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Spellforce, now there’s a name. I first became aware of the series with the first game’s box art, and specifically its suggestion of some moral shenanigans at work. Alas, it was utter bollocks and the whole thing was a classic good vs evil crusade with you playing on the less interesting side. It was a good game mind you, or at least my memory tells me it was, the mix of RPG and RTS was quite unique and being the good fantasy nerd that I was and still am the setting was more than enough to keep me interested. I played its sequel; Shadow Wars and remember liking that too, but that was some time ago and despite the inexplicable revival of the game through expansions likes Demons of the Past I never touched the series until now with the third mainline game.
With original developers Phenomic long dead, rights holder THQ Nordic have set loose their own team of Germans on the project and the end result is a very beautiful, if slightly slow moving genre mashup. It’s the sort of title that Relic ought to have played before making Dawn of War 3, as it does a much better job at weaving its hero characters into the larger conflicts. In fact, if Spellforce 3 proves anything it is that RPG and RTS elements can and do fit together really rather nicely.
The transition from party based, isometric role-playing in the Baldur’s/Pillars mould to full on army on army action is very smooth and intuitive. Maps are designed with careful thought to allow for you to both explore and adventure as any RPG would yet have all the necessary features to make its RTS elements work and not feel out of place. It’s odd to think as to why this hasn’t been tried more often, yet it doesn’t seem too far fetched to also imagine the change of pace, from gentile adventuring to APM action, could be a little jarring to anyone not already on board with both aspects.
What the experience does suffer from is pacing, specifically during the RPG sections. Your action speeds are on the ponderous side and it makes battling a touch dull once you realise that winning is a foregone conclusion long before the victory itself.
However, this is something of a symptom to the wider problem regarding the story. It all starts well enough with your character thrown into a pit of political and religious intrigue but events quickly devolve into having to recruit followers and find magical plot advancement devices before anything actually interesting happens. Far too many games do this and it’s frustrating that writers and narrative designers seem to think that it’s acceptable to waste time in this way. It's needless padding and does nothing to enhance the experience or story beyond its runtime.
Having a slow paced game is not a problem in and of itself; when the story is clipping along nicely, when there is a sense of interesting events moving on and characters developing, the pace of combat isn’t an issue. But when you remove that desire to see what comes next you put all the focus on the gameplay and taking the story out of an RPG is like a lasagna without a proper cheese sauce, a shameful mistake. This is precisely why ARPGs tend to be much faster than their non action cousins
Yet there are lots of positives in terms of how the world is full of little secrets to uncover, hidden boss battles and unique loot to find, so the RPG side is a positive experience for the most part, just lacking a propulsive element at times when the story hits the buffers.
The RTS elements have no such issues; your attention is always needed somewhere and time isn’t exactly on your side. It’s straightforward in terms of design; you construct buildings to gather materials and produce units, expanding you territory with control point capture and increasing your population capacity. Buildings can be upgraded and higher tier units subsequently unlocked. The AI is largely competent and responsive, but with larger armies it is advisable to target areas rather than specific targets lest you desire a conga line of idling warriors, waiting to get into the battle as if it was some theme park attraction for psychopaths. It’s all pretty solid if unremarkable, although the satisfaction of rolling over an enemy with your assembled horde is something of an eternal pleasure.
Speaking of pleasure, Spellforce 3 looks fantastic. The environments are all richly detailed and some of the landmarks are breath-taking. Water looks like water, clouds pass over with the birds, and there’s some actual verticality to the landscape. The starting Castle, Greykeep, is particularly impressive with its genuinely colossal scale and opulent interiors. It’s clear a lot of effort went into the look and feel of the game and the end results are to be applauded. I don’t think I’ve seen another top down game with such beauty as this.
In fact, most of the production values in Spellforce 3 are of a high standard. The menus are clear and have some nice stylistic touches to them, the writing and voice acting is both above average in the main and the number of bugs and glitches do seem to have been brought under control since the original release in 2017 although even if breaking the game still feels a little too easy.
One other aspect worthy of mentioning is how abilities are used by your party. Rather than having to select a hero, select a skill, select a target etc. the game simply requires you to mouse over whatever you want to affect. Be it an ally, enemy or building you can just press a key to either pause or slow time and then use a context sensitive action wheel to fire off any of your party's skills or spells on the highlighted target, be it one after the other or all at once. For someone who has never been used to using hotkeys in games it is a revelation and allows for you to effectively utilise your party when caught within the disorganised melee that the larger battles can often devolve into.
On the final analysis however I must confess to having pretty low expectations for Spellforce 3. Typically one always tries to go in with an open mind but the context of its release (no name studio, previous titles stink of IP milking) had me sceptical as to what the experience would have to offer. I therefore spent over 35 hours wondering what I was missing; surely the game can't be this good can it? It certainly has issues, the mission design and story both love to waste your time at points, but it is good; it's ambitious yet cohesive, with an elegance that goes beyond its refined appearance.