[h1]Introduction[/h1]
«The Great Fantasy Struggle» is a nice looking yet quite simple grand strategy game, where your main goal is management of resources and people. Players are given the choice to play as forces of light or darkness and are supposed to spread their influence on the world map through indirect ways, during war or peace times.
[h1]Gameplay[/h1]
Perhaps, the first part worth mentioning from the very beginning is the fact that game description on the store page sounds better than actual game itself. It doesn’t necessary mean that game is bad, though, but some people might get upset as they expected quite different game.
At the very start of the game, players face global map separated on independent regions, and a news tab, featuring current events where they can view what’s going on in said regions. Sometimes war occurs and common people pray to light and dark gods, asking for reinforcements and this is where player can interfere: you can send some demons, or paladins to protect a territory, or you can use more subtle approach and avoid wars, while sending missioners, who would spread propaganda and make common folks want to join your side instead of the enemy’s.
Apart from global war, players also have a chance to build their capital city, which would have influence on all regions in the world. Each building you construct in capital requires some people to work. Your warriors and missioners on the other hand, aren’t infinite too – they are manpower as well, quite often limited in numbers, so you really need to think twice when it’s worth to invest human resources into building capital, or spreading propaganda, or participating in wars, or maybe even giving up a territory to the enemy. Obviously, the more regions you control, the more gold and human resources you own and thus, more power you have.
While it sounds cool on paper, in fact most of the time you are supposed to be monitoring only few things:
[b]-amount of population you have available[/b] (there’s no difference between elves, zombies or humans in terms of their stats. They’re all nothing but numbers).
[b]-amount of gold you can spend
-your income per month
-morale on each territory.[/b]
Speaking of morale – it plays a vital role for a region: the lower morale is, the more chances for war to start are there.
All of that is not as easy as it sounds, however, as map is quite large. Inattentive player may easily forget to check some important places every now and then. But apart from that game doesn’t really offer much to the table – main difficulty is nonstop speed. Even when you open up menu with building capital, global events still appear, which makes it easy to miss some important news. There’s also not much difference between buildings in the capitals of light & darkness. All they do is just bringing influence points. No advanced melee warriors, or archers, or mages, or dragons you can summon and add to the field of battles, nothing.
So yeah, initial goal of the game is given to the player through difficulty tab in main menu. In other words players don’t necessary need to destroy the enemy. Your global task is somewhat time limited though, as each match lasts for 50 in game years.
[h1]Graphics[/h1]
Visual part of the game looks really great for a small indie game. Whole style, with all these pictures of fat daemons and paladins, capital buildings, even global map itself - all of that reminds an old fairy tale book you’re looking through. Not to sound cynical, but it’s really one of the best parts of the game. Developers did their job just fine here!
The only weak part here is tutorial, which is done in separate PDF file. For a game of such art quality, authors could easily make in-game manual, where players had a chance to observe all the information through a scroll, or a book with animation of turning pages.
[h1]Sound[/h1]
Another good part of the game. Great music pieces, bringing that feeling as if you’re part of a huge fantasy saga. There’s not much to tell about sound overall, however, as music takes game’s biggest part.
[b]So yeah, let’s take a brief look at pros and cons of the game once again:[/b]
[h1]PROs[/h1]
Basically all the strong sides were listed above already, so let’s observe them without going deep into details:[list]
[*]Stylish art and graphics
[*]Nice sound
[*]Game is quite easy to play, once you read the manual[/list]
[h1]CONs[/h1]
Now this is where some more details are required: [list]
[*][b]Lack of lore or storytelling about game world.[/b]
That really spoils immerse of the game and makes you think with only numbers.
[*][b]Somewhat shallow gameplay. [/b]
Not much to comment on, really. Game doesn’t feel bad, but it always gives you a feeling that it could be something way more that you have at this moment. It has really a lot of place for improvement.
[*][b]No way to change speed. [/b]
It’s not much of an issue, but you might have a feeling that this speed is made so high on purpose, just to compensate weak gameplay parts listed above. Such speed also makes you want to skip actual text of the news and events, only reading it briefly through headlines.
[/list]
[h1]Conclusion [/h1]
Overall, game feels like something you could spend an evening or two on. That is, of course, if you have some spare money in your pocket. It has nice music, stylish graphics, not too deep and yet somewhat challenging gameplay. The biggest problem of the game is actual fact that many people will always expect more than there actually is available.
Of course, some things like tweaking game speed can be added later, but at this moment you just have to struggle with certain mechanics.
Overall this review is supposed to be neutral one, but since there’s only option to give it thumbs up, or thumbs down, final decision is quite clear. Game is not legendary indie which came to this world to change whole genre. Instead, it’s just a small representative of a kind, clearly made with love of the creators and it deserves at least some attention.
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