SpellForce

Additional Screenshots

You know the old saying; never judge a book by its cover? Well, over time, I have decided that most video games can easily be judged by how they look on the box. This more than applied with my experiences with Spellforce: The Order of Dawn. When it arrived in the mail, I was like "Cool." As I was turning my computer on, I couldn't help constantly turning my head to stare in awe at the beautiful color and detail of the box. When my computer loaded, in almost a trance, I popped in the CD and soon was ready to play. As it loaded, I read the manual and realized the game was neither an RTS or and RPG but both. Man, was this going to be great...

Choosing a Character with Special Attributes

First, we shall delve into the wonderful world of the Spellforce RPG. Much like Diablo, the gamer takes a character they create and advances them through different worlds and settings to the climax of the game. Character selection is a huge plus in this game with many options to choose from. Gender, appearance, statistics and their specialty are all choices any avid gamer must choose. For example, for my first character, I decided that going dark magic would be fun. Under dark magic, I chose to specialize in death as opposed to curses or summoning. What made this so good was the large amount of variety there was. Gamers can go from melee characters to magical characters, each with unique traits and abilities. My nature man was given the ability to have a thorn shield as a level one ability. This allows for early game interaction between monsters and your arsenal of skills, not just you whooping them with a sword. Anyway, back to my dark arts hero. When the game loads, there is a cinematic of you somehow "appearing" at this little portal place. This old guy comes over to you and talks like he's known you for years and it makes you wonder… He tells of a tale that you are a rune warrior, a soldier once used like a mercenary. Now that you are free from this captivity, its time to forge your own destiny. Then, this scrawny white guy appears and is all in a huff that some "Black Warriors" are descending from the mountain and something has to be done. The old guy leaves and you are left with this messenger boy. Oh what fun! He is supposed to escort you to Greyfell, a city that contains the group of men known as the Order of Dawn. On your way, he retaliates against you and you realize the old man is headed for a trap and blah blah blah. Haha, anyway, after this comes the best part! Upon arrival at this little temple-like structure, the whole "rune warrior" aspect comes into play.

The RTS Aspect of the Game

As it turns out, the RPG mode is included right next to RTS. Rune warriors carry runes that can be used to summon workers at certain structures (like the temple thing). The rune you were first given is a human rune, so little peasants become available. The peasants can construct bases for you, which in turn create more peasants and soldiers. This becomes very important shortly as a siege on a goblin camp is issued, a mission that can only be accomplished with an army. One neat feature of the base was that workers can double as soldiers if they get attacked, so the gamer doesn't have to worry about sending his avatar (the rune warrior) back to base at a bad time. The campaign carries on with such detail and quality for a fair time, but delving even more into this area would ruin the surprise and the simple yet beautiful style in which the game was made.

The Multiplayer Mode Could be Nice but... Empty?

Along with the campaign mode is the multiplayer function. Over the Internet, gamers can verse each other by building bases in many different maps. Races include the humans, dwarves, elves, trolls, orcs and the dark elves, a race almost never seen in fantasy games. Each race has its unique abilities, like the elves' bonus to ranged attacks and magic against the dwarves who have sturdy melee warriors and architecture. I really wanted to do this upon opening the game, but when I logged into GameSpy, I was the only one who was logged on. I mean, come on, I am a geek, but the only person who actually plays a game- that's just creepy. I tried again later, but all I got were these German servers who had different game versions than me. Great, a beautiful fantasy RTS with no one to play with…

Overall

As you can see, the game is choreographed very well and the mechanics behind it are all beautiful. There we hardly any flaws in the game except for the crazy Germans and their different versions. Whatever, I can just amuse myself in the campaign; in fact, I want to forget about writing this to go back to playing. This game is one of the best RTS/RPG games ever to hit the shelves. Pick it up.