Warcraft 3 made this type of game obsolete. Hold on, though, this statement assumes that you enjoy shooting troops like bullets at your opponent or spending most of your free time honing your mind and fingers into spring-loaded RTS machinery . Since I am more into pure exploration and strategy - without the hectic barrage and late night training - Disciples still has vitality for me. The characters and maps look awesome, exploration is engaging and rewarding, and the gameplay seems to have been tweaked by designers whose obsession with balance seeps through everywhere. The explorable maps are huge. The scenarios are well-balanced and open ended, even though your army makeup and tactics are essentially limited. Somehow the very simple army structure, movement and magic system yields dozens of ways to accomplish the conquest of a portion of the map. You can go about things in the exact way you choose without getting stuck in grueling, inch-by-inch territory fights with opponents - unless you a make some pretty bad choices. The design is fairly awesome in this game. The character portraits really, really capture the essence of the type of unit. The un-leveled fighter's eyes glow with eagerness and solemn duty. When he levels into a Witch Hunter, his lowered, puritanical hat and 5-o'clock shadow make him look brooding, world-weary, and dangerous! A different tech path will turn the fighter into a knight - whose look of solemness is supervened with a light sneer and rising ridges of silver-white armor. Then you have bestiary of orcs, krakens, elementals, etc - All the fantasy tropes are nailed, and in many cases are world-class exemplary! The positives are definitely enough to get this game if you are into TBS (or strategy games that aren't a frantic nightmare), but the negatives are pretty glaring. For one, there is no plot here. There is a -story-. But as far as a group of characters taking part in this story, and an explanation of how your actions effect the story at large (a -plot-), no, you don't get that. The story expositions are so forced that they happen in between scenarios, in such a way that they could have been made up well after the scenarios were finished. Someone talks to you when you conquer a town, but it's so inconsistent as to who is talking to you, and why, that it's pretty hard to integrate or take seriously. At it's worst, the game will randomly throw up text boxes containing bits of story (again, with very little links to what the hell you have to do with any of it). I wouldn't be surprised if these boxes are verbatim storyboards that the developers meant to flesh out through dialog or cutscenes, but didn't have time to incorporate before shipping. It's hard for me to imagine someone making something so baffling and disordered without there having been a real problem. Also, it has not been localized well for about 60% of the game - the English is fluent, but only just. There seems to be some kind of cool story happening under the surface. It's too bad we don't get to be part of it. Other than this, there are some pathing issues (your units want to fight everything ever), and interface options are close to nil. You can't turn off unit responses and spell animations, or speed up the game to any appreciable level (the battle animations are cool, but after seeing them rote for the 1000th time, I'm ready to just end my turn).
The fun of this game is so raw and pure that I'm having trouble switching to the superior JA 2. Explore, move, shoot, swap items, conquer - tactical bliss. The inability to buy new guns will trouble you at first, but the scrounging element of this game gives it an apocalyptic, hard-fought feel. That M14 rifle is way more meaningful when you have blow it out of a locked building with a jury-rigged live plastic!
