SpellForce: The Order of Dawn Review
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Unless you find RTS games repetitive in general, you'll find it hard to fault Spellforce when it comes to gameplay. Unfortunately, I found that the user interface took away a lot of the potential fun the game system offered. The camera was hard to control when I had the graphics on high detail (even when I tweaked its scroll speed), so I spent a lot of time just trying to get the screen to show me what I wanted it to. Likewise, the lack of hot keys made it hard to get my army to function smoothly. I could group my troops pretty well and get them where I wanted them to go aside from some pathfinding issues that no RTS has been able to remove completely. My big problem was in coordinating magic users with melee troops. You can just send the whole mob in and let them do their thing, focusing only on your avatar when it comes to special attacks, but if you want to control what your magic-using grunts are doing, you either have to attempt to select one out of the brawl or have the whole group target one monster. This would have been easier if you could assign magic or special attacks to hot keys, but unfortunately you can't. With the graphics on high detail, the game looks very nice and you can zoom the camera all the way in to see how nice they are. During combat, though, you want to pull the camera out, though you sometimes can't even get a very clear idea of what's happening when you do that. Having a lot of foliage on a map makes it more realistic, but it also means that you are fighting the silhouettes of monsters obscured by trees a lot. As mentioned, unless you have a very fast machine, turning the graphics options up may cause problems, including annoyingly long load times.
Sound in the game is pretty good, with the sound effects and music creating an immersive atmosphere. The voice acting, on the other hand, was OK in places, but downright abysmal in others. That kind of thing can be forgiven if it's one NPC that you don't have to talk to very often, but when your avatar seems to have no discernable emotion over the events that are unfolding, it really takes away from the role-playing aspect of the game. I eventually stopped paying attention to the story because I didn't want to hear any more bad deliveries of badly written lines. Some of that had to do with the fact that a European company developed the game and that the script was obviously translated. Still, it seems to me that if Konami can translate a game like Metal Gear Solid from Japanese into English and have it make sense and sound halfway like natural English, Phenomic could have done the same.
With all my grousing, though, I'm still glad that Phenomic put the effort into Spellforce that they did and I hope that future expansions or variations will be able to iron out the kinks in the otherwise compelling and engrossing gameplay. For anyone hoping to find a more traditional role-playing experience in a real-time strategy game, Spellforce is definitely worth a look. Let's hope that Spellforce leads some RTS enthusiasts to know the joy of the RPG and that we'll see more attempts at genre-blending that are this thoughtful in the future.
