Birth of Shadows Review
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Birth of Shadows is primarily a single player role-playing game where do undergo quests, which usually involve killing stuff or finding people (and killing stuff along the way). The main campaign is quite long: 100 different quests are spread across a number of maps. Unfortunately, the background story and in-game text-only narrative aren't terribly interesting, so Birth of Shadows isn't as engaging as other role-playing games. There are skirmish maps for single missions you can play alone or over a network (with a known IP address). Cooperative play is pretty fun, although you need to communicate effectively so you don't cast contradictory spells and that's difficult to do in real-time. There are currently only four maps, but more are planned to be released in the future. There might also be some maps coming from the map editor that ships with the game, so while Birth of Shadows doesn't come with much non-campaign content, the prospects are promising.
Birth of Shadows is a magic-only game, so all of your conflicts will take place from a distance. You can only cast one spell every two seconds (no matter which spells they are) and some (but certainly not most) spells come with recharge times. There isn't mana in the game, so as long as your spells aren't cooling down, you can keep on casting spells every two seconds. Because of this fixed time limitation, you would think Birth of Shadows would allow you to queue up spells, especially since so many spells work in concert with each other. But, sadly, this is not the case: you can only press spell buttons after the two second limit has passed, making combat much more tedious than it needs to be. Birth of Shadows also lacks any type of auto-targeting, so you must click on an enemy unit before casting any spells. As for the spells themselves, there are a good number of them (sixteen to be exact) that are introduced gradually as you begin a new campaign. Giving you new tools one at a time is a good design choice, as it would be quite overwhelming to begin with sixteen spells and not really know how to use them. The spells also compliment each other well; for example, a spell that steals enemy rage can be cast before a spell that causes more damage with increased player rage. Spells include the usual health/armor/speed buffs and debuffs, area damage, nightmares that cause your character to disappear, and pets that can attack enemy units. While these run the gamut of the types of spells you will encounter in any role-playing game, there could still be more and you're not able to customize your character with specific spells as you gain experience.
