fantasy

As a fan of both Real Time Strategy (RTS) and Role Playing Games (RPG's), I was immediately drawn to the concept of Spellforce: The Order of Dawn. I've not been disappointed. The RTS side of the game is challenging, but not frustrating. As for the RPG aspect, it's very engaging. It's not quite as in-depth as an actual RPG - the story is linear, quests have generally one solution - it's still very fulfilling.

The graphics in this game are phenomenal. Something fresh that the developer, Phenomic, did was add the ability to go into 3D, first-person view. Most of the time you want to keep the game zoomed out into the standard RTS isometric view, but sometimes it's awesome to just look at the buildings or units up close.

The music in the game is fantastic. It's very appropriate for the genre, and it moves from beautiful to haunting to menacing and back again. All dialog is voiced and has sub-titles, which is nice. Most of the voice acting is decent, some of it's great, but every so often, about 15% of the time, you get some that's just ludicrous. Thankfully, those characters are generally the ones you only have to talk to once or twice *whew*

As for value - I've been playing the game for about a week straight, probably about 40 hours so far, and I'm only about 1/3 of the way through. I can also see replaying the game in about 3-6 months to try different types of avatars.

In conclusion, this is a wonderful game. It's fun, it's gorgeous, and it's innovative. Give this game a try (there's a demo available) but if you like RTS and RPG's, you'll love it!

I'm a huge fan of both RPG and strategy games. When I saw that there was a game that combined the two I was excited. This game really is decent. It even had potential to be even better though.

As an RPG it is fairly straight forward. You can choose certain paths, but there aren't any consequences, other than missing out on side quests, for either not talking to or choosing different options in conversations. Fairly idiot proof as the main quest goes. Go and talk to this person and then that person and you're done.

As a strategy however it is lacking. You can command your units to go here and there and even attack along the way. Other than that there are no further unit commands. Your healers and mages will rush into battle as though they're swordsman. Your archers actually hang back and for the most part just pick people off until they're physically attacked. The only unit command that you have is 'Hold'. This works great for your healers and mages until the stream of enemies keeps drawing your fighting units deeper into their territory taking them from the healing range of your healers.

To make this game truly awesome they really need to incorporate some kind of unit behavior options so that you don't have to constantly tell your healers and mages to back off from physical combat. I'd also like to see some variation in the RPG path that you can go down rather than just side quests.

All in all the game IS worth playing though I'd wait for the price to come down to ~$30.

The game is awesome I did not have a single problem installing the game on my computer. I have an Ati card myself. They game runs just fine.