SpellForce 2 - Anniversary Edition

Warcraft meets torchlight should have been a great gaming experience. Unfortunately the game is extremely buggy and suffers serious design flaws that quickly make playing it tedious and annoying. The screenshots are rather deceptive as to what the game may be like as well so don't go by those. It really is mostly like Warcraft 3 in that it's an RTS with 3d graphics and persistent heroes you can level and equip, although there is real continutity across boards. There is also a regular swapping from RTS (build armies and wreck the enemy base) and Diablo type RPG (small party fighting small encounters, get loot, equip). But the writing/acting is horrid, dialog interactions constantly have visual and audio problems, the leveling is flavorless as you have to level up everyting equally instead of specializing, equipment comparison is non existant so deciding if a new item is an improvement is tedious at best, several mechanics don't work, quest grant/complete/reward is a tedious string of anouncement sounds and short messages instead of one notice, managing abilities in a big fight is fraught with targeting issues... it's just a hot mess. Really unfortunate the execution was so bad because the idea and foundation are great.

..missing basic customization, e.g. hotkeys etc. As usual, zoom is not quite as high as I would like, giving a better strategic overview.

Nice old game with a good Story. Big world, a lot of Quests and a nice story and many side quests (for 2006). A fantasy world with a classic atmosphere, in my personal opinion the best part of the series. If you enjoy it you can spend many hours with it

Overall I enjoyed playing the game, however I recall that first part was more engaging for me. It's nice combination of RTS and RPG, but both part of games are just decent - nothing outstanding. Pros: - Nice graphics - Good combination of RTS and RPG - There are some nice quests Cons: - Not that engaging plot - Bit boring RPG part of game - RTS not that challenging/engaging as it could be

After finishing Spellforce 1 and its addons, I was really looking forward to play Spellforce 2 but unfortunately both the Steam version and this GOG version just refuse to start for some reason. Nothing I tried helped. Tried everything I could find online, sad reality is that the Anniversary Edition just seems to be a worse version of the original Gold Edition in multiple aspects.