The promo price of $4 was hard to pass up and I'm glad I didn't spend the full $9.99 on Spellforce at a later time. The blend of an RPG and RTS was an interesting twist, but for me the experience rang hallow as the game progressed beyond the early stages and I found myself caring very little for the world, the lore, and my own character's development. There are horrible balance issues in regards to game mechanics that become increasingly obvious as you progress further. Mage and rogue types eventually become useless while the strength/stamina hack and slash fighter build is overpowered the entire way through. Companions are uninteresting and are mostly cannon fodder for the dungeon crawling aspects of the game which requires no strategy beyond point and click. The loot is unvaried and uninteresting. I only found one weapon the entire game I thought was unique or even worth getting. The RTS element is deceptively entertaining at first but there is no tangible variety in the six playable races beyond personal preferences of what you think is visually pleasing. Enemies come in easily dispatched waves, exhibit no tactics beyond just mauling whatever they run into first, and you can pretty much kill any monster or mob by just kiting them. Resource management is a joke as everything is close at hand and requires no aggressive decision making on the part of the player to acquire new strongholds or outposts. There is generally only one, maybe two, entrances to your base and can easily be walled off with buildings causing all the laughably easy mobs to be funneled down into a kill zone. Overall the game was too long and I my first mistake was probably choosing to be a Heavy Combat Arms strength/stamina build as playing as anything else was grueling and felt like punishment. The RTS element isn't bad but extremely weak in comparison to pretty much any other RTS of its era. Ultimately I recommend only buying and playing this game during the promotion period or if you've exausted all other alternatives in both the RTS and RPG genre.
