The game in itself is a good idea, interesting story, good graphics. But it is ridden with bugs, so many bugs that it makes the game a pain to be played, I mean what the point of doing 75% of a side quest when one interaction does not work and kill the entire quest itself? It's frustrating trying to work around one bug after another, I did not pay 50 bucks to be a beta tester and I feel that the developper did not backtest this game seriously.
Both Expansions are listed in the main menu of the main game, but they are not recognized when they are installed. You are obviously supposed to be able to start the expansions from that menu, but both Expansions are greyed out. When I click them, I am directed to the GOG web page to buy them. Which is not possible, since I have bought and installed them already.
This is pretty weak. I don't know who is to blame for this, but either the developers or GOG (who needs to make sure the games they are selling are actually working as intended) didn't do their job correctly. Not acceptable.
The game leans more towards RPG, with lots of dialogues. Character progression is far from impressive, the selection of skills is common across characters, with usually only one branch (out of 3 or 4) specific to a character. Skills in each tree (usually around 8 per tree) are very generic and boring. XP gain is extremely imbalanced and comes almost exclusively from quests, which makes killing monsters a bit pointless (spend a few minutes fighting a boss-level monster and get 200 xp, when you need 20k to level - that kind of stuff). Inventory management is not good and itemisation relies on giving you endless copies of the same items with exactly the same stats.
Tactical combat is the best example of how a good idea ended up badly implemented. Pressing alt brings up a context-sensitive radial menu for quick access to skills - however, this is very difficult to control during a battle, due to poor camera control, constant movement of units and a fairly badly made UI, where not all clicks register and targeting is often imprecise.
The RTS portion is a micromanagement freak's dream, with convoluted design (the whole workers / carriers concept), sector management, etc. on top of it all. There is no option to slow down or pause the game and when the AI starts sending never ending waves at your base - often from several directions simultaneously, the whole RTS design shows its weakness in full light.
The game runs smoothly most of the time, except occasional strange FPS drops during cinematics. There is an incredible amount of loading screens - each area transfer pops up a loading screen (zones are fairly small, so you'll be transferring a lot!) and even the simple task of exiting the game can take up to 30 seconds, while you're staring at yet another loading screen (!) claiming to be cleaning up stuff, before the game finally shuts down.
Overall: not an impressive game. If it's heavily discounted, it might be worth a try, otherwise it's not really worth it...
I'm just here to tell you, if, after all the things you have read and seen about the game, you find yourself to be interested in it, give it a shot. Especially if you liked it's prequels. It may not be revolutionary, and it's not technically flawless, but it's got a lot of heart. I personally really enjoy it's writing and (german) voice acting, it's detailed world, it's beautiful art style and it's fluent gameplay.
I think the industry needs games like Spellforce 3, good games made by small, but dedicated and well-versed teams of people. They are the ones for young developers to look up to, to see that it's possible to succesfully follow your ideas. So, if you can and want, give the people behind this game some of your hard-earned money. In my opinion, their work deserves success.
Hailing from good ol' Germany, Spellforce 3 for me is the epitome of a game that's typical for German culture. Thus, the pros are:
- Meticulously crafted (OK, that's a lie, there were a lot of bugs, but reasons for the rushed release are unknown (profit maximization, anyone?), patches were provided asap and they are gone for good)
- Incredible eye for detail (especially in the graphics and design department, the environments are gorgeous)
- Meaningful, comprehensible & coherent (the story is top notch, the conversations and relationships between characters are well thought out and actually make sense)
- Epic scope (well, being the old guy I am I needed 50+ hours to complete the main game, and for sure the future of the world as we know it is at stake here)
- The soundtrack is actually really epic, too, and there's voice over for all conversations (the English ones are really good, don't know about the German VO, though).
However, as usual, there are cons:
- Being a RTS/RPG-hybrid, the RTS part is boooring (I think due to many reasons, e.g. units are not easily distinguishable from each other visually, the rock-paper-scissor-system is not very apparent, the gorgeous environments are too distracting because units are kinda lost in scenery)
- Loading screens are too frequent and take too long which is really distracting (travelling to a location and back just ot talk to an NPC takes ages, and yes it's a 980 PRO M.2 NVMe SSD, guys)
To sum it up, if you like it slow, sometimes boring, but also epic, coherent, beautiful and are fond of a good story being told then this is your game.
