A fun strategy game for those of use who suck at RTS games but excel at RPGs.
Disciples: Sacred Lands is a Turn-Based Stragegy game that focuses on a series of holy wars between four competing factions, each of which has their own special array on unique units and magic spells. What makes it unique among strategy games, though, is how the battles work; tactics in combat are really, really simple. So simple, in fact, that you could just use a calculator to guess how they'll turn out and be right most of the time. The actual "Strategy" part of this TBS game lies in how you prepare for your battles: the tactics of this game by Strategy First are all about setting up the ideal conditions for combat, rather than actually fighting.
VISUALS; 4/5: The game isn't very graphically impressive. It's not ugly by any means, but it's nothing spectacular. Then again, given that it came out almost ten years ago, I guess I should be fairly impressed with it. At any rate, visual spell effects look cool, and everything looks like it is supposed to. In particular, the really big monsters that take up two whole combat "squares" look nice. Anyway, it's a TBS, right? What do the visuals really matter?
SOUNDS; 3/5: The sound is okay. Not bad, or good, but okay. The voice acting is pretty minimal, the sounds of swords and explosions is standard, and the "bite" sound that a number of different animal creatures make when they attack sounds like someone crunching on a potato chip. The music isn't bad, and there's a nice variety of tracks, but it doesn't really add anything to the experience. You can play this game with no sound and feel almost exactly the same.
WRITING/STORY; 4/5: The stories that the game's scenarios revolve around, while simple, are pretty good. The narration for the sagas (campaigns) comes out like a historical account of things that actually happened in the Disciples world, and it's just interesting enough to make you want to play on and see what happens. However, the delivery of these stories could use a little work, I feel. When you're actually playing the game between story narrations, the "storytelling" is limited to an occasional sentence or two uttered by your troops or by defeated enemies whenever you conquer a city. Compared to Heroes of Might and Magic, which could give you several paragraphs of exposition in response to several different ques, it's kinda tame.
GAMEPLAY; 4/5: As stated before, the game's strategy primarily involves actions you perform outside of combat. Tasks like putting your soldiers in an ideal formation; choosing the right troops for the job; leveling up your soldiers and generals; casting spells that bless, curse, damage, or summon stuff; using your Thief units to poison, disorganize, or assassinate enemy soldiers; and gathering resources are all generally more important than actually fighting. One big indicator of this is in how it is nearly impossible to sieze the capital cities of your enemies; every capital city is guarded by a divine avatar of that city's relevant deity, and this avatar can move with blinding speed, soak up tons of damage, and deal hundreds of points of damage with every attack; its only weakness is that it cannot leave the capital. As long as the capital stands, the civilization that capital is founded on lives, and thus you cannot "beat" your enemies in open combat. Instead, the way to "win" over your enemies is to cut them off from all resources. Surround their capital with your own towns and convert their land to your purposes, and whenever any units leave the capital to try to get any resources at all, kill them immediately. Keeping your foes too weak to fight back, or making yourself too strong to challenge, is the key to victory.
There is only one real flaw in this system, however, and that flaw is repetition. Every mission you go on generally follows the same pattern: you start by gathering resources, then you conquer stuff, and then you gather more resources, level up your troops, buy stuff, conquer stuff, gather resources, and follow this pattern until you eventually get to a point where you have one or two parties of high-level characters who you use to kill everything, and supplement their strength with magical buffs, curses, and airstrikes. So it goes with every single mission. However, unless you're a really impatient or sensitive person, you'll probably be too addicted to notice the repetitiveness, and you can change it up by playing different civilizations or altering the difficulty level.
VALUE FOR PRICE/OVERALL; 4/5: For ten bucks, this is a pretty good buy. The only really serious flaw in it is that it doesn't have much replay value; the scenarios you get when you buy it are all you've got, and if you try to replay anything, you may just find yourself doing almost exactly the same things as you did the first time you played, and the game will get old fast.
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