I've played all the Spellforce games since the first one, and have sunk quite a few hours into them. They've always been a bit clunky, but endearing enough to keep me coming back. The worst faults were sketchy graphics, camera controls, UI, and jokingly bad acting. Sorry devs, I still love the previous Spellforce games, no hard feelings okay? But this one takes things to a whole new level. The graphics are on par with any RPGs that have been released over the past 5 years. The game is jaw droppingly gorgeous. The character models are a bit weak, and the choice of portraits is a bit scant for my liking, but you're usually zoomed out so far you can't really tell anyhow. Performance is excellent on my system, Win7 64 Pro, an i7-6700k, 32GB RAM, and a GTX980. Loading times are perfectly fine from a 7200RPM HDD with 128MB cache, 5-10 seconds.. I've put a few hours into the game so far, just sticking to the campaign. I've played enough that I have a pretty good feel for the RPG and RTS elements. Some reviewers will tell you that the ability selection is limited to 3 per hero, but that's not true. You can flip through four pages of abilities, giving you 12 slots per character. No issues there. The default camera controls aren't quite to my liking. Dragging the middle mouse button pans the camera, ctrl-dragging MMB rotates the camera. I find myself wanting to rotate more often than pan, so I reversed that setting in the options. The game offers two different control schemes. Option A assignes your left main home keys, all four rows from [qwer] to [zxcv], to spells. Panning is either edge-scroll, arrow keys, or mouse. I find that setting perfectly acceptable. Otherwise you eat up your spell keys with panning controls, then you have to use a context menu for spells. No thanks. Voice acting is WAAAY better than previous entries. Some people still complain, but I found it all to be as good as any other game out there. Music and sound is great. Overall, 5/5, great game!
I'm happy to report that this game works perfectly on Win7 x64! I've had this game on CD since it came out, but it's been years since I've been able to play it. Yes there have been some fan patches to make it playable but psh. This GoG version is amazing! I haven't tried LAN multiplayer yet (still trying to talk my daughter into playing with me) but I've done several campaign missions and everything is just like I remember. Clean fonts, no flashing textures or funky HUD issues, it's just like being back in the 90's again. Wonderful! It's a difficult game, even on Easy. You have to pay attention and sometimes you're put into no-win situations where you're just supposed to run away. You start out working with a lot of cargo, scanning it, shooting it, picking it up, delivering it, but pretty soon the Imperials start showing up and it's all out war. Tie Fighters, Tie Bombers, Star Destroyers, and Gunboats everywhere. Oh yeah, good times, good times. This is the one to get, the definitive X-Wing experience.
