Others say...

"An excellant game with a couple of glitches."
The other reviews cover the game in detail but I only want to talk about a couple of issues. The text did not always match the speech and I found that an error that should have not happened, as it is amazingly easy to spot. The other issue was, as mentioned in another review, that there is all of these hot items that you can never reach a high enough level to use. I played the game twice in two differing ways and had a couple of different discrepancies. I performed a task and did not get credit for it. Characters did not respond when the tasks had been done. On the other hand I did not perform a task but the only response choice I had was "Aye". The game went on merrily afterwords as if I had. The last main issue is that the payoff was lacking. After all the work it was lame. It could be that it was done on purpose to have you go on to the next game in the series. The next two modules are only available in Amazon UK. I would like to see them here, like, yesterday. The overall gameplay was amazingly good. I played it twice back to back so that is a measure of how much I liked it. It is a good idea to download the game patch as it repairs a few problems.

"Spellforce is no force"
I find this game to be one of the most frustrating attempts at RTS game play I have ever played. I have played hundreds of hours on other RTS games and never found any game to be as annoying and poorly designed as this one. Not only do the designers intentionally limit your ability to build armies,but if your hero gets killed its start over time. You have to constantly micromanage your entire unit structure, especially the armies. You find your hero always on the short end of the battle since he or she is seldom able to defend himself against even odds. The border scroll function is either too sensitive or to slow to react in a timely manner. The AI is terrible and gives the overwhelming odds of winning to the enemy. I do not like the screen angle, you're practically looking straight down on your charaters. Finding things like upgrades and ways to improve your hero and use of the tech tree are not intuitive. Your armies will not follow orders and attack anything they come across. Over all I would not buy this game if it was on sale for 5 cents. I would not be as generous in my praise as some have been on this game, it lacks real playability for the general masses in my opinion.

"Flawed, but otherwise great RPG/RTS"
Spellforce is one of those games that makes me really want to like it, and that would be truly awesome if but for a few very irritating problems. All in all, I must say that playing the game was a mixed experience- there were great moments, and there were times I felt like cracking the discs with a sledgehammer. Despite these, I would recommend the game for any RTS player that also has a taste for fantasy.

The game introduces some truly unique aspects to the old (in both time and overuse) RTS formula. You create a character- the avatar- that is your `hero' for the game. This unit is exceptionally powerful, levels up with experience, and can equip items. This might sound like Warcraft 3, but suffice to say that it holds much closer to the traditional fantasy RPG norms than that game (there's a paper doll, for one, and you get to pick skills at level-up). You find runes to summon worker units and unique heroes, which are basically weaker versions of your avatar. You can also find plans for buildings of any of six races. When you discover a monument of a particular race, you can then summon workers and build a base, which is what one would expect of a typical RTS. The main difference is that you can command armies of multiple races, if there are monuments available. There are also many quests in the single play campaign, which yield experience and items (some of which are very powerful) as well as providing some break from the typical `build up your army, kill everything on the map' deal. The world is somewhat persistent, though resources respawn when you return to an area.

Since I'd say the game was generally quite good, I'll start off with the positives:

First and most noticeable, the soundtrack is great and the opening cinematic fantastic. I wish there was more than one combat track, but otherwise this was one of the better game soundtracks I've seen- likewise for the introduction. The sound in general is well done. All dialogue is spoken and the voice acting is at least passable all around (and sometimes quite good).

The graphics are second to none. This is truly a beautiful game, and the locations are varied and breathtaking. Some of the larger cities in particular look great, especially from third person perspective. Units look great- especially the 'titan' unit each race can deploy once.

The single play campaign is generally well designed and executed. The quests are quite interesting, as is the main plot. The world is also well done, and side-quests are generally intuitive and don't require you to go too much out of your way. Replay value is decent, since you have many choices for customizing your avatar. You can choose to be a warrior, ranger, one of several types of mage, or healer. All are pretty fun and interesting to try out, and the unique equipment and spells are worth seeing in action. The campaign is also long, though not to the point of tedium.

The unit balance is generally good. To sum things up, the six races are as follows: Humans are good all-rounders, but not particularly strong in any area. Elves are excellent ranged fighters and great healers. Dwarves are peerless close combat warriors. Orcs have the best support units. Trolls have the strongest melee and ranged units, but all are very slow and expensive. Dark Elves have the best magic units. It is quite beneficial to mix and match, but the three `light' races will automatically attack the three `dark' ones, which adds another interesting aspect.

The developers did a good job in `making the show go on.' That is, your avatar can't permanently die and will respawn at the nearest bindstone. This makes it less necessary to reload frantically, provided you don't mind losing a bit of experience. Even if you get completely routed, you can pick up the pieces and play on. This is both realistic and fun.

The game is also quite challenging to master from a sheer gameplay perspective. There's many tactics and counter-tactics available, and none particularly stand out.

As I mentioned before, the game is not without flaws. Some of them are so bad that I almost didn't recommend this game.

Though the sound is generally good, I do have some complaints. When you zoom into third person mode on your avatar, the sound FX gets extremely loud. You can remedy this by turning it down, but then when you zoom out it gets too soft. This is annoying. There's also not enough unit voices- all the workers of each race have a voice, all the combat units have another, and your avatar and heroes have their own. That's it.

The controls are only partly what an experienced RTS player would expect. For example, units don't attack-move by default. To make them do that, you need to hold down ctrl while right clicking. This would be fine, provided you could rebind the hotkeys. However, you cannot.

Your avatar doesn't auto-attack, which is very annoying at times since it's almost always your most powerful unit. Getting them to attack buildings (which you want, since they can destroy them very fast) is a particularly major problem. Defensive tower fire can't be targeted, and the attack-move AI is generally insufficient. Only a certain number of units can cluster around a target, which is realistic but sometimes very annoying. You also can't control most summoned units. Once again, all of these would be just fine, provided you could somehow turn them off or on in options. However, you cannot.

Though the camera generally works well, the game really isn't manageable in third person perspective. You simply can't see things you need to click on. This is unfortunate, because a lot of detail is missed in the isometric bird's-eye view.

Experience is also something of a problem. To reach the higher levels you have to exploit monster spawn points (usually by spamming the area with towers and letting the game run unattended for hours). This is a bit tedious, but if you don't do it you simply won't have a very powerful avatar.

Multiplayer is also very lackluster compared to the campaign. There's no skirmish mode, and not much to do online.

The graphics, though spectacular, taxed my machine (which greatly exceeds the recommended specs) when large numbers of units were moving. Turning detail down didn't seem to do anything but make everything look ugly.

Whoever did the translation and text editing for the game ought to be fired. Enough said.

Last of all, there are very serious problems with the saving system. I'm not sure what it is with JoWood games and save crashing (I had similar problems with Gothic 2), but they apparently are unaware that the VERY WORST time to crash is during saving. That's the only time Spellforce ever crashed for me, and it did it more and more often as the campaign progressed. Furthermore, sometimes instead of saving a game, it deletes existing saves. It also arbitrarily saves corrupt data and still displays `game saved successfully' upon finishing. This is really bad, because the only other mechanism keeping you afloat in the long campaign is the autosave. This is only triggered when you exit the game, which probably isn't too often. I really hope they address this in a patch, because it's a showstopper issue.

Despite its flaws, Spellforce was a pretty decent play. Dealing with technical issues and the odd controls broke the flow of it somewhat, but it's forgivable for the great campaign, graphics, and the unique RTS features.

"Good gamebut No Support for Tech Problems"
I found that the combination of RPG/RTS was interesting but the game is buggy. After installation and uploading of lots of patches it still is graphicly jerky and reduntent in the "teleporting". Loads slow as well. Do not look to get quick tech support or answers. Best source is the Forum, if not a posted problem you can get an answer in a week or so.

"fun game but a bit reptive"
the rpg part is a neat idea but if youve played a game like warcarft then youve played this i did like thee fact that you had you own hero but having to start in each land with nothing got on my nerves but its ease of actual play was nice not that the game is easy its not even on easy i had a rough time agaist the cpu a draw back is your rune heros dont level like you do but if you like warcaft and games of that sort this ames for you