SpellForce: Platinum Edition (PC) Review

Generic high fantasy storytelling thy name is SpellForce. If in search for the next great epic, with immersive writing, deep lore, and cleverly put together plot twists and turns… keep on searching because this ain't it. Throughout the 50+ hours that one can experience with The Order of Dawn (100+ if you add the expansions), you'll meet a gazillion different characters, which have all been assigned one of the typical stereotypes of the fantasy genre, with the voice-acting, as well as the actual words that come out of the mouths of the various people the main hero will meet, being of mediocre quality at best, enjoyably bad at worst.

As always, when it comes to fiction it's not what the story is, but how you tell it, and SpellForce isn't really that good when it comes to narration and presentation, which is a shame as the actual premise behind it all is somewhat interesting. It's a tale revolving around a pivotal, past event that essentially broke the realm into "islands" separated by a strange ether. Rohen, one of the mages who took part in the process that led to this destruction, has created portals that connect the areas of this vast archipelago, and has also summoned a rune warrior - you - to Saaave the World! from an evil mage. Sadly, the vast majority of time will be spent in interactions with characters that have little to do with the actual story, which makes most of the dialogue sequences very… skippable.

The central hero is a custom-made character whose creation screen provides quite the diverse array of classes, skills, and so on and forth. This fellow will act as a general of sorts, able to activate the one and only structure that is in charge of creates units, who in turn must collect resources and construct buildings that act as gathering points, as well as upgrades for your army. Pretty standard stuff for a RTS, only in here the main hero is also able to improve his/her stats via level-ups, learn spells, wear better gear, and even summon lower-ranking hero units. The problem, as with everything on offer, is that it's all terribly balanced.

The hero that players will craft in the beginning has a 50-50 chance or ruining your - very long - playthrough, as certain builds are usually better than others, especially since a lot of the missions revolve around your hero acting on its own, without any additional help, which really hurts those who want to play, say, as a healer. This problem continues with the rest of the available resources as well, whether that has to do with the costs for units or buildings, the six available factions/races, the available gear, the enormous library of spells that can be found - you name it, and it probably has a balance issue.

There's a general lack of polish everywhere you look in SpellForce. The various menus and interfaces range from ok to a bad mess, and there is no key-binding whatsoever; the friendly AI has fragile units run towards heavy-hitters, while melee fighters (as well as your character) look puzzled just a few steps away from the battlefield; going into the third-person is pretty, yet renders your melee character into a nimrod that doesn't follow your orders; everyone, no matter the race or type of unit takes its sweat time when moving from A to B (more on that later on), and battles are essentially fights where 20 bullet sponges fight other bullet sponges… and many, many more small and large flaws to talk about.

Visually the whole thing leans towards bland, but without that meaning that it's actually ugly, in fact there are moments that look pretty good despite the aged graphics. The art style however is such that it creates issues of a more practical nature. After all, this is an RTS - you are supposed to play from afar, so you need to know who is who, and what is what, with just a quick glance. Impossible in here. For most people the usual tactic will be to create a large enough and diverse army before sending it to the enemy base, because once the swords start clanging, it's hard to micromanage anything. This applies to other key objects as well, with resources and even quest-giving NPCs blending with their surroundings.

Now, despite all this talk about the mixing of genres, this is mostly a strategy game, where you simply have an RPG-type main who can complete missions and whatnot. Sadly, the strategy portion isn't without its own flaws either. While there is a surprising variety when it comes to its more… gimmicky scenarios, most of the time you are simply thrown into a map, and are tasked to build a big army as fast as possible, with enemies attacking in wave after wave, and with an endless supply of resources. There's no real tactic to speak of besides guarding key spots on the map, and then crafting a big group of battle-ready units. It's all boring, repetitive, and, like with everything in SpellForce, with no care about balance, with the expansions that are included in this 'Platinum Edition' not trying to fix anything at all… in fact they can safely be described as simply "more SpellForce."

All would be forgiven if everything wasn't so darn slow, something that coupled with the map structure, leads to one of the hungriest time-munchers ever created. Out of the 50+ hours one will need to reach the end of the main campaign, 60 to 70% of that time will be spend on waiting for the army to be created, and then moving them from here to there. That's especially painful when you need to send the main hero to a quest giver at the other side of the freaking map just so he can give you a bloody exit key, and send you back to where you were. That's a process that can take up to 15 minutes, with no way to speed-up things like in… well, every RTS ever made!!! There's a reason why WarCraft III succeeded, and this failed, and it wasn't because of the budget, or brand recognition. As always time is the best judge, and the fact that few even remember this speaks volumes about its quality.