SpellForce Platinum

Spellforce 1 is among my most favourite games out there; particularly with both addons. One of the primary reasons is actually the worldbuilding, story and characterwriting (which is also rather progressive for it's time). I do like the gameplay as well, but here I admit that I prefer it with cheats, the latter shorten several parts of the games which can turn into slogs.

So, game itself so far reminds me of old school warcraft kind of, and a mix of diablo ish tones? i dont know kind of baldurs gate ish too without the super strong roleplay dice rolling, however my problem is the game is hit and miss with stuff, sometimes you click options it just dies, crashes, cant figure out why. sometimes u are playing and everything works but you click on one particular enemy and it crashes. who knows maybe it just me but other than that games awesome.

I really want to love Spellforce, and in a certain way I do. This game offers a lot. The base foundation is rather simple. A CRPG hero with the power to summon armies. So Baldur's Gate meets Warcraft. Sounds awesome, but the implementation is mixed. Spellforce maps tend to be pretty big, and that creates long waiting times just to run from A to B, made even worse when quests send you all over. Also in the Strategy parts controlling your units is a bit sketchy, in particular the path finding seems to struggle with bigger groups of units. While a formation option is present it does not work properly. So be prepared to manually prevent kongo lines of units. Another thing about the strategy part that it less than ideal, specifically in the first campaign. You almost always start with a fresh base, meaning the game is rather low key at the start of a new map. Build your base, tech up, attack, reinforce, attack... In the 2. and 3. campaign they improved that. Up above I compared it to Warcraft, but that is probably a bad image. It in many ways feels almost like a Settlers game, more focussed on base building and ressources than the leading of armies. A bad fit for what they wanted to go for, a hero and his troops. Overall, it feels a bit slow and clunky, but functional. The same can be said for the RPG part. The skill system is relatively simple. You level up and get a couple points to increase your character stats and invest into skill lists. Skills allow you to equip better gear and learn spells. However some skill categories seem inherently better than others. And while the game technically allows to create hybrid characters that is a terrible idea for the most part. So wrong skilling is possible and no respecc. Best to stay in one category. Now all I said is bad but that is how I am. Overall it is a good game. If you can see past the flaws listed above you can have a wonderful time and many adventures in Eos.

Would have enjoyed this a lot more if it had a 20x speed up button or something like that, I was too advanced in the Order of Dawn campaign when I found a mod that kinda does this. For side-quests there's a lot of walking around, and sometimes your army takes a huge hit and there's only one depleted iron source left that takes forever to replenish. I think more than half of my gameplay time was idling while the getting resources to rebuild the army or waiting for the main character to arrive somewhere in the map. A bit unrelated, but in the Breath of Winter campaign, one of the story characters died before it was supposed to and it broke my game. Wasn't willing to restart a game because of a dumb script so I dropped the game.

But still a decent game. The RTS controls kind of suck, and sometimes ranged units won't fire after using spells, but other than that, it's quite good, deep, and fun... definitely worth the price.