SpellForce: Conquest of Eo Review - Page 5
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The game's unit variety keeps things from getting stale for a long time. You might be starting your adventure dealing with brigands and overgrown insects, and feeling overpowered, but then, following a string of mistakes and events not fully within your control, you'll have to relocate to a swamp swarming with powerful undead stacks where you'll be holding for dear life, slowly losing all your veteran units and frantically trying to come up with a plan to get out of this tailspin. And then you finally admit defeat and relocate once again, which now pits you against a faction of racist Dwarves and their pet moles that seem tailor-made to counter your favorite strategies. And that's exactly what makes the whole thing so satisfying.
Technical Information
Conquest of Eo's visuals are clean and crisp, and its maps, both the overworld and the combat arenas, are detailed and pleasant to look at. And its loading screens are simply fantastic. On the other hand, its unit portraits leave a lot to be desired, while all the items and crafting reagents look downright cheap and wouldn't seem out of place in a mobile game.
The trend continues with the game's audio where its soundtrack is an absolute joy to listen to, but the barks you get when you click on your units, especially those belonging to the human faction, are borderline laughable.
The options menu is robust and can put a lot of other options menus to shame with all the clearly described and handy options, like the ability to adjust the game's font size, but also a separate slider specifically for tooltips. You can speed up the game's animations to a ridiculous degree, but also you can differentiate between your own units and your opponents. However, certain attack animations take much longer than the rest of them, and this makes fine-tuning the animation speed more annoying than entirely necessary.
All in all, it's a great options menu. Except for the fact that not only can you not rebind the controls, but there also isn't even a tab listing them. Which, considering the rest of the menu, feels like some crazy oversight.
The game saves instantly and loads relatively fast, but could do with some optimization in the latter area. You do get manual and auto-saves, but unfortunately, the game doesn't let you load directly from combat for some reason.
Another point of contention is the game's UI which is more or less functional, but far from aesthetically pleasing. Some of its elements don't mix well with the rest of it, ending your turns can be way more hassle than you would expect, and occasionally you'll be able to enter the crafting menu thinking you can craft something when you actually can't. You also don't get anything in the way of a quest journal. And because of that, tracking your current tasks can be a real chore.
The above is made worse by the grimoire UI that's actually pretty impressive and looks exactly like you would expect it to look like in a game about powerful mages. Well, at least everything runs well and there aren't any apparent bugs. Though the way morale damage works is a bit suspect, but the system isn't transparent enough to know for sure.
Conclusion
A somewhat askew balance of narrative and sandbox content, a haphazard approach to combat arenas, and a far from stellar UI prevent SpellForce: Conquest of Eo from becoming an instant, probably cult, classic.
But even so, it's still easily one of the best and most engaging video games in recent memory thanks to its complex interconnected systems, satisfying level of challenge, emergent elements, and that hard-to-pin-down "just one more turn" feel.
