This is another great addition to the spellforce world. Love the graphics, music and voice acting. Great challenge to manage army building while defending relentless attacking hordes. Once you get used to the mechanics it is brilliant!
This Expansion is a lot different from the base game. It streamlined a lot of things. For example the 4 physical damage types were fused to only 2 while the 4 magic types were put together as one (more or less, fire and ice effects deal more damage on monsters from the other type and often no damage to the same type). Equipment was also heavily condensed. A little too much for my taste. The skilltrees have been completly overhauled. You no longer have 3 Trees (+ leadership on main) but 2 trees with one synergie skill, depending on which trees you chose (unforunately the game doesn't tell you what those synergies will be beforehand). The companions also no longer have a companion-specific tree like in the basegame. There are also fewer companions available than in the basegame. To compensate you can hire custom mercenaries, whithout personality. Unfortunately the others do not have much of one either. I never felt compelled to talk with them much.
The RTS parts also got streamlined a bit. The sector outposts no longer have their own storage, everything is stored globally. You can now gather resources in the back and have unit-production in the frontline sectors without having to haul the ressources there. Most units have some unique unlockable skill or effect, which makes the different races more distinct than in the base game.
So mechanics-wise they did a lot very right with only a few hiccups that might be only my personal taste getting in the way. But the story part lost me. The companions are lacking. The MC is even worse. Tahar was intriguing, Aerev is horrible. He "made a mistake" that should have him demoted, exiled or executed, but instead he gets to command the elite Wolfguard, because they killed Tahar offscreen. The main storyline didn't capture me like the one from the base game. It also felt unfitting for the SF universe. Much of it felt conflicting with the lore from SF 1 to me. So far I couldn't bring myself to replay the campaign because of that.
I played about 8 hours of this before it lost my interests. The main problem is that it is trying to be a real-time strategy game and a role-playing game and does neither well. The RTS part is old-school resource collecting and base building. It offers no innovations that were not in Warcraft 3 15 years ago. The RPG portion is a bit more interesting, with some character development, questing, and decent voice acting. But the need to occasionally build bases and armies is a big distraction. This might not be so bad if the interface was better. But as it is, you might struggle to figure out how to access the right abilities, spells, buildings, and so on during heated battles.
I didn't have any problems with frame rates, though the load screens could be long. The game is beautiful and sound effects are fine, but I struggle to remain interested in the gameplay and story.
This is an odd game for me to review, In some parts I absolutely loved the game in other parts I hated it. Firstly the good, Graphics are gorgeous, Music and voice acting are top notch, some of the rpging, particularly the underground areas reminded me of rpg classics like BG2 and Hordes of the underdark and the combat is generally pretty good.
The bad parts are the developers have nerfed your characters, you have access to only 2 skill trees now per character while in SF3 you had 4 on your main character and 3 for your team mates. Also your perks and skills are also now weaker.
On top of that the RTS parts have been made harder through cheap AI. On some of the later RTS levels you'll start with one area, half a dozen troops and one building while the AI has the entire rest of the map and will almost immedietely start sending an endless stream of enemies to destroy your base. In SF3 this wasn't a problem as your team were a wrecking crew and could handle anything that was thrown at them. Here your nerfed heroes will get quickly overwhelmed which just leads to the games pace grinding to a halt.
Some boss battles are pretty cheap, One in particularly will see your entire team getting one shot unless you have a character with a particular skill. SH is a good game but just feels more rushed and less play tested and balanced than SF3 was.
A great expansion pack, the Dark Elves are as vicious and as powerful as they are complicated. The campaign is done extremely well, in most part better than the original and the ending is quite satisfying. The synergy part that was added so You can combine Your abilities is a good add too.