SpellForce Platinum

Voice acting is poor, graphics are dated, but this is a great blend of RPG and RTS. As someone who is primarily a RPG player, with some turn-based and RTS games from time to time, this was a perfect game for me. It might appeal less if you are primarily a RTS fan. My favorite feature is basically the combined RTS and RPG camera angles: you can zoom way out to give your troops orders, and then zoom right into third person RPG mode and control your character in the battle. No other game, except its sequel, gives you that epic hero feel like so many fantasy novels, where you do some quests with a small group and then get into big battles against hordes of enemies. The story is pretty good too. Sure, it's secondary to the gameplay and the plot is designed to move you from map to map, but there are some cool moments later on that make you think. The only thing I do not like about the RPG system - and I offer this as advice if you play this game - is that it gives you a lot of options but specialization is crucial to success. If you pick up too many different skills you will not be able to wield the best equipment and spells later on and you will be tempted to restart. It is hard to make a hybrid combat/magic character that works well, except for a paladin, white magic and heavy weapons and armor. Magic is very good in this game, particularly black magic and elemental magic. I recommend one or the other. You can also use melee, but it is a lot more one-dimensional - although you will be near unkillable later on. I am not exaggerating when I say this is one of my favorite games of all time. I wish there were more games that blended RPG and Strategy.

Playing Spellforce...it means FUN FUN FUN! A lot of it! Again and again. I never get tired playing Spellforce.

Resolution aside (which can be fixed with a mod), the game is great. A neat combination of RTS gameplay and RPG character creation and exploration

After 90 minutes of playtime I decided to move on. While some aspects of the game seem good on paper, a mixture of underwhelming execution and a troublesome crash issue made me feel my time was best spent elsewhere. The game allows you to customize your main character's stats and choose from set number for your avatar. The gameplay is fashioned more like many fantasy RTS games of its time with RPG elements including your main character gaining levels and acquiring gear which will persist throughout the story. My negative experiences occurred immediately as selecting the Options button crash the game on my Windows 10 machine. You can bypass this by forcing the game to run in windowed mode by modifying a shortcut for the executable, however this forced the game to run at the smallest resolution despite altering the config.lua accordingly. This crash is quite jarring as I felt like discovering this solution took a bit of research and a few things (namely graphics and music volume) needed tuning. While the voice acting is forgiveable, the UI and the gameplay pacing was not. Navigating the UI elements was unintuitive, usually requiring far too much shuffling around. I cannot understand a Worker needs to be manually stopped from his current job before being commanded to build. The game moves at a snail pace. Points of interest are far apart, everything moves and performs things at a snail's pace. I'm sure this game has the potential to be fun once you give it the time. However, that's a tall order when an endless stream of outstanding games exist. In fact, there were times when I was reminded that Warcraft III, a game released years prior, executed many of the shared similarities better and I couldn't help wanting to play Warcraft instead. I won't fault anyone favoring SpellForce, but for me: I think my time is best spent playing something else.

Great Game.