SpellForce 2: Shadow Wars

"All right game, but has plenty of room for improvement"

Spellforce 2 was pretty good, although there were several things that could've been improved. Spellforce 2 is about a 50/50 mix of an RPG and a RTS, and pretty much follows the gameplay style of previous Spellforce games.

This review is based on Version 1.0 of the game, played at normal difficulty

Genre score: 33/50

- Strategy Element (15/25)

The strategy involved in this game is mediocre, at best. There is not much strategy involved at all in the game, and it wasn't balanced very well. For example, 5 soldiers beats 4 soldiers is pretty much the only strategy involved because strategic use of counter units is really not present in this game. Any scenario where your allowed to build on is pretty much just defend your base, collect a ton of resources, then max out your army and blindly charge. Battles are not won marginally either in this game due to the fast regeneration of HP by units, which I feel is a balance issue. If an army of 50 goes up against an army of 40, after the army of 40 is completely wiped out, there will still be like 80% of the original army of 50 remaining just due to how the game mechanics work. Even when using the wrong type of unit, if you have just a few more men on your side, you can still win easily. If you lose a battle, then reload your game to before you started it and add an additional 5 or 10 soldiers, then you will often win the battle with very few casualties, the balance could use some serious work in this game.

- Role Playing Element (18/25)

The storyline in this game was decently solid, although some of the quests are boring and repetitive. Quests that require you to run around on the map and just look for things on the ground or just run errands for people get boring after a while, especially when you are forced to jump to 2 or 3 different maps to complete 1 quest. If the load time between maps was much shorter, this wouldn't be an issue, but it does take a while for a map to load. Character building in this game was done all right, and again, is very similar to the first game. One thing that did bother me though is that the game forces you to split up your skill points so much. The player should have the option to say, completely specialize in 1 branch of the tree, instead of having to take some picks in another branch. Even if the skills further down have a high level requirement, the player should be able to save up the points to use them later on.

Other genre-specific notes:

Hotkeys in this game are nearly nonexistent. There's no hotkey that I know of that allows you to quick cast spells (clicking those buttons really quick gets annoying after a while), and to build things. If there are hotkeys, they should be clearly labeled, such as "Build Castle (C)" or "Build Castle (Hotkey: C)", but I did not see any of those and they were not mentioned in the tutorial, so I'm assuming that they do not exist. Granted, the difficulty of this game is pretty easy so that these arn't necessary, but it still makes the fun factor of the game go up when it's easier to control your units.

General score: 29/50

- Graphics (13/20)

Graphics in this game were OK, but there were some serious issues. The shadows are VERY pixelated, and I feel that if the shadows are going to be such a lousy quality, then the game would look better without shadows at all. There were also problems with the fog of war, which takes a very long time to update. Your units can walk into the dark and even be able to start fighting enemies, but you have no idea what's going on until 5 or 6 seconds later, the fog of war should update IMMEDIATELY after you enter the area.

- Sounds (7/10)

Not much to say here, sounds are done all right, but get annoying after a while. Some of the spoken speech also didn't match with the text subtitles. It happens quite a few times too, so it makes me believe that nobody took the time to make sure that it was correct.

- Performance (2/10)

Serious performance issues. My system is NOT outdated (is less then a year old) and the game runs extremely slowly when the game needs to do anything that's CPU demanding

- Learning Curve (5/5)

Includes an in game tutorial for the first map if you turn the option on. Is VERY helpful and really holds your hand through it. If you can't learn how to play the game after this tutorial, your too stupid to play computer games.

- Replayability (2/5)

You MIGHT want to play it again as a different class (ie, you play a mage once and a warrior once), but that's pretty doubtful. Playing through the game once will probably let you have your fill of it.

Final Notes:

It's an all right game, but with some flaws that should've been fixed before the game got released, and there's features that are missing that should be there.

If your a hardcore RTSer or RPGer, then this game is severely lacking, but if you like a mix of the both, this game does an OK job of combining it.

Final score: 62/100
Rounded to: 6/10

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 05/04/06