Introduction
In October 2003 Phenomic Game Development (later EA Phenomic) released SpellForce: The Order of Dawn, a game combining quite well, 2 different genres, RTS and RPG. In 2004 the game received two additional expansions called The Breath of Winter and The Shadow of the Phoenix.
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| Avatar Creation Screen |
Gameplay
Be it either the campaign or multiplayer you start out by creating an avatar and pick a starting skill Like Heavy Combat Arts, Elemental Magic,etc and then invest points in Strength, Agility, Stamina, Dexterity, Wisdom, Intellect and Charisma. The Campaign follows a story set a few years after the Convocation, an event that broke the continents of Eo apart and made travel between the remaining Islands only possible through portals. Your avatar is a rune warrior, a hero bound to a rune, who is given his own rune so he won't be a slave.
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| Just yer Human camp! |
Then as you progress you get runes of other different rune warriors but they have fixed levels and can only be geared, unlike the avatar which also levels up and gets better. You also get runes for the races in the game. There are 6 races, Human, Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, Trolls and Dark Elves and 7 monuments, one for summoning the other rune warriors and 6 for each race. Runes also have different levels and having a weaker army might stop you from fighting certain higher level foes. Of course you will also get or buy different building and unit blueprints so you can build the more advanced forces of each of the races. The inventory allows you to equip 3 pieces of armor, a 1-handed weapon and a shield or a two-handed weapon and 2 rings. Of course as you level you will also learn different spells and skills that will help you in combat, either for healing, illusion or damage.
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| Hello Rune Warrior! |
now to the Strategy part. As I mentioned above you need to activate a monument with a rune to use it to summon units and pretty much the monument is used to create all units while buildings are mostly used for resources, upgrades and titans. There are 7 resources in game, wood, stone, iron, food, moonsilver, aria and lenya. Not all resources are used by all races, e.g. humans use only wood,stone, iron, food and aria. Initially you create some workers/slaves at the monument which you use to gather resources and then build resource buildings to harvest them faster assigning 5 workers to each buildings. Alongside that you build buildings that boost harvesting, that increase population limit and that unlock higher tier units to be summoned at the monument. An interesting mechanic here is that summoning units gets slower and slower if you don't let your rune power regenerate, so if you mess up it's harder to field units fast enough, making the game relatively slow paced.
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| Humans dying one by one |
Graphics & Sound
Well I must say that starting the game for the first time in quite a few years I was surprised to see that the game holds up quite well. Selected 2160p, set all the details to the maximum and well the game looked quite ok, even the UI is relatively sharp. the only real issue is that the game isn't that colorful and there are plenty of low polygons yet most textures look quite sharp, for a 15 year old game.
Voice acting in the game is quite ok, can't really hold up to 2018 standards but it's enough to feel immersed in the game, the soundtrack is pleasant but other than that the alarms, the ambient sound is a bit too generic and often barely heard, making the game feel quite empty at times.
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| Yeah... in SpellForce bridges aren't exactly bridges, one of the weirder/lazy things of the game engine. Oh and Trolls! |
Compatibility
Luckily, at least with the platinum version steam the game just needs to be installed and played but one issue I found is that the game gets into a not-responding state after applying settings and I have to use task manager to close it but after restarting the game the settings are applied. And even though the text gets just a bit small the UI scales well up to 4k.
Wrap-up
One of the more unique and better RTS (and decent rpg) games out there, it's totally worth picking it up and playing it. The story of the base game and expansions can keep you busy for hours and it's surprisingly solid with enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. The only thing you'll have to learn to deal with is the fact that the game is quite slow paced.
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| Damn spider... well one less bug to deal with! |
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