SpellForce: The Order of the Dawn is an excellent fusion of RPG / RTS that will keep you playing for a long time. It's a real time strategy game at heart but it's formed on a solid base of role playing game; it's not quite the perfect fusion of the genres, perhaps, but it comes pretty close. After the initial character formation - you choose your genre, facial appearance, race, class, and distribute some stats, you go into the game proper. There is a tutorial level which is skippable; this is usefulfor explaining the game mechanics but isn't designed all that well, and forces you to wait for the narrator to explain things even if you've already done them.
Installation
I had a bit of a battle getting this to install. The problem turned out to be, not Vista, but my virus killer. I use AVG (professional version), and unfortunately this and some other virus killers detect the program with the copy protection as a Trojan, preventing it from running. This is a problem both in installation and running the game later on. Some virus software correctly identifies the offending files as harmless, so depending on what you use, you may not have this problem.
I found that in my case, the following was necessary to get the game to work:
1/ Deactivate the Resident Shield component of my virus protection while I actually installed the game
2/ Go into the options in AVG and set it to ignore the SpellForce folder on my hard drive. There are two files that case problems: AR.EXE and SPELLFORCE.EXE. Once I'd successfully told my VK software to ignore these files, I didn't have any problems.
Getting Started
With or without the onerous tutorial, it's pretty easy to pick up and play SpellForce: The Order of the Dawn. The interface is well designed both in terms of the control methods and the graphical interface. There are quite a lot of little tricks that you will work out for yourself as you go along; the interface is quite flexible and each player will end up using a slightly different way of playing the game, suited to their own tendencies. Which is, at the end of the day, just how it should be.
Storyline
In all RPG and RTS type games, the storyline is very important. It's necessary to establish your character's personality and motivation for doing things, and make you interested in completing the next bit of the game so that you can find out what happens next, as well as purely progressing towards completing the game. It's impossible to avoid cliché in the fantasy genre, and this has its fair share of influences from Tolkien and others who've been copied a million times before. In terms of the races involved in the game there's little originality, though I feel that's hardly important. The overall plot is typical "save the world" stuff, but quite well done.
Where the game narrative scores highly is in terms of building up a history for the game world and in integrating game features seamlessly and unobtrusively into the mythology that's been created for the land of Nortender. The history of the land gradually unfolds as you progress through your quests, and it's quite interesting to see how things have developed to the point they're at in the game. A major factor in managing to get anywhere is in the "bindstones" - once you've bound your soul to one of these, you will re-spawn there when you die and you can also use them to travel between locations - though you'll lose everything you've created through the Rune if you go to a different map.
Your Character
The Rune is crucial to everything in the game, including your character. In the introduction sequence there is a circle mage who calls you into being through the Rune, then gives you your own rune to carry so that you are master of your own decisions. He then gives you a quest, and destiny awaits...
You have a decent amount of choice when setting your character up, and as you level up there's a lot of flexibility as to how you develop your skills and abilities. As well as five skill points to be distributed among strength, stamina, dexterity, agility, wisdom, intelligence and charisma, you have two talent points which can be used to upgrade your present abilities or add new ones. It's easy to create a specialised character or a Jack / Jill of all trades. My character started off with light combat skills and has improved those with a side order of white magic and elemental magic. There are three subsections to each ability, which can be increased up to the level of your basic ability. This can lead to some interesting choices as you level up.
You give your character a name at the beginning, but will always be called "Rune Warrior" by other characters throughout the game. Some will distrust you because of what happened at the "Convocation" - this is the main aspect of the history that is revealed through the game. The Rune was obviously a major factor in this... what and why is up to you to find out.
Heroes
In addition to your own character, you can recruit Heroes from the Hero Monument. Some levels only have these, some have none, which gives a bit of variety and helps to distinguish some levels as being more role-playing based than others. You can find, buy, or be given runes for different heroes as you go along. The more you level up, the more heroes you can control, up to a maximum of 5 - if you have enough runes to create them, of course. Weaker characters aren't going to be much help at all in later parts of the game, so it's essential that you can get hold of more powerful runes since unlike your main character, your heroes do not level up.
Equipment
There's a plethora or items, weapons, armour, clothing, rings etc to get hold of in the game. There are a lot of merchants to sell things or buy your defunct / captured goods. The trading system works well, with the disparity between the buying and selling prices being enough to be convincing, but not so much that you can never get enough money. You don't get any gold from defeated creatures unless they're linked to specific quests, which ups the realism level compared to a lot of RPGs. Sometimes you are given coins or items as a reward for completing quests.
Like many things in the game, the monetary system is simplified to aid gameplay. One gold coin equals a hundred silver coins, which equal a hundred copper coins. At first it seems quite difficult to get hold of enough money, particularly as enemies do not re-spawn, but after a while you'll find yourself with plenty. One (presumably) bug means that you can end up with hundreds of thousands of copper coins rather than the equivalent in gold coins... a bit silly, but not a major problem.
You can also purchase spells from many vendors - and the number of spells is quite staggering, though this is partly because each spell comes in varying levels. This means that you have to have the right level magical skill to cast that level (or lower) spell. It's a good system and works very well.
Base and Unit Building
A major part of the game, also made possible through the power of the Rune, is creating workers / army units. The workers can mine various resources and build headquarters and other buildings, which then allow you to create army units and purchase upgrades. You don't actually need food to keep your units alive, but food collection is important for upgrading your headquarters so that your maximum number of producible units increases.
The three basic races are humans, elves and dwarves. What helps the game immensely is that each race handles completely differently, and the units available for each one are also very different. On some maps you can have more than one type of monument, and controlling all of them effectively is quite a challenge.
Workers come in different levels, and to create different types of unit or building you must first possess the rune and activate it on your rune board. Most of these you will find, but some can be bought. Never leave a chest unopened!! It might just contain a rune you'll really need for the next challenge.
I don't know if it's necessary for completing the game - I suspect not, but despite many hours playing the game and a powerful main character I have yet to complete SpellForce - but you can also control Orcs, Trolls and Dark Elves. One interesting aspect of this is that you can control both good and bad forces - but if you camp them too closely to each other they will fight each other, despite being under your control! [EDIT - Have got further into the game and yes, you will need to control orcs etc as well sometimes. Strangely the game often uses the spelling orks... but otherwise they're pretty much what you'd expect!]
Quests
One of the main plus-points of this game is that the quests are varied, interested and pretty much always multi-faceted. Some cover a large number of locations, characters and required actions. There is a small element of puzzle-solving involved; a little more would have been nice, but the quests are still a lot of fun to do, and sometimes quite rewarding. As you would expect there are objectives crucial to your overall quest and side-quests which are not essential, but are always beneficial. Defeating enemies in battle gain you a small amount of XP, but without completing quests it will take you a very long time to level up.
Aesthetics
The graphics are quite good - not exceptional by today's standards but they're nice enough whichever view you're in. There are three types of view available - overhead, which is good for the RTS element of the game; isometric (45° angle view) which is zoomable, not bad for either the RTS or RPG element and great for viewing the action when you're confident of victory; and 3rd person behind the main character's shoulder, which looks pretty good but is limited in its usefulness. It works well when you're in town or controlling only your main character, and sometimes it adds an extra dimension to things simply because it's a different possibility to try out in a particular situation. Movement around the landscape does feel a little too limited in the behind-the-character view, but since I rarely use that view I didn't really find it much of a problem.
The music is exceptional - some of it is truly majestic, and it's never less than good. The sound effects are all high quality and there are a lot of nice ambient sound effects. The voice acting is rather variable - the hero is voiced well, and some of the other characters sound good too. Some of them though... sound pretty unconvincing. More good than bad, but definitely a mixed bunch.
System Specs
CPU: 1Gb
HDD Space: 2Gb
RAM: 256Mb
GPU: 32Mb
DirectX: 9.0a
Tested on: Packard Bell iMedia J2489
Drawbacks
Though there's a lot to like about the game, it's not quite 5 star quality. The weaknesses in the game all tend to detract from the atmosphere; the lack of any lip-synching whatsoever gives the conversations a rather unearthly feel. The interface does break down a little at times; in particular your own character seems to have no initiative whatsoever, simply responding when directly attacked, but nothing else. This can be frustrating when you have several large groups in different places and, going back to the group with your hero in it, find that your guys and girls have been getting mashed with your hero idly standing a couple of feet away doing nothing.
The game is a little buggy - nothing major but every so often it refuses to start because of what it claims is an incompatibility problem (which has miraculously resolved itself five seconds later when you try launching the game again!), and sometimes after a long gaming session the conversation system goes nuts and it rifles through dialogues too fast to read without sound. Rare events but both have happened to me.
The dialogue options sometimes seem pointless - particularly when you have to use a key to open a gate, for instance. You have only one available option or none if you don't have the key... what's the point of going through a whole sequence to select the only thing available to you? Surely it would make more sense for the game to automatically do it when you have the key, and just tell you it's done. Occasionally the conversations can feel a bit like that too, but usually there are at least two or three options to choose from there.
I've had problems with the main character repeatedly casting the same spell despite there being no point, too - this has resulted at times in having no mana left just when I need it most.
Sometimes it takes quite a while to locate a character you need to find for a quest - the map could be slightly more helpful. It's not bad... but it could be better.
Also the cut scenes don't seem to be skippable whatever you do, and that's rather a bugbear with me!
Some or even all of these problems may possibly be solved by installing the patch; unfortunately I have been unable to get this to install, as it won't recognise that the game is on my system. If this changes in the future I'll update this part of my review!
Multiplayer
The multiplayer function has support for up to 8 players and can be run on a LAN (Local Area Network) or over the internet, though I'd think you will need a pretty good connection if you want to use this. This is the one feature of the game I haven't used. As I have a slightly obsessive personality (does it show?!?) I stay away from online games on the sensible premise that I don't want them to take over my life.
Overall Verdict
There's a lot to like about SpellForce: The Order of the Dawn. It has a good plot, the gameplay is very good, and it'll keep you playing for a long time. While most of the drawbacks listed above are more annoyances than serious problems individually, put together they're enough to take some of the shine off an otherwise excellent product. Whether you like RPGs or RTS games you'll enjoy this, and the two styles are blended together very well. Highly recommended.
Related Links
Depending on your preferred genre, you'll also enjoy the following games:
RPG
The Bard's Tale
Knights of the Old Republic
Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
Sacred Plus
Beyond Divinity
RTS
Paraworld
If you prefer turn-based strategy, try:
Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria
Heroes of Might & Magic V
Installation
I had a bit of a battle getting this to install. The problem turned out to be, not Vista, but my virus killer. I use AVG (professional version), and unfortunately this and some other virus killers detect the program with the copy protection as a Trojan, preventing it from running. This is a problem both in installation and running the game later on. Some virus software correctly identifies the offending files as harmless, so depending on what you use, you may not have this problem.
I found that in my case, the following was necessary to get the game to work:
1/ Deactivate the Resident Shield component of my virus protection while I actually installed the game
2/ Go into the options in AVG and set it to ignore the SpellForce folder on my hard drive. There are two files that case problems: AR.EXE and SPELLFORCE.EXE. Once I'd successfully told my VK software to ignore these files, I didn't have any problems.
Getting Started
With or without the onerous tutorial, it's pretty easy to pick up and play SpellForce: The Order of the Dawn. The interface is well designed both in terms of the control methods and the graphical interface. There are quite a lot of little tricks that you will work out for yourself as you go along; the interface is quite flexible and each player will end up using a slightly different way of playing the game, suited to their own tendencies. Which is, at the end of the day, just how it should be.
Storyline
In all RPG and RTS type games, the storyline is very important. It's necessary to establish your character's personality and motivation for doing things, and make you interested in completing the next bit of the game so that you can find out what happens next, as well as purely progressing towards completing the game. It's impossible to avoid cliché in the fantasy genre, and this has its fair share of influences from Tolkien and others who've been copied a million times before. In terms of the races involved in the game there's little originality, though I feel that's hardly important. The overall plot is typical "save the world" stuff, but quite well done.
Where the game narrative scores highly is in terms of building up a history for the game world and in integrating game features seamlessly and unobtrusively into the mythology that's been created for the land of Nortender. The history of the land gradually unfolds as you progress through your quests, and it's quite interesting to see how things have developed to the point they're at in the game. A major factor in managing to get anywhere is in the "bindstones" - once you've bound your soul to one of these, you will re-spawn there when you die and you can also use them to travel between locations - though you'll lose everything you've created through the Rune if you go to a different map.
Your Character
The Rune is crucial to everything in the game, including your character. In the introduction sequence there is a circle mage who calls you into being through the Rune, then gives you your own rune to carry so that you are master of your own decisions. He then gives you a quest, and destiny awaits...
You have a decent amount of choice when setting your character up, and as you level up there's a lot of flexibility as to how you develop your skills and abilities. As well as five skill points to be distributed among strength, stamina, dexterity, agility, wisdom, intelligence and charisma, you have two talent points which can be used to upgrade your present abilities or add new ones. It's easy to create a specialised character or a Jack / Jill of all trades. My character started off with light combat skills and has improved those with a side order of white magic and elemental magic. There are three subsections to each ability, which can be increased up to the level of your basic ability. This can lead to some interesting choices as you level up.
You give your character a name at the beginning, but will always be called "Rune Warrior" by other characters throughout the game. Some will distrust you because of what happened at the "Convocation" - this is the main aspect of the history that is revealed through the game. The Rune was obviously a major factor in this... what and why is up to you to find out.
Heroes
In addition to your own character, you can recruit Heroes from the Hero Monument. Some levels only have these, some have none, which gives a bit of variety and helps to distinguish some levels as being more role-playing based than others. You can find, buy, or be given runes for different heroes as you go along. The more you level up, the more heroes you can control, up to a maximum of 5 - if you have enough runes to create them, of course. Weaker characters aren't going to be much help at all in later parts of the game, so it's essential that you can get hold of more powerful runes since unlike your main character, your heroes do not level up.
Equipment
There's a plethora or items, weapons, armour, clothing, rings etc to get hold of in the game. There are a lot of merchants to sell things or buy your defunct / captured goods. The trading system works well, with the disparity between the buying and selling prices being enough to be convincing, but not so much that you can never get enough money. You don't get any gold from defeated creatures unless they're linked to specific quests, which ups the realism level compared to a lot of RPGs. Sometimes you are given coins or items as a reward for completing quests.
Like many things in the game, the monetary system is simplified to aid gameplay. One gold coin equals a hundred silver coins, which equal a hundred copper coins. At first it seems quite difficult to get hold of enough money, particularly as enemies do not re-spawn, but after a while you'll find yourself with plenty. One (presumably) bug means that you can end up with hundreds of thousands of copper coins rather than the equivalent in gold coins... a bit silly, but not a major problem.
You can also purchase spells from many vendors - and the number of spells is quite staggering, though this is partly because each spell comes in varying levels. This means that you have to have the right level magical skill to cast that level (or lower) spell. It's a good system and works very well.
Base and Unit Building
A major part of the game, also made possible through the power of the Rune, is creating workers / army units. The workers can mine various resources and build headquarters and other buildings, which then allow you to create army units and purchase upgrades. You don't actually need food to keep your units alive, but food collection is important for upgrading your headquarters so that your maximum number of producible units increases.
The three basic races are humans, elves and dwarves. What helps the game immensely is that each race handles completely differently, and the units available for each one are also very different. On some maps you can have more than one type of monument, and controlling all of them effectively is quite a challenge.
Workers come in different levels, and to create different types of unit or building you must first possess the rune and activate it on your rune board. Most of these you will find, but some can be bought. Never leave a chest unopened!! It might just contain a rune you'll really need for the next challenge.
I don't know if it's necessary for completing the game - I suspect not, but despite many hours playing the game and a powerful main character I have yet to complete SpellForce - but you can also control Orcs, Trolls and Dark Elves. One interesting aspect of this is that you can control both good and bad forces - but if you camp them too closely to each other they will fight each other, despite being under your control! [EDIT - Have got further into the game and yes, you will need to control orcs etc as well sometimes. Strangely the game often uses the spelling orks... but otherwise they're pretty much what you'd expect!]
Quests
One of the main plus-points of this game is that the quests are varied, interested and pretty much always multi-faceted. Some cover a large number of locations, characters and required actions. There is a small element of puzzle-solving involved; a little more would have been nice, but the quests are still a lot of fun to do, and sometimes quite rewarding. As you would expect there are objectives crucial to your overall quest and side-quests which are not essential, but are always beneficial. Defeating enemies in battle gain you a small amount of XP, but without completing quests it will take you a very long time to level up.
Aesthetics
The graphics are quite good - not exceptional by today's standards but they're nice enough whichever view you're in. There are three types of view available - overhead, which is good for the RTS element of the game; isometric (45° angle view) which is zoomable, not bad for either the RTS or RPG element and great for viewing the action when you're confident of victory; and 3rd person behind the main character's shoulder, which looks pretty good but is limited in its usefulness. It works well when you're in town or controlling only your main character, and sometimes it adds an extra dimension to things simply because it's a different possibility to try out in a particular situation. Movement around the landscape does feel a little too limited in the behind-the-character view, but since I rarely use that view I didn't really find it much of a problem.
The music is exceptional - some of it is truly majestic, and it's never less than good. The sound effects are all high quality and there are a lot of nice ambient sound effects. The voice acting is rather variable - the hero is voiced well, and some of the other characters sound good too. Some of them though... sound pretty unconvincing. More good than bad, but definitely a mixed bunch.
System Specs
CPU: 1Gb
HDD Space: 2Gb
RAM: 256Mb
GPU: 32Mb
DirectX: 9.0a
Tested on: Packard Bell iMedia J2489
Drawbacks
Though there's a lot to like about the game, it's not quite 5 star quality. The weaknesses in the game all tend to detract from the atmosphere; the lack of any lip-synching whatsoever gives the conversations a rather unearthly feel. The interface does break down a little at times; in particular your own character seems to have no initiative whatsoever, simply responding when directly attacked, but nothing else. This can be frustrating when you have several large groups in different places and, going back to the group with your hero in it, find that your guys and girls have been getting mashed with your hero idly standing a couple of feet away doing nothing.
The game is a little buggy - nothing major but every so often it refuses to start because of what it claims is an incompatibility problem (which has miraculously resolved itself five seconds later when you try launching the game again!), and sometimes after a long gaming session the conversation system goes nuts and it rifles through dialogues too fast to read without sound. Rare events but both have happened to me.
The dialogue options sometimes seem pointless - particularly when you have to use a key to open a gate, for instance. You have only one available option or none if you don't have the key... what's the point of going through a whole sequence to select the only thing available to you? Surely it would make more sense for the game to automatically do it when you have the key, and just tell you it's done. Occasionally the conversations can feel a bit like that too, but usually there are at least two or three options to choose from there.
I've had problems with the main character repeatedly casting the same spell despite there being no point, too - this has resulted at times in having no mana left just when I need it most.
Sometimes it takes quite a while to locate a character you need to find for a quest - the map could be slightly more helpful. It's not bad... but it could be better.
Also the cut scenes don't seem to be skippable whatever you do, and that's rather a bugbear with me!
Some or even all of these problems may possibly be solved by installing the patch; unfortunately I have been unable to get this to install, as it won't recognise that the game is on my system. If this changes in the future I'll update this part of my review!
Multiplayer
The multiplayer function has support for up to 8 players and can be run on a LAN (Local Area Network) or over the internet, though I'd think you will need a pretty good connection if you want to use this. This is the one feature of the game I haven't used. As I have a slightly obsessive personality (does it show?!?) I stay away from online games on the sensible premise that I don't want them to take over my life.
Overall Verdict
There's a lot to like about SpellForce: The Order of the Dawn. It has a good plot, the gameplay is very good, and it'll keep you playing for a long time. While most of the drawbacks listed above are more annoyances than serious problems individually, put together they're enough to take some of the shine off an otherwise excellent product. Whether you like RPGs or RTS games you'll enjoy this, and the two styles are blended together very well. Highly recommended.
Related Links
Depending on your preferred genre, you'll also enjoy the following games:
RPG
The Bard's Tale
Knights of the Old Republic
Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
Sacred Plus
Beyond Divinity
RTS
Paraworld
If you prefer turn-based strategy, try:
Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria
Heroes of Might & Magic V
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