Time to roll up your chainmail sleeves, sharpen your magic sword, and decide the fate of the planet Eo! Just finished the last part of the SpellForce 2 saga: Demons of the Past, in short :)
Disclaimer
This is a review of the latest SpellForce 2 story expansion, so I’m focusing only on what’s different from previous releases. If you want a more detailed review of another parts of this game please look for my reviews on the thier respective pages.
Overall Impression
The penultimate part, Faith in Destiny, was utter crap—both design-wise, narrative-wise, and technically—so I approached this one with a lot of caution. In the end, the game left me with mixed feelings.
On one hand, most of the screw-ups were fixed. Not completely, not perfectly, but enough that you can actually play without nervously waiting for some technical bug to ruin all the fun. On the other hand, you can’t say the developers and writers went all out to deliver a strong, high-quality series finale either.
Story and Ideas
Absolute respect for fixing the approach to the story. The narrative is written properly—this is a real ending to an epic adventure. The heroes became so strong and so crucial for the fate of the world that they talk to the gods directly (well, the gods themselves get shy when called that and ask to be called “Guardians,” but you get it) and even fight alongside and against them.
One of the main narrative failures in the previous chapter was the fanservice character Sariel—I talked about her in the last review—a graceful girl covered in blue fur with a long tail, no backstory (or clothes) whatsoever. In this expansion, she was incorporated into the plot and became one of the key characters of the story.
Yeah, someone might say that this was the plan all along, that she was intentionally introduced to transform a cute sexy plushy into a central character, but… I’ll stick to my opinion: this wasn’t the original plan, it was fixing past mistakes on the fly. Which is also good, and way better than when mistakes are neither admitted nor corrected at all.
On the other hand, you can feel the developers were at their limits while making this game—the beginning and the end are packed with events, new locations, and interesting plot twists, but… the middle is pretty empty. Mostly old maps are reused, clearly too big for the minor events taking place on them. Half the game feels unfinished, like it was just there to fill the player’s time. Honestly, I would have made it shorter but more focused.
The ending, by the way, is also a bit simplistic. The story is still linear, but there were a couple of moments that could have seriously affected the planet’s history: I repaired the portal network connecting the islands, and I couldn’t influence (thanks to a broken quest again) Nightsong—one of the key characters in her choice between her father, duty to her race, and the love of her life—the Shadow (the main hero from the first part by the way). These events should have been reflected in the ending, damn it!
After all, I solved the planet’s main problem—the disconnection between the islands that threatened all mankind (and other sentien races) with slow extinction—and I was super curious to see the fate of the Dark Elves and the Shadow World! And all I got was a description of the epic battle’s ending and a line saying that this story is just one possible version of the world’s history. For a linear story, that felt especially mocking :)
Design, Graphics, Sound
Nothing much changed here—it’s not a new game, just a new chapter of the story on the same engine. No complaints, but also no moments of wow in terms of artistic decisions.
Gameplay
Gameplay again hasn’t changed in any significant way, which is more good than bad. I really value it when, within a single game series, nothing in the mechanics changes fundamentally from story to story—it lets me keep the feeling of a unified story. More than that: even moving from one game to another in a series, I’m not a big fan of major gameplay changes. But that’s my personal preference.
Execution Quality
Most quests work fine, the glitches with item descriptions are gone, and the balance of the new Nameless faction has been adjusted. The last part, however, wasn’t done by reworking unit stats, but by setting level caps for certain units. This created an interesting twist: SpellForce used to offer constant “puzzles”—a level 10 unit could be deadly to a party of level 25 heroes, and a level 30 unit could die from a breeze. Now the numbers over the models are different, but it’s roughly clear that they’re all roughly equal in strength.
Still, despite most quest problems being solved, the scripts and quest design didn’t reach the level of the first chapters of the story. Quests sometimes pop up out of nowhere, complete themselves, or don’t show on the map where you’re supposed to go; and if they do appear, there’s no real link to the quest itself. Some quests just require walking through a certain point on the map, where the characters supposedly fix some mechanism or activate magical towers—but it happens automatically, and you can only figure out where to go through experience, or sometimes completely by accident.
The main problem, as I saw it, was the script tree. Most quests only worked properly if I did them exactly the way and in the order the developers intended. If for some reason I did them earlier or later than expected, the quest just hung in the air and refused to complete. This was frustrating in a few places, but absolutely infuriating at the end, when I didn’t figure out how to activate the infamous defense towers (presented from the story perspective as the camp’s protection mechanism, which I had handled without the towers) and ended up powerless against the final boss. Six hours of gameplay down the drain—I had to start over. Only out of respect for the series, and because this is its finale, did I push through to the end.
Final Impression
But… all that said, I finished the game. A great game, a great story—despite the rough fate of its last chapters in technical execution, it created a cult following in the gaming world, becoming the most successful attempt to merge RPG and RTS, and it inspired me in developing my game Verbo Draconi. For all that, I will forever be grateful to it.
