Developer: Grimlore Games, THQ Nordic
Publisher: THQ Nordic
Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Tested on: PS5
SpellForce 3 Reforced – Review
It has already been five years since we last took a closer look at SpellForce 3. The game proved to be a very interesting mix of a traditional RPG and a fleshed-out RTS title. At the time of the release of the base game, however, the game still had quite a few bugs and other issues. Luckily, the developer has been polishing their title ever since. Over the years, the game has received several expansions, as well as many patches. Now, however, the game has finally been ported to consoles with most of its available updated content bundled neatly into one package. As we discussed the base game, the Soul Harvest DLC and the Fallen God DLC in the past, we will mainly be discussing how relevant the Reforced version for consoles is. Keep in mind that the base version of SpellForce 3 Reforced does not include the two DLCs.
Truth be told if you like somewhat old-school RTS and RPG games, there’s no doubt about it, SpellForce 3 Reforced is a game you should consider looking into. This is a fairly big statement to make only a few lines into our actual review. If you exclusively game on consoles, this game might just be one of the few titles that provides a grand-scale top-down RPG and RTS experience. The game has a massive world to explore, many different modes to try out, multiplayer options that will certainly entertain you and your friends, and much more. That being said, this is a game in which you’ll have to invest a lot of time, as it does take quite a while to learn the basics, and just playing through the different modes will also take many hours. This is, of course, great, but it comes with a certain learning curve that not every gamer might like.
In SpellForce 3 Reforced you will be micromanaging both your heroes, as well as your troops and buildings. Some maps will solely revolve around the key heroes, and others will put you at the helm of large battles. This change of pace makes the game very interesting but it also shows that this title never completely masters any of its components. It comes close to perfecting its individual parts, but more than often you’ll like one part better than the other, and sometimes you might even wish that the game either chooses its RPG format or its RTS format for certain missions.
Getting a game such as this to work on a console is very much a nearly impossible task. We can easily state that the development team went beyond our expectations and they did an amazing overhaul of the UI. After a few (longer) sessions with the game, we could also easily find the menus we needed for our characters, building options, skill tabs, and so on, but even so, we couldn’t help but constantly miss a mouse and keyboard setup here. We eventually struggled with precision controls and it became a bit tedious to actually go through all the menus with the triggers, to then go to stick controls, to then basically remember what other buttons did what. To add insult to injury, it’s almost impossible to see your objectives on the mini-map, as it is so ridiculously small when you’re not right in front of the screen. Again, the developers did a great job here, but everything just feels clunky and imprecise. The game itself, however, runs extremely smooth on PS5 and it simply looks amazing.
Conclusion
SpellForce 3 Reforced is an amazing game to get on console – if you cannot get it on PC, or simply really prefer gaming on a console. This RPG and RTS hybrid experience just works perfectly, and we enjoyed playing through the original campaign, as well as the other modes. The only downside to getting the console version of this one is that the controls are just not that pleasant. That being said, the developers put in a lot of effort to make this grand-scale adventure playable on consoles, so it’s certainly still worth looking into.
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