SpellForce 3: Soul Harvest

TLDR: Gameplay-wise deeply flawed, unbalanced and heavily scripted. Almost all of the dialogue in this game makes you feel like they have been written by people frequenting various Reddit selfhelp subs. While at first it feels fresh and seems more realistic than your standard fantasy mumbo jumbo, it gets stale real quick. Imagine endless quasi-deep personal/quest discussions with 100% accepting, thoughtful, reasonable and "wholesome" NPCs. Those same NPCs are at the same time extremely one-dimensional, naive and downright gullible. A royal officer disobeys orders which ends up causing a major problem gets discharged (while keeping his pension) and starts ranting about it like a baby IN FRONT OF THE QUEEN who then proceeds to explain things to him like he's 5 and fails to recognize his resentment? That's comletely OK, he will not rebel for sure, let's just leave him be, everybody is entitled to their own quirks regardless of their professional (in this case military!) obligations and can get away with just about anything. And this is just one example of the issue with the writing in the game, there's much, much more. The vanilla game, while not perfect, was much better in this regard. I understand that the writers probably wanted to make the NPC interactions deeper than the cliche "we shall slay the dragon, m'lady", but it becomes so damned tiring REAL FAST. Yes, people talk about deeper stuff from time to time, but not all the time. Not unless they are in a therapy session that is, and the game honestly feels like that. When it comes to gameplay, it is extremely unbalanced and heavily scripted. You can win pretty much every RTS segment by just NOT UPGRADING the capitol (as it will trigger stronger attacks from the enemy) and just rushing the opponent with basic units and quickly conquering land. Once you get the earthquake spell to level 3 you can just rush the capitol with your heroes and instawin by destroying it with 1 cast of the spell. It's bonkers.

I played about 8 hours of this before it lost my interests. The main problem is that it is trying to be a real-time strategy game and a role-playing game and does neither well. The RTS part is old-school resource collecting and base building. It offers no innovations that were not in Warcraft 3 15 years ago. The RPG portion is a bit more interesting, with some character development, questing, and decent voice acting. But the need to occasionally build bases and armies is a big distraction. This might not be so bad if the interface was better. But as it is, you might struggle to figure out how to access the right abilities, spells, buildings, and so on during heated battles. I didn't have any problems with frame rates, though the load screens could be long. The game is beautiful and sound effects are fine, but I struggle to remain interested in the gameplay and story.

This is an odd game for me to review, In some parts I absolutely loved the game in other parts I hated it. Firstly the good, Graphics are gorgeous, Music and voice acting are top notch, some of the rpging, particularly the underground areas reminded me of rpg classics like BG2 and Hordes of the underdark and the combat is generally pretty good. The bad parts are the developers have nerfed your characters, you have access to only 2 skill trees now per character while in SF3 you had 4 on your main character and 3 for your team mates. Also your perks and skills are also now weaker. On top of that the RTS parts have been made harder through cheap AI. On some of the later RTS levels you'll start with one area, half a dozen troops and one building while the AI has the entire rest of the map and will almost immedietely start sending an endless stream of enemies to destroy your base. In SF3 this wasn't a problem as your team were a wrecking crew and could handle anything that was thrown at them. Here your nerfed heroes will get quickly overwhelmed which just leads to the games pace grinding to a halt. Some boss battles are pretty cheap, One in particularly will see your entire team getting one shot unless you have a character with a particular skill. SH is a good game but just feels more rushed and less play tested and balanced than SF3 was.

A great expansion pack, the Dark Elves are as vicious and as powerful as they are complicated. The campaign is done extremely well, in most part better than the original and the ending is quite satisfying. The synergy part that was added so You can combine Your abilities is a good add too.

Basically that. The main character doesn't act like a general. In fact corporal Tahar is more of a general that this whiny, pathetic excuse for a main character. Outside of the main plot, however, the game shines in gameplay department. Creating different variations of your character build + mercenaries (your handcrafted companions) will take a lot of your time. Also, this time around we can actually enjoy multiplayer.