Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes

As someone who loves games like Civilization and the brilliant Fall from Heaven 2, I really enjoy Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes. Simply put, it's a 4X turn based strategy game with a fantasy theme, where you build cities, do research, build armies and do quests while pursuing one of the victory paths. Mechanically, the game is excellent. While there are many similar games, the way FE:LH does things feels refreshing. Some noteworthy points: * You have 3 separate research threes, allowing you to focus on developing society, warfare, or magic. * Cities can not be built anywhere, only on fertile land. City yields only depend on the tile where the city was built, and any connected resources/buildings. * Cities "level up" when they grow, and specialize. * You can design your own units, in a system which is slightly similiar but more advanced than the one in Alpha Centauri. * Units join to form armies. Wielding larger armies depends on researching the right technologies. * Battles take place in a separate tactical battle view. * Units gain XP and level up to gain improved stats. Champions level up and gain class based skills. The only real weakness of the game, in my opinion, is the visual style and theme, which I personally only find passable. To me, it's all a little bit bland and slightly ugly. Still , the game itself is a real gem, and an easy recommendation if you enjoy the genre.

Fallen Enchantress Legendary Heroes is the stand alone expansion of Fallen Enchantress that significantly expands upon the base game. Fallen Enchantress was the sequel to War of Magic which was Stardock's first disastrous attempt at a fantasy 4X game. Because of that lineage most people and reviewers never gave the follow up games a fair shot while throwing praise at (IMO) inferior games such as Endless Legend. FELH is a unique strategy game due to the setting of the world. The world was destroyed by the "Cataclysm" which destroyed nations, the world, and even the gods. Your goal is not only to do the usual 4X of eXplore, eXpand, eXploit & eXterminate but to actually revive and explore the world. The gameworld is not a nice place and is full of enemies and deserted world space. With civilization destroyed you have to rediscover technology and magic along with the still lingering chaos and evil left on the world. Combat takes place in a tactical battle map with turns. Not the greatest implementation but workable and I personally prefer it to say Age of Wonders. One of the most unique features of the game is the limitation of city placement, Only certain areas can hold cities which produce Grain (Food), Materials (Production) or Essence (Spell Slots), but these locations are very spread apart and once a city is placed it erases all other spaces nearby. That means you are constantly fighting for expansion space against AI and random enemies such as Dragons. Enemy AI is a little iffy but solid. The real danger is the world around you is a wandering Dragon just so happens to walk by your city and you have no means to stop it. You just have to hope it wanders off. Or random events (which there are many) spawn hordes of spiders led by a Spider Queen. Not to mention all the quests scattered across the world. I have over 125 hours split between FE & LH. I highly recommend LH for anyone looking for a unique but still traditional 4X.

So there seems to be 3 types camps for this game. 1) People who love it 2) People have trouble running it 3) People simply who find it boring I'm in the first camp ... I think this game is great. It's one of the few games I've played over and over again. I feel like each set of random maps I play presents new challenges I need to figure out in order to win. In my opinion, there's a lot of variety regarding leveling up your characters, towns and customizing your armies, etc. that I just never really get bored with it. Like virtually every game, there are a few things don't work well or as good as they should. But overall, at least on my system, it's solid and an enjoyable experience. The graphics are a little "cartoon-ish" but other that, I can't find too many complaints. If you can get it on sale at least, I recommend giving it a try.

I'm probably going to go against the rave reviews here by saying that the Scenario (Campaign/Story mode) killed all my enthusiasm for this game after only 5 hours. As an old school gamer, I "learn" a game and get into the lore and story first by completing the story mode where possible. The "Scenario" in this case, is poorly designed and the story is weak. I soon realized that the quickest way to play is to just turtle in my starting village and hit end turn until all the research are done, the city is fully upgraded and my coffers are full of gold and mana. In all that hundreds of turns, only a single Ogre came knocking. Only then, do I train any units (with max upgrades) and buy all the equipment for the Heroes. Once done, it is then a matter of rushing through all the minor quests that are mostly "fetch this MacGuffin by patrolling an area in this general direction until you can farm the right enemies for it". Game is unbalanced in so many ways that bows and swords are nearly useless and heroes are always better as spell slingers. The AI is poor but that may be due to the scenario constraints. There is also a bug that made the 50% bonus for "Produce Wealth/Research" useless (I cannot make it work). I know most folks are reviewing the sandbox aspects of the game, which is how this game should be played, but I am so put off by the scenario that I am not keen to spend more time on it. Maybe if the game came without the half-baked campaign and is only played on a random map like "Civilization, Master of Orion or Warlock: Master of the Arcane" style, it would not get such "I played the story mode and it is terrible! Not playing anymore!" reviews.