SpellForce 3 – Review

SpellForce is a series that started its own neat fanbase. Mainly due to the fact that it’s a rather experimental game where the developers tried to combine RPG and RTS elements, creating an interesting concept. It’s been a long time since the last game (SpellForce 2, 2006) came out, and obviously, a lot of people are excited to dive back into the monster-infested fantasy world of swords and sorcery. 

Story 

Your main character is called General Sentenzia Noria, commander of the Wolf Guard. The Wolf Guard is like the Secret Service, but only with swords and magic. You have sworn your loyalty to the Queen, protecting and obeying her at all cost. You’ve been sent out to find a certain powerful artifact that cannot fall into the wrong hands. Arriving at the overgrown foresty area where you are supposed to find a contact and the artifact, things escalate rather fast because you stumble upon some resisting rebel mages and treasure hunters, not to mention all the undead monsters roaming around you. It’s a little pre-story that’s supposed to explain something before the prologue even starts, but it will give you at least an hour of gameplay already. Without spoiling too much, things go South and after your first mission, there’s a time gap after which you try to regain the artifact. From this point on, General Sentenzia Noria keeps meeting new people while we follow his rather violent life as commander of the Wolf Guard.

Graphics

This game looks rather great in terms of graphical quality. viewed from top-down it feels a bit like a huge animated movie that you look at from above. However, there is also the possibility to zoom in, revealing a lot of detailed work in either your troops or the environment. The thing that could have been way better in terms of ‘graphics’ though, is not about aesthetics, it’s about the menu layout. The many unclear things you can click on and the way clickable objects hide behind environments every now and then. There could have been a bit more effort to make these things more obvious or helpful in terms of accessibility.

Sound

The sound is cool! During the loading screen alone there is plenty of epicness to be heard with an entire movie soundtrack to be heard before you can start (Yes, the loading times on a new level are rather extreme). But besides that epic track, a lot of the game has proper in-depth sound to be heard. A vibrant forest, the proper metal of swords touching each other, ah, the joy of a rich fantasy world. The voice acting is also rather well done. At least, characters do the voices you expect from them. A dark mage sounds.. well, dark. A light mage sounds what in Dungeon and Dragon terms would be described as ”lawfully good”, a.k.a. a softie.

Gameplay

SpellForce 3 is a slow-paced combination of a Real Time Strategy game and a Role Playing Game. This means it’s a mix of games such as Age of Empires and Titan Quest. On one side you use buildings, gather resources and build an army to achieve your goals and conquer the land, on the other side you travel solo or with your army with some heroes. These heroes, the main characters who are a part of the narrative, are stronger than regular units, have quests to fulfill and are not dead when defeated. At least, not immediately. Also, they got abilities they can learn, have equipment such as weapons and armor they can equip after finding them and specific stats they can gain. All these things make SpellForce 3 a rather complex, big game.

For somebody not familiar with an RTS game, this one can be rather complex to get in to. The tutorials aren’t really helping a lot either since they don’t totally explain what is going on. For advanced players, there are some new elements as well. For one, you don’t build everything wherever you want to like in a regular RTS. No, in this game you try to conquer a small section of the map by either defeating world monsters or an enemy army and establishing an outpost at the fresh location. This gives you a small area on the map surrounding the outpost where you can freely build some buildings such as a watchtower, barracks or resource gathering buildings. Then, depending on the level your outpost is, you got a certain amount of workers you can put to work in the area.

This way, you try to conquer the map bit by bit while focusing on achieving your objectives and looting stuff to make your heroes stronger. Especially the first time when playing the game can be rather challenging. Not only because of the difficulty, but also because of the enemy A.I. coming at you at unexpected times and some bugs that are still very much in this first release of the game. It’s nothing a few good patches can’t fix but they are very noticeable and break either your experience playing the game or the game itself. Oh, and like mentioned, the loading times for each map are easily one up to two minutes. They might be accompanied by some epic soundtrack, but especially in this era of games, it is way more of a nuisance than it is a virtue. So you better have some patience while starting a game.

Conclusion

SpellForce 3 has great potential but it’s totally a hate-it-or-love-it type of game. Real RTS fans might not fully get what they want from this game, and you must have some patience while playing as well as while waiting for a game to load, but when you are open-minded this game just might surprise you. A story to follow, graphically deep with RTS elements and some classic RPG parts that might even get some hooked on the series.

Icecreamvamp

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I'm a game designer, developer, and reviewer. I've been reviewing for 3rd-strike.com since 2017.

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