No matter how "cutting edge", or "next gen" a PC game claims to be, there are, invariably, myriad clues that explain its genesis. Just as Sherlock Holmes could casually inspect some random passerby and make astute observations about him based on the type of dirt staining the hem of his mackintosh, the knowledgable gamer can look at the design elements of any given game and establish a lineage, of sorts. Said gamers will not be fooled by buzz-words; rather, they will absorb the game and then make their own pronouncements upon the validity of whatever claims the marketing crew endows upon their finished product.

Spellforce 2, fortunately, makes no claims to anything, save "a seamless blend of RPG and RTS." This much is true. Unfortunately, it doesn't take a forensic analyst to see the fingerprint of other, better games all over it. The main lure here (aside from the mostly-naked Dark Elf lady) is the ability to hop in and out of two distinct genres with little to no interruption between the two. The question to be answered, then, is this: Are these two portions of the game handled well enough, in themselves, to make for an enjoyable final product?

Spellforce 2 is a simple game to sit down to. Cracking open the game manual, one of the first items the player reads essentially states "You can spend an hour reading this manual, or just play the tutorial. I advise the latter." Being on a deadline and having no time to waste on eye-bleeding unit charts, I did just this. After running a serviceable cinematic introduction complete with my first in-game footage of the aforementioned mostly-naked Elf lady (always a great way to begin a game), I was thrown directly into the in-game tutorial.

Indeed, the manual had provided sage advice. As these things go, it was top-notch - providing all the information I needed to dive into the main game, in a concise and neatly-tailored package. You'll hit on all the key aspects of the game here, with detailed, voice-enabled instructions (which would turn out to be the only decent voiceacting in the game) covering everything from level-ups to town construction. The tutorial also conveniently provides the plot-launch for the campaign. Duly tutored by the end, you're ready to go crack heads, gather phat lewtz, and save the world. Equipped only with a knife, your magical blood and a mostly-naked Elven sidekick, it's time to truly begin the game.

To play the game, you'll need to master both of its elements: an RPG format similar to Dungeon Siege, where you'll control a handful of heroes from a third-person or isometric view, and an RTS format, reminiscient of Warcraft 2. The charm here lies in the integration. You'll arguably spend more time utilizing RPG mode, exploring the map and completing quests. Some of these quests will charge you to hit specific map waypoints and build towns from which you'll then be able to recruit armies and lay siege to the enemy in a traditional RTS format. The transitions are intuitive and extremely smooth, and couched in an attractive graphical environment that isn't lacking in any respect when compared to any current RTS titles.

Both aspects of Spellforce 2 follow well-trodden genre standards, so the game should be extremely familiar to anyone old enough to actually purchase it.

Playing in RPG mode (where you're travelling and exploring with only a handful of fellow heroes) is done via two available views: third-person view, where you can get more of an RPG flavor and see much more detailed avatar graphics, or an isometric view (also used in the RTS areas of the game) which sacrifices eye candy for a much wider view of the on-screen map. You'll guide your heroes around from quest givers (with familiar golden exclamation points floating above their heads) to preset encounters tailored for your smaller group. You'll complete quests for experience points, which will allow your main hero to level.

As your hero levels, so do his companions, and while they're never quite as tough as your avatar, they're all hardy and servicrable, with powerful and useful special abilities. Of course, no RPG today would be complete without gobs of glittering loot, and Aspyr knows this. Following what has become convention, your avatars will grow in graphical majesty as they upgrade their gear. A not-inconsiderate part of the hook in these types of games is watching your heroes go from dirty potboys to ass-kicking ubertankers; you won't be disappointed here, either. There's no shortage of lootables to be had throughout the campaign, and they can be shared or passed down amongst any heroes you have who attain the necessary skills to use them.

RTS mode uses very common features that most any gamer will be used to - three gatherable resources, town construction based on a "crafter" platform, and unit construction and upgrades. Hotkey designations for individual unit groups were eschewed in favor of a graphical UI at the top of the screen, displaying the individual groups and number of units contained. Auto-building is not here; instead, in a throwback to earlier genre offerings, you'll need to assign workers to build your structures. The more crafters you have working on a specific project, the faster the completion. This will often lead the player to having many "idle" units lying about in town; fortunately, there's a handy UI button that will allow you to deal with assigning work to idle crafters much more efficiently than having to micromanage one at a time. Action alerts will display on a mini-map, which also uses a very friendly waypoint marker system, making it much more difficult to get lost among your RPG and RTS goals for any given level. Any given objective which relies on a map location will have a waypoint marked; then, it's just a question of bulling your way through to it.

Does all of that sound pretty familiar? It should. You've played it all before.

Spellforce 2, conceptually, should have been a solid, engaging game. It has all of those core elements I mentioned, pushed into a tight package of gameplay - a "seamless blend" of genres, like creamsicles, or chocolate-vanilla twist on a hot summer night. A naked Elf babe following you around wherever you go.

The concept is good. The reality of the execution, unfortunately, is not.

The reality is that there is nothing here that makes you think you've risen above the level of alt-tabbing between the aforementioned Dungeon Siege (which was a better RPG) or Warcraft 2 (which was a better RTS). While there are small tweaks that show some developer insight (like the ability to teleport around the map after certain “journey stones” are discovered), the entire offering reeks of a lack of imagination in both aspects. While Auran has succeeded in seamlessly blending two genres, either offering by itself would have been a failure, and blending the two does little to mitigate this.

Compouding the mediocrity present here are a hodgepodge of issues that speak to insufficient time in final polish and a design team that has no business handling anything beyond, perhaps, some of the more rudimentary knock-knock jokes you might find on any given fourth grade playground. Dramatic soundfiles of heroic music come crashing out of your speakers as a battle engages, then immediately cut to travelling background music when the battles are still raging, only half-over. You'll find poor grammar scattered intermittently throughout several quest dialogues. Adjunct heroes or compantions are tossed into your party infrequently, but the lack of most ability to select or control them effectively can cause pathing issues when changing the movement of your armies en-masse, leaving them to run off solo and die should your attention wander for a moment.

And the quest design... words cannot describe the horror. For instance, an NPC, on your first encounter with her, will ask you to murder two lost children that you've already been tasked by another NPC to save. Without any preamble or reason to trust you, just "hey, kill these kids." What's worse, this is supposedly coming from the right-hand councilor to a local Baron, who happens to be standing right around the corner from her. Of course, your only option is to run back and tattle, which spawns an encounter with her about 30 seconds later that leaves her dead in decidedly undramatic fashion. The Baron? He's all "well, that's a shame." I wrote better Dungeons & Dragons adventures than this when I was 14.

Any top-shelf RPG relies on a decent level of scripting, fancy grammar and, if included, passable voiceacting to pull off the proper amount of immersion and get people emotionally invested in the story the designer is trying to tell. This is particularly crucial to quest-based systems, where the advancement of the story goes hand-in-hand with the avatar's levelling system. Aspyr has blown all three in Spellforce. However, a discerning gamer will be quickly able to tell that this team took this game pretty seriously, which makes the abject failure of writing here that much more unforgivable. The voiceacting in particular is awful to the point of being a very unwelcome distraction - all the more so because there's so damned much of it, all of it categorized as a) bad, b) terrible, or c) stomach-turning. While material such as this might be acceptable to a younger crowd (really younger), it just doesn't fly when you're older, wiser, and in "been there, done that" mode.

On a final note, if you're lucky enough to be running a GeForce 7950 GTX2, turn off your second video gpu. Attempting to run both will cause interesting and unsettling graphical issues until such a time as Aspyr or nVidia can address them in a future patch or driver, and renders the game close to unplayable.

As bad as the bad is, the game's not all bad.

For gamers who aren't particularly picky or demanding, there's still fun to be had and progression to be enjoyed in Spellforce 2. Most of the elements which make the two genres enjoyable are riffed on here, if not outright copied. There's a ton of gameplay available that, on a higher-end system, is stable and fast-paced. If nothing else, it has indeed lived up to its claim to "seamlessly" blend RPG and RTS.

However, there are a myriad of faults with this title, particularly from a non-technical standpoint - some of which are glaring, and repetitive enough to be galling. If you fancy yourself an electronic game connoisseur or writing hobbyist of any kind, you'll find it difficult to bother with progression in the face of the mess which is the story. If not... wait for it to hit the bargain bin. Until then, you wouldn't be doing yourself a disservice to grab a copy of Dungeon Siege to assuage your wait.

Smooth,stable gameplay is comprimised by a laughable plot and scripts not fit for daytime TV.

Good hero details coupled with fancy-pants terrain design. Needs better particle effects.

Poor soundfile scripting throughout and horrifyingly bad voiceacting. Add a mute function.

Nothing really new or compelling; poor plot and quest design is tolerated, not enjoyed.

While I’d never touch it again, there’s plenty here to enjoy if you can ignore the flaws.

]]> Wed, 02 Aug 2006 10:42:00 -0500 Tim Grube http://www.gamebump.com/go/spellforce_2_gets_release_date http://www.gamebump.com/go/spellforce_2_gets_release_date http://www.gamebump.com/go/spellforce_2_gets_release_date# This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Certain formatting, imaged, and embedded content may have been lost in the transition process.

SpellForce 2 - Shadow Wars will be release for the PC and have a SRP of $39.99. Aspyr is publishing SpellForce 2 in North America and JoWooD is publishing the game in Europe and other territories.]]> Thu, 06 Apr 2006 14:32:00 -0500 The Gaming Horizon Archive http://www.gamebump.com/go/gh_preview_spellforce_2_shadow_wars_pc1 http://www.gamebump.com/go/gh_preview_spellforce_2_shadow_wars_pc1 http://www.gamebump.com/go/gh_preview_spellforce_2_shadow_wars_pc1# This preview was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content. It was written by Matthew Call.

SpellForce II: Shadow Wars is the sequel to the moderately successful SpellForce: The Order of the Dawn, which released two years ago, and aims to improve on the original in every conceivable way. It seems that the game’s developer, Phenomic, actually listened to the criticism of its fans and the gaming press and actually corrected the problems! I’m not entirely sure, but this might be a first for the industry. Sarcasm aside, Gaming Horizon received a preview build featuring the tutorial as well as three levels from various portions, and so far it's looking like one of the best PC titles of 2006, especially in the RPG and RTS genres.

SpellForce is unique because it attempts to take a role-playing game and combine it with real-time strategy elements, which is not an easy task. The simplest way to describe SpellForce is Dungeon Siege meets Battle for Middle-earth. Levels often begin with a single adventurer or a small group of adventurers fighting through a dungeon. Upon exiting the dungeon the adventurers typically discover a town or village that needs to be defended and the game switches into a real-time strategy. Players need to gather resources, construct buildings, and then form armies to actually fight the enemy. Surprisingly, the switch between dungeon crawler and RTS is remarkably smooth, and doesn’t distract the player or pull him out of the game with the sudden change of direction.

The story is the typical RPG tale that has been floating around for years now, but it is told with a style and sense of urgency that helps pull the player into the action. The player fills the role of one of the reclusive Shaikan, a human race with some ancient dragon blood which bestows special abilities upon its members. One day the Shaikan stumble into a dark elf, Nightsong, who has been seriously wounded in battle. Upon healing the elf it is discovered that a renegade army known as the “shadows” is moving across the land conquering everything in its path. The player must team up with Nightsong and several other adventurers they encounter along the way in order to find a method to stop the army’s march of terror across the countryside.

Simple enough, but the way the game uses the story adds a surprising amount of depth. Typically a scenario begins with the small party of adventurers traveling to warn or gather help from a nearby village, fighting small groups of enemies on the way. In the town some RPG-style conversations occur and the player is tasked with defending the town from enemy attackers or often must assist the town in resolving a local problem before being able to gain the people's support against the shadows. This allows every scenario to be unique while still tying into the overall mission of defeating the shadows. If the single-player campaign’s story isn’t enough, the game will also ship with a 30 hour co-op mode, complete with a different storyline. 

The game’s interface has been noticeably tweaked since the original SpellForce. In the last game players had to deal with gathering seven different types of resources. In Shadow Wars, the number of resources has been reduced to three. When creating villagers to harvest the resources, the game wisely allows players to designate a resource for the workers before they ever set foot outside the city hall. If players need to harvest stone, they simply build five stone worker villagers and the instant the villagers pop into existence they will immediately walk over to the nearest stone and start harvesting. The villagers can also be retasked at any time, so a stone villager can easily be sent to harvest another resource or construct a building.

Another nice interface upgrade deals with the combat system. Heroes in the game have special abilities, such as the ability to heal or cast spells. When a hero or group of heroes is highlighted, their portraits and abilities appear in the upper left corner of the screen. This is handy in combat since it enables players to quickly access any of their heroes’ abilities without having to individually highlight them. These two simple additions to the RTS interface greatly simplify the whole strategy process and will likely be adopted by future strategy titles.

The graphics in SpellForce II are the most impressive I’ve seen in an RTS. Since the game was designed as both an RPG and an RTS, players are able to move the camera from the typical overhead RTS view all the way down to an over-the-shoulder view like those seen in Dungeon Siege or Neverwinter Nights. With that level of camera control in mind, the developers added in small details on the character models that typically would not be visible in an RTS. The environments are also extremely detailed with individual blades of grass and mountains in the distance which are only visible when the camera is dropped down for a closer view.

The audio is also exceptional. The music, while sounding suspiciously similar to the Lord of the Rings movies, is top-notch and works well in the fantasy setting. The voiceacting is also well done, with the typical cheesy RPG style of gruff ogre and dwarf voices and dainty elves, but it works given the context of the game. Sound effects for combat and spells are also respectable and add to the style and atmosphere of the game.

SpellForce II: Shadow Wars will make a splash on the PC scene when it launches next month. At a time when it seems many major developers are beginning to abandon the PC in favor of console gaming, titles like SpellForce show that PC gaming still has plenty of life left. While I did only see four of the game’s levels in the preview build I received, what I saw was extremely well polished and has left me wanting to play the full game upon its release. Don't pass this one up. ]]> Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:39:22 -0600