SpellForce - Platinum Edition

There isn't a game quite like it, mixing the RTS with RPG. Maybe Sacrifice of the old ones, but not quite. It's slow, deliberate in its mechanics and general gameplay pacing - some missions would take you several hours to beat. And although you can sometimes bypass building an army and get it done quicker with just your heroes - that would be really missing the point of this game. You build a huge base, an equally sizeable army - and you also get to enjoy seeing both from a 3rd person view. The game is also quite massive even without the 2 expansions, so you will likely sink 200+ hours into the whole thing. The music is among the best in the genre and deserves an award on its own - definitely in my top 5 for fantasy games (another one being Spellforce 2 heh). It's just such a treat to listen to. Hat's off for the composer and the orchestra - that's quite a talent. It's certainly not without its flaws. Writing is often questionable with many odd errors (probably lost in translation ?), voice acting - downright terrible at times. In fact, I even bought a German version of it back in the day, to see if it was better - it was, and substantially. Even though I'm not a native speaker and my knowledge is school-level. RPG part of it is rather basic too and when it comes to skill descriptions - it doesn't even give you any, except for your main character. So you will either google it, or keep on guessing what on earth "Benefactions" or "Black Allmightyness" does. The story and lore are pretty generic and lackluster too, with the latter also scarce in the original and Breath of Winter. They really tried to compensate for it in Shadow of the Phoenix though, but I felt like it was a bit too late - the stage has long been set by the first 2 games, and the 2nd expansion couldn't fully salvage it even with extensive lore-dumps. With all that - I still have a soft spot for SF1 and 2 to this day, having beaten both multiple times.

;)

[h1]El equilibrio perfecto entre comandante militar y héroe de rol[/h1] Si te gustan tanto los juegos de rol con inventarios y estadísticas como la gestión de ejércitos de un RTS, el Platinum Edition de SpellForce te da ambas cosas a una escala colosal. El sistema de runas para invocar héroes y trabajadores es brillante, y la progresión de tu avatar a lo largo de sus tres campañas integradas se siente constante y muy satisfactoria. Eso sí, se le notan las costuras, el juego requiere una tolerancia alta a la lentitud. La recolección de recursos es pausada y la IA enemiga a menudo hace trampas, enviando oleadas interminables que te obligan a jugar a la defensiva durante horas en el mismo mapa. Los controles tácticos son rígidos y la gestión de la interfaz ha envejecido con cierta tosquedad. A pesar de estos baches, su propuesta jugable sigue siendo tan única y sólida que devorará tus horas de juego sin que te des cuenta.

What a journey of (almost) equal-parts frustration and enjoyment. This is your typical eurojank le gem, with a unique gameplay style (RTS+RPG) that caresses those brain grooves with fresh vibes. The good: * RTS/RPG genre mix was great and I really enjoyed it. It's hard to get bored when you can lean into one direction or another, especially when you build out your MC to be able to handle entire maps by skipping the entire RTS genre; this was a life-saver when I was starting to burn out. * The RTS part of the game was awesome as well, and I think they did a good job at slowly increasing the complexity: 1 base/race, then another different one, then two at once etc.. I enjoyed how different the races seemed to be, but I feel like most of the unit types felt like filler and I didn't enjoy spending a bunch of time figuring out which ones were better. * The DLC's made me rage at times but they did introduce some freshness with the settings - especially DLC2. DLC2 felt like a proper RPG game foremost, and I loved Empyria / Jungle settings. I think the clockwork area bugged out for me and I could never get into the top area though - sadge. The mid: * I enjoyed learning about the RPG elements (wow so many choices! I can be both mage and warrior?!), but even after consulting the web about recommended choices I made some terrible ones and ended up having underleveled MC's with bad stat/attribute distributions. * As always with classical but janky games, there were annoying situations that required bizzare workarounds. Like the level where you have to figure out that you need to abuse pathing in order to destroy the insta-death towers. Or at the end of DLC2 where the enemy priest types can insta-heal and unless you micro their quick death they decimate your units. These are the situations where you hate it in the moment but have a fond stockholm-like memory of them. * Lack of clear information / details. I wanted to know more about the damage output and abilities of: individual units, heros, enemies. It's hard to make clear decisions when lacking this in-game and having to look it up in the wiki. Towards the end of my playtime I upgraded to the playtest version which seemed to include details on DPS for weapons/abilities that was lacking before, so that was nice. * Difficulty was fine in general - but I feel like there wasn't much balance across the game, with some maps being drastically more difficult and unfair compared to others. This is even more prevalent when doing a mage MC (which I did for first campaign), where you can't really tank some of the first waves of enemies. * The story was OK, I didn't care for it much and ended up skipping a lot of the dialogue after the main campaign. * The voice acting was so bad it was hilarious. * Graphics and such were fine, I don't care about that stuff as much when it comes to classic games. I even installed the HD Upscale mod for about 0.5 seconds before realizing it was one of the upscaled slops that make the eyes burn... do better. The bad: * Holy mother of farming need. Even using CheatEngine and playing game at 4x-12x, I never really wanted to leave it running for farming - just feels cheap. So I was consistently underleveled which makes some of my gripes about leveling above more explainable. * Hero/companion/army AI is absolute trash and unless micromanaged ends up being really bad. Why does the MC not auto attack enemies around him? Why do my mage heros run into close quarters combat? Why do army healer types also run into close quarters? Why can't formations be actually useful and useable? Why can't formations be click-drag?? Non-deterministic formation direction is a nightmare! * Heros. Maybe I was doing something wrong but they felt useless most of the game, other than like the healer types. Any of the ones used for combat quickly died. I feel like they needed some better working. * All the great mods were incompatible with latest version, so potential fixes to above gripes were out of scope.

It's advertised as "a mix of RPG and RTS". The RPG part is a generic early 2000s lowpoly RPG and has some charm. The RTS part on the other hand is more like The Settlers than Warcraft. The tutorial last 1 hour and a half just for that RTS part. You have control over a portal from which workers are spawned. For some reason you have to use those workers to collect 7 different types of ressources (wood, stone, iron,etc...) wait that they have collected enough to be able to build lilttle collector buildings that will let you harvest faster until you can build secondary collectors, then a city hall and food market to increase the amount of units you can generate (most of these people so far are busy collecting crap or erecting pointless ugly buldings), then build barracks and dormitories, etc, etc.... After almost two hours, you'll finally be able to spawn three (3) wizard units, so that the scripted scenario can let you move on. Why don't those magic unit just come out from the portal that just spawned about six million wood collecting peasants? It is one of the universes' jealously guarded mysteries... When you finally complete the tutorial, you move to chapter 1, where after a couple minutes you reach the middle of the map, where you find a peasant-spawning portal, and the game tells you that you'll have to "raise another army" so that you can defeat the camp of whatevers blocking your path. And here we go again, wood collecting time. You restart from zero and have to rebuild a whole village of ressource collecting ants so that the magic portal finally accept to churn out a few soldiers and wizards. This village-building part is braindead and repetitive. There is no need to explore for ressources and nothing to prioritize or think about. Just wait until the rerssource are enough to be able to build the buildings in corrrect order. The game was made by germans, which explains a lot.... a low tier german editor (JoWood) that went bankrupt by trying to surf the dotcom bubble and running their business like a ponzi. Germans do love watching over people dilligenlty working in camps, in their videogames. I don't know if the franchise gets better after that, but I won't take the chance.

Very unique and individual tape of fantasy game !!!