SpellForce: The Order of Dawn

"Voice acting at its worst (still a decent game though)"

I got this game free with my new motherboard, so naturally I had low expectations for it. Having to reinstall windows and not having any other games handy, I installed this one and started to play. Well, actually, it took awhile before I could actually play. The first thing I noticed was that the mouse was off by half an inch, making it so I would press the button above the one I wanted to press. I eventually solved this by switching resolutions a few times till it worked, which brings up another thing: the highest resolution doesn't work, even though its my desktop resolution. To make things worse, there's no options program, so I had to COMPLETELY reinstall the program to return the resolution to default.

Once I finally got the game working and started to play, I noticed the voice acting. And then I laughed. Very hard. I don't know if the girl was chinese or what, but she could barely speak ENGLISH! She kept talking right through periods, and even skipped a word! I have to admit, it was pretty funny. Thankfully it got better (not much better) later on in the game.

One other main concern is that they totally screwed up buying/selling with merchants. I realised that I could buy whatever I wanted, even though I didn't have the gold to pay for it. While this isn't necesarily a bad thing, it goes to show how much time went in to developing this game.

Now there are alot of good points to the game. There are numerous side quests to complete, although not as many as I would have liked. Also your hero can wear equipment such as armor and rings, and equip different weapons. I think this is a major improvement on warcraft III. One thing however, is that the tutorial said that people with a ? over their heads had side quests. I found this to be wrong, as many people have a ? over their heads but actually don't even talk to you, much less give you a quest.

Overall, I'd say that the game is definitely worth playing, as it's held my attention so far. The bad voice acting is bearable, and the aspect of leveling your character and buying (well not really) new equipment for your character will keep you playing. However I wouldn't pay more than $15 for it in the store.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 01/09/06