In Depth Review
Graphics People who play games like this that are strategy based are USED to poor graphics. Usually when you're dealing with 300 models on the screen you rarely have the settings on high. It just lags the game, even in this game I still have to put all the settings on low, so even if it looked good I wouldn't be able to run it at that high during large sieges. SameIn Depth Review
Graphics People who play games like this that are strategy based are USED to poor graphics. Usually when you're dealing with 300 models on the screen you rarely have the settings on high. It just lags the game, even in this game I still have to put all the settings on low, so even if it looked good I wouldn't be able to run it at that high during large sieges. Same graphics as Spellforce 2.
Gameplay I'm going to break this into two parts. City development, and Warfare.
City Development This part of the game is its' weakest point. You don't get to customze where things go unless you're an Orc, you don't get to choose where you settle so if you settle in an area without awesome mountains to hide behind then you can't move or find a new spot. Buildings are static for elf/human and the intuitiveness of how they did the buildings (click building, circle thing pops up and select your options) is very unfriendly, especially when you're often clicking on things by accident. Along with this, there's really nothing here but resource gathering you don't plan strategies here, you don't set up schemes... It's all just a resource hub and recruitment hub. Sieges will be there eventually so you will plan for that in the meta game but most of your gameplay will be out in the world map.
Warfare It's pretty damn fun to strategize where to move x units, etc... In fact in concept they did this very well. Each unit has a weakness, you can level your units up and so you end up getting very attached to them and sad when they die. Unfortunately the lag currently that plagues pvp hinders the enjoyment some, but you get used to it. By far this alone is worth buying the game for, as you will find many hours of enjoyment if you really have patience to give it a shot.
Design These guys are obviously new at designing video games, and they've got a long way to go to learn basic gameplay design concepts. The quest system, the UI, the font choices used... all of it says indi developer. Which is fine, I prefer supporting indi developers myself, as they usually have the game concepts I want to play.
The warfare alone is worth buying the game for, but you'll find that the rest of the game is constantly trying to turn you off from playing. Every time you load a new area it has to do this pan-arama view thing that annoys the crap out of me. What's worst is there's no way to auto accept the quests, they literally make you walk your hero unit to each guy and select them. This means you spend several hours just running your guy back and forth between spots, and on top of that when the quest is inside an NPC city you can't accept all the quests at once. You have to accept one, log out (loading screen) and then load back the city (loading screen again). They could make this a 7/10 or even an 8/10 if they just added an option to not have to enter cities to accept/complete quests. The writing is so generically cheesy no one cares about the story anyway.
Do I recommend a buy or pass? I would say buy. Given it's current state its' full of bugs and problems and you will probably be turned off at first by it, but have patience. These guys used to work full time jobs and work on this game part time, but they've recently stated that now they can quit their jobs and work on this full time because of steam and how popular it's become. They've already rolled out a hotfix since it came to steam, so give them a few months to hammer out the bugs but buy now while it's on sale.
The community seems extremely helpful and the amount of people who have joined the game is staggering. I expect this game to explode in the coming months. I just hope they add more monsters to the shop because I want hydras and :)
For those of you that are concerned this is a "pay to win" game. Yes and No. Yes you could potentially spend hundreds of dollars building an army entirely out of the shop. No because none of those units will live forever. Units bought from the shop die permanently, and acquiring crowns is so easy. For example, one PVP siege netted me 20 crowns. The top item in the shop is 120 crowns. So I'd have to win six sieges to get a dragon, and you really only need one. So it's very easy to get crowns in game. Quests give them, pvp gives them. I personally bought crowns because I wanted to get a head start on getting the resource development going in my city. Made sense to me, I'd rather have my cities producing enough resources for me to play with. I didn't have to do this, I could have spent a few hours just gathering resources via battle but I was lazy.
If you have any problems in game the devs have been extremely helpful and they are constantly in the help chat helping people. Very active devs.
Yes my scores in some areas are very low and you're probably wondering why I am recommending it. Honestly, I don't know entirely what has me hooked on this game. I've spent over 10 hours playing it since I bought it yesterday… Expand
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