*Gives Kiya a cookie with big fat chocolate chips* <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
Right. I've played Spellforce for a while now, and with your permission, a review:
General
SpellForce is an interesting blend of Real-Time Strategy and Role-playing game. The RTS part consists of the regular RTS procedures: you train workers, those workers construct buildings, and with those buildings you can employ warriors and research upgrades. When you've assembled enough warriors, you head over to your opponent and stomp the snot out of him. A change however, is that you do not actually train warriors and workers at your buildings, but you summon them at monuments, using runes. The RTS part, however, is only half of the game. You start the game with a character you yourself configurated. During the course of the game, the character finds equipment, learns spells and gains levels. In other words, this is a role-playing game as well. After a while, the main character (or Rune-Warrior, as she is called) can even summon heroes and create a true Role-Playing party, with the kicker being that this party can be backed up by the warriors you have summoned at the rune monument. When you take into account the fact that you can select up to one hundred units at once, you can imagine the epic clashes that this creates.
Gameplay
The most important feature of a good game is of course that it has good gameplay. SpellForce offers gameplay in spades, but nothing truly revolutionary. Their self-proclaimed innovative Click 'n' Fight system is nice, saving you a few mouse clicks, but I am fairly convinced that most gamers will stick to the old Select Unit - Select Ability - Select Target stratagem. The CnF system is an innovation, yes, but it's not the great revolution it's cracked up to be.
The game has, in my opinion, one slight flaw: when you access your inventory, the game will not be paused, in fact, the game cannot be paused at all, except by accessing the main menu. A shame the makers didn't keep the requirements of the Role-player in mind: a role-player likes to pause the game, and issue orders and think the whole thing over. Especially due to the fact that the Formations aren't much help in this game.
However, the game does shine when you look at the town management. You build towns with resources that your workers harvest, that looks pretty generic, but your workers can also build specialized harvesting buildings and become Artisans, collecting more resources per trip. You can quickly see how many artisans are employed at a building by clicking on it. Another thing which I found interesting was the fact that the game respects logic more than most RTS games. Take a look at the Food system, for instance: your workers collect food (they fish or shoot deer or pick berries), and that food goes into your headquarters. When you have collected enough food to support a larger army, the headquarters can bump the maximum limit of workers and warriors up, so that in fact, the food in your storehouses, and not the number of farms, determines your maximum army size.
Graphics
SpellForce graphics are state-of-the-art. All characters are carefully textured and animated, and to make it even better, you can actually choose your viewpoint, zoom in, and even go into 3rd person perspective with a simple turn of the mouse wheel. The buildings are interesting to look upon (though they sometimes look a bit similar), and they can be freely rotated when put into place and so you can create a fully customized town, and even walk through it with the 3rd person perspective. The spell effects are also impeccable, lighting up the landscape and reflecting in the water (which is also stunning by the way, provided your graphics card supports pixel-shading)
Of course, all this takes a heavy toll on the old ticker. Don't expect to be able to play this game with anything less than a PIII with 1Ghz.
Sound
The music is certainly inspiring, with choirs and drums at war, and flutes and such at peace. The adrenaline gets flowing when you see thirty goblins swarming at your settlement with only workers to defend your town, and your army miles away.
The sound effects are adequate, if rather bland, but the quality of the voice talent falls far short of what can be, should be, expected from a modern game. For starters, all units from one race share the same voice set. That's not a disaster yet, but the voice acting is definitely subpar. It's like they dug up some fanboys and -girls and told them to "Read these lines. Go on, just read, don't act". That's a shame. It's no biggie, but it does irritate occasionally.
Conclusion
Buy this game! If you're a RPGer or RTSer, you definitely need this one for your collection, and it gives you a chance to explore the other genre as well. Despite the flaws I mentioned, this game is great. But be sure to check the system specs before you open up your wallet.
