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Great RPG, good RTS, quality control stinks

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 22 / 24
Date: March 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

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.

A good RPG though a bad strategic game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 16 / 19
Date: March 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

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.

Flawed, but otherwise great RPG/RTS

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 13 / 14
Date: January 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

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.

Best Roleplay game 2003

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 16
Date: December 05, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Love it. It is like reading and playing a fantasy book.
You can move into the play in a first person view and feel like in Dungeon Siege or Gothic 2.
You have a story like Baldurs Gate or Icewind Dale with a lot of carefully created characters. Not the crap like in DS.
You have Realtime Strategy like in W3 and AoM with hundreds of units battleing.
It is epic. You have a huge world consisting of lots of islands connected by portals. Even after finishing one island you can/sometimes must return to old islands and you may find out that the situation has changed.
Playing it for 1 week now and it feels better than all I have had in my hands the last 3 years...

A Wonderful Hybrid of Strategy and Roleplaying!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 11 / 13
Date: March 05, 2004
Author: Amazon User

As a fan of both Real Time Strategy (RTS) and Role Playing Games (RPG's), I was immediately drawn to the concept of Spellforce: The Order of Dawn. I've not been disappointed. The RTS side of the game is challenging, but not frustrating. As for the RPG aspect, it's very engaging. It's not quite as in-depth as an actual RPG - the story is linear, quests have generally one solution - it's still very fulfilling.

The graphics in this game are phenomenal. Something fresh that the developer, Phenomic, did was add the ability to go into 3D, first-person view. Most of the time you want to keep the game zoomed out into the standard RTS isometric view, but sometimes it's awesome to just look at the buildings or units up close.

The music in the game is fantastic. It's very appropriate for the genre, and it moves from beautiful to haunting to menacing and back again. All dialog is voiced and has sub-titles, which is nice. Most of the voice acting is decent, some of it's great, but every so often, about 15% of the time, you get some that's just ludicrous. Thankfully, those characters are generally the ones you only have to talk to once or twice *whew*

As for value - I've been playing the game for about a week straight, probably about 40 hours so far, and I'm only about 1/3 of the way through. I can also see replaying the game in about 3-6 months to try different types of avatars.

In conclusion, this is a wonderful game. It's fun, it's gorgeous, and it's innovative. Give this game a try (there's a demo available) but if you like RTS and RPG's, you'll love it!

spellforce is about 2 rock

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: November 26, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Spellforce is a mix of an roleplaying game and a realtime strategy game. so it is comparable with warcraft 3 but here the mix is more advanced.

it features a detailed world, 6 different races, a new click'n'fight system, awesome graphics and multiplayer modes.

the was honored to be the "best game" on the games convention in leipzig, germany.

check the homepage...i own spellforce since some weeks and i can say its great!
initially i got some bugs which are fixed or will be fixed in short time. my rating:
check out that ur computer and graphicscard are not low-end, because otherwise u wont see the great graphics.
after that:

BUY THE GAME!! tons of great entertainment awaits you.

Good gamebut No Support for Tech Problems

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: October 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I found that the combination of RPG/RTS was interesting but the game is buggy. After installation and uploading of lots of patches it still is graphicly jerky and reduntent in the "teleporting". Loads slow as well. Do not look to get quick tech support or answers. Best source is the Forum, if not a posted problem you can get an answer in a week or so.

Fun for awhile

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: August 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game awhile, about a year ago. Great graphics, although if you're planning on running it on a less than ideal computer, beware. Even with the graphics and settings turned way downnnnnn, the game tended to 'lag' freezing up for a second or two regularly. Trying to use a touchpad with it was beyond frustrating, and the load times tended to be horrendous. Average time to load the game up from the desktop to my character was probably about 5 mins, with most of that time being spent watching the splash screen while the saved game loaded.

Superb graphics if the settings were turned up high, though. The game could have also benefited from some creativity in the plot department. It's pretty standard save the world stuff.

In the game you are a 'rune warrior' essentially a slave, summoned up by a power sorcerer to fight another powerful sorcerer who is intent on dominating the world. Ho hum, nothing new there. Your summoner sets you free, and you're on your way to go fight the other guy, and you make your way around the world building your character, doing quests, and so forth to eventually go fight this guy. I got about halfway through the game, before I completely burned out on it. Eventually, after reloading my harddrive, I lost the original saved games, and having no real desire to play through half the game again, so I can burn out at the middle on it, I haven't really touched it since then.

Truely a force to be reckoned with for fans of RTS and RPG's

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: December 01, 2003
Author: Amazon User

If you enjoy RTS games and are looking for something with some depth- or if you are an RPG fan who digs strategy- or even if you're just a fan of GOOD games, you will have a blast with SpellForce. Every aspect of the game feels well polished and finely tuned, and the design and balance work is evident. Do yourself a favor and pick this one up; Just in time for the holiday wish list, too!

Two thumbs up!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: August 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

A mix of Warcraft, Diablo, and Never Winter Nights.

Hard to believe they were able to put these types of games together, but they did just that and very succesfully. If you enjoyed playing such games then you will love Spellforce. It has the settlement building with troop summoning/upgrading and resourse requirment features as in WC, the Diablo type of hero leveling, abilities, portals, towns, merchants and items, as well as a very NWN story feel and interaction with choices in quests and subquests.

Very little negative can I say about the game, however the voices of characters met along the way sound like theyre reading their lines. Its such poor "voice-acting" that its difficult to get into the story.

Another thing I didnt like was when I went back to previous completed map areas via portal, I had to sit through the movie clips of the level all over again with no way to bypass.

Besides that its great and will keep you busy for days.

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