed and executed. The quests are quite interesting, as is the main plot. The world is also well done, and side-quests are generally intuitive and don't require you to go too much out of your way. Replay value is decent, since you have many choices for customizing your avatar. You can choose to be a warrior, ranger, one of several types of mage, or healer. All are pretty fun and interesting to try out, and the unique equipment and spells are worth seeing in action. The campaign is also long, though not to the point of tedium. The unit balance is generally good. To sum things up, the six races are as follows: Humans are good all-rounders, but not particularly strong in any area. Elves are excellent ranged fighters and great healers. Dwarves are peerless close combat warriors. Orcs have the best support units. Trolls have the strongest melee and ranged units, but all are very slow and expensive. Dark Elves have the best magic units. It is quite beneficial to mix and match, but the three `light' races will automatically attack the three `dark' ones, which adds another interesting aspect. The developers did a good job in `making the show go on.' That is, your avatar can't permanently die and will respawn at the nearest bindstone. This makes it less necessary to reload frantically, provided you don't mind losing a bit of experience. Even if you get completely routed, you can pick up the pieces and play on. This is both realistic and fun. The game is also quite challenging to master from a sheer gameplay perspective. There's many tactics and counter-tactics available, and none particularly stand out. As I mentioned before, the game is not without flaws. Some of them are so bad that I almost didn't recommend this game. Though the sound is generally good, I do have some complaints. When you zoom into third person mode on your avatar, the sound FX gets extremely loud. You can remedy this by turning it down, but then when you zoom out it gets too soft. This is annoying. There's also not enough unit voices- all the workers of each race have a voice, all the combat units have another, and your avatar and heroes have their own. That's it. The controls are only partly what an experienced RTS player would expect. For example, units don't attack-move by default. To make them do that, you need to hold down ctrl while right clicking. This would be fine, provided you could rebind the hotkeys. However, you cannot. Your avatar doesn't auto-attack, which is very annoying at times since it's almost always your most powerful unit. Getting them to attack buildings (which you want, since they can destroy them very fast) is a particularly major problem. Defensive tower fire can't be targeted, and the attack-move AI is generally insufficient. Only a certain number of units can cluster around a target, which is realistic but sometimes very annoying. You also can't control most summoned units. Once again, all of these would be just fine, provided you could somehow turn them off or on in options. However, you cannot. Though the camera generally works well, the game really isn't manageable in third person perspective. You simply can't see things you need to click on. This is unfortunate, because a lot of detail is missed in the isometric bird's-eye view. Experience is also something of a problem. To reach the higher levels you have to exploit monster spawn points (usually by spamming the area with towers and letting the game run unattended for hours). This is a bit tedious, but if you don't do it you simply won't have a very powerful avatar. Multiplayer is also very lackluster compared to the campaign. There's no skirmish mode, and not much to do online. The graphics, though spectacular, taxed my machine (which greatly exceeds the recommended specs) when large numbers of units were moving. Turning detail down didn't seem to do anything but make everything look ugly. Whoever did the translation and text editing for the game ought to be fired. Enough said. Last of all, there are very serious problems with the saving system. I'm not sure what it is with JoWood games and save crashing (I had similar problems with Gothic 2), but they apparently are unaware that the VERY WORST time to crash is during saving. That's the only time Spellforce ever crashed for me, and it did it more and more often as the campaign progressed. Furthermore, sometimes instead of saving a game, it deletes existing saves. It also arbitrarily saves corrupt data and still displays `game saved successfully' upon finishing. This is really bad, because the only other mechanism keeping you afloat in the long campaign is the autosave. This is only triggered when you exit the game, which probably isn't too often. I really hope they address this in a patch, because it's a showstopper issue. Despite its flaws, Spellforce was a pretty decent play. Dealing with technical issues and the odd controls broke the flow of it somewhat, but it's forgivable for the great campaign, graphics, and the unique RTS features.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good RPG though a bad strategic game,
By Cory0331 "Cory0331" (Fairbanks, AK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Spellforce (CD-ROM)
I'm a huge fan of both RPG and strategy games. When I saw that there was a game that combined the two I was excited. This game really is decent. It even had potential to be even better though.As an RPG it is fairly straight forward. You can choose certain paths, but there aren't any consequences, other than missing out on side quests, for either not talking to or choosing different options in conversations. Fairly idiot proof as the main quest goes. Go and talk to this person and then that person and you're done. As a strategy however it is lacking. You can command your units to go here and there and even attack along the way. Other than that there are no further unit commands. Your healers and mages will rush into battle as though they're swordsman. Your archers actually hang back and for the most part just pick people off until they're physically attacked. The only unit command that you have is 'Hold'. This works great for your healers and mages until the stream of enemies keeps drawing your fighting units deeper into their territory taking them from the healing range of your healers. To make this game truly awesome they really need to incorporate some kind of unit behavior options so that you don't have to constantly tell your healers and mages to back off from physical combat. I'd also like to see some variation in the RPG path that you can go down rather than just side quests. All in all the game IS worth playing though I'd wait for the price to come down to ~$30.
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