The RPG and RTS elements blend together almost seamlessly, bringing together those quieter moments of a tight group of heroes in a dungeon and those sprawling battlefield clashes cohesively. You can send out a detachment while your heroes guard the home base or you can split your main adventuring party into a number of smaller units and have those heroes back up your forces, flitting between them with hotkeys as you would in an intense StarCraft match even as they focus on different objectives across the map from each other. You maintain control through the entire process, commanding where your heroes go and which tasks to accomplish in whichever order. "The RPG and RTS elements blend together almost seamlessly, bringing together those quieter moments of a tight group of heroes in a dungeon and those sprawling battlefield clashes cohesively. " Quests can seamlessly transition from your small party of heroes doing dungeons and slaying dragons and naturally progress into a situation where you’ll have to build a base, defend it and raise an army to take on a larger task. Where as some games would change completely between their two parts, you’re always going to be controlling the game from the same overhead, isometric perspective whether you have 4 heroes in a dungeon or 40 units storming a battlefield, fingers dancing all over the keyboard to fire off hero skills or use hotkeys in base management.
If you’ve ever send out a patrol of archers to locate an enemy empire, you’re going to slip into the gameplay of Spellforce 3 with relatively little problem, and even if you haven’t then fairly competent tutorials and map systems help keep you on track. Though firmly rooted in some western RPG tropes with the story, the strength of the title is how well it blends together the RPG game mechanics with larger RTS elements. I would have preferred a little more bravery in the story for a game so bravely playing with mixing genres, but it at least got out of the way when it counted. There’s that tired discrimination plot line around persecuting Magic users, which falls apart under any real scrutiny as always, but in the moment it pushes things along. Through the course of the game you’ll grow in strength, recruiting and raising armies, forging alliances across the world to achieve your goals of stopping a looming threat. You control a central protagonist named Tahar, a player customized avatar who’s the offspring of the mad villain who kicked off the Mage Wars. "I would have preferred a little more bravery in the story for a game so bravely playing with mixing genres, but it at least got out of the way when it counted." Though the setting is pretty old hat, it does the job well enough with giving context to the actions and the story. The war-torn land of Eo, recovering from a brutal Mage War is now beset by mysterious plagues. The medieval setting of Spellforce 3 isn’t particularly unique unfortunately, and many comparisons could easily be made to other games (such as The Witcher 3). Taking the mechanics of both a hero driven RPG in the vein of a Diablo and layering in a Real Time Strategy system to create something that when separated out aren’t anything too special, but somewhat click when together.
Spellforce 3 then, is a curious experiment. We don’t see many Diablo-like dungeon crawler RPGs or RTS games on console because of how complex either genre can be on its own. The glorious “PC Master Race” enjoys some pretty layered games on the regular, with experiences like Starcraft, Elite Dangerous and Diablo that ask far more of the player and their input device than most consoles will dare.
0 kommentar(er)
