SpellForce: Conquest of Eo – Review

The SpellForce series has been around for a very long time, although it has remained relatively unknown. Always featuring strategy gameplay, the series has seen its fair share of RTS titles, with its latest release, Conquest of Eo, taking a veer into the turn-based tactics genre. Featuring gameplay similar to that of the Might and Magic series, this latest title offers players large campaigns in a massive world. Here is what it has to offer.

Story

The game’s story follows the player, a young mage who, upon visiting his master’s tower, finds it ransacked and in ruins. Using an artifact hidden by their tutor, they watch the fight that took place and what became of his master. Coming to the conclusion that their master was attacked by the Circle, a faction of powerful magicians, for delving too far into the research of magical energy, the player then sets out to recover their master’s legacy and spells.

Throughout the game, players will have to confront the Circle’s mages and fulfill a set of conditions to join the organization or beat it. Along the way, they’ll encounter heroes with their own stories and side-quests with longer narratives which provide the game with much of its charm. While the main story is not particularly heavy, mostly being in the background, the smaller narratives told through quests are enjoyable and well-written, while still being skippable for those uninterested.

Graphics

Conquest of Eo’s graphics combines 3D models for the overworld and creatures with gorgeous illustrations for quests and menus. Featuring a rather large world with visually unique and distinct biomes, each of these stands on its own thanks to the amount of effort put into them. What could do with improvements is the UI however, which due to its unintuitive design often leaves the player without knowing things as simple as where to see all their troops or navigate their spells more comfortably.

Sound

The game’s sound design is not bad, featuring a decent soundtrack, although the SFX are rather questionable, especially those pertaining to creatures. It is rather jarring seeing an animal make human grunts when being hit or zombies spitting out Wilhelm screams. Besides this, the sound department doesn’t have much else to mention, lacking voice acting on all fronts.

Gameplay

As previously stated, Conquest of Eo is a game in the same vein as the Might and Magic series, where players will command squads of units (“stacks”), around the map, harvesting resources and battling foes. At the start of a campaign, players will choose their magic archetype, which will define what they can craft as well as their starting spells.

An example of this archetype could be necromancy, focused on aggressive magic and crafting undead units by harvesting souls and resources. The way the game’s crafting system works is that players will have to combine up to 4 materials containing different essences. Depending on the essences provided and the amount of them, different results will be obtained. The materials themselves can be obtained as spoils of war or by sending units with harvest skills around the world, with higher rarity ones providing more essence.

The player’s units themselves also have several mechanics worth mentioning, like their leveling up and the ability to equip them with glyphs that provide passive and active effects. As units level up, they’ll gain passive stats like health and armor, but sometimes they’ll also obtain skills that can alter how the unit works. This is especially true for “milestone” levels, those being multiples of 5, where the unit will get more powerful ability choices. In order to keep their army afloat, players will require gold or mana to sustain their units, each with its own upkeep cost to pay each turn.

In each squad players will also be able to slot an apprentice or hero, unique units with powerful skills, and the ability to equip trinkets alongside glyphs. Apprentices tend to be casters and also get the unique ability to establish a lodge, where they’ll respawn upon death. These lodgings also claim the surrounding area as part of the player’s territory, automatically harvesting the resources every day. On the other hand, heroes are even more special, having a unique storyline that allows them to unlock powerful abilities upon completion.

Among the resources players can harvest, there is a special one known as Allfire, which can only be obtained by melding wisp units with its nodes. Upon capturing an Allfire node, players will be able to put it towards generating one of three resources: mana, research, or experience. Mana is required to cast spells and upkeep units, while research unlocks new spells, and experience upgrades the mage’s tower, making Allfire indispensable to progress.

While players will begin with a limited amount of spells and a small tower, obtaining more Allfire and putting it towards the necessary resources will steadily increase their power. Only by unlocking the unique effects provided by tower rooms and enchantments will units become powerful enough to beat endgame enemies. This is especially true when facing foes who use elements disadvantageous for the player.

Although battles can be personally commanded, once players get enough powerful stacks, they’ll be able to auto-resolve them. Doing so skips the battle and generates a result based on the battling power the game assigns to each squad, basing the damage units might take on the conditions given. A handful of important battles, such as those against the Circle’s archmages, are not skippable and will require the player to manually engage in classic turn-based combat. The only unique feature said combat contains is the fact that units are beholden to only 3 action points, which can be used to move up to two times, using an item per point or attack by consuming all remaining ones.

Conclusion

Overall, Conquest of Eo is an entertaining game with a decent amount of mechanical depth to offer. That said, campaigns are rather long, going for over 10 hours at normal difficulty, meaning its replayability somewhat suffers from this. Although the game features a rather good tutorial for beginners, some important things are left unexplained, which could hinder newcomers to the genre. That said, at a price point of $/€29.99/£24.99, the game is fairly priced for the amount of content it offers, although, as always, waiting for a sale is not a bad idea.

Personal Opinion

“While I love turn-based tactics, games of this style (I hesitate to call them 4X lest hardcore fans of Stellaris and Civ pounce on me) drag on a bit too much to my liking. A single campaign takes ages to beat and halfway through it tends to become really easy once you have a powerful squad. Midway through my first play-through of Conquest of Eo, I was just clicking auto-battle all the time, my turns mostly consisting of moving my squads towards whatever objective I needed to destroy next. Funnily enough, this might’ve been partly due to the fact that the game doesn’t seem to scale much into the late game. One of the first things I did while playing was to lay siege to one of the archmage’s towers, meaning he was effectively out of the way and it meant that I could beat any of the others with the same squad (which I proceeded to do). Obviously, I assume harder difficulties do the usual rigging of the odds so that AI enemies just cheat and grow way faster, but well, that kinda gets rid of the charm.”

Noparg

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No longer writing for the site, pursuing other things.

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