Fun fact: I won this game on Steamgifts a mere couple months before it was given away for free. I also won it before I played Starcraft and realized I wasn’t that big a fan of RTSs. Oh well.

• SpellForce 2 - Anniversary Edition
  

  59 hours playtime

  no achievements

This is a CRPG/RTS hybrid. You have your standard group of heroes (never more than 7 at a time), but at various points in the game, you’ll be given access to a headquarters and some resource gatherers for the rest of the map, at which point you need to build up an army and send them, along with your group of heroes, into battle against the enemy to destroy their headquarters (only a couple maps don’t have an RTS segment). Controls are also fairly standard: click and drag to select all units in an area, shift-click to select multiple units, right click to move/attack, WASD to move the camera. I do have one issue with the controls: your heroes have a list of powers that you can use by clicking on the icon (e.g. healing, AOE spell, attack increses by X% for Y seconds, etc), but there are some icons that don’t seem to want to work. For example, early on, there’s a power that’s supposed to deal 2X damage for the “next attack,” but whenever I clicked it, the cursor changed. I assumed this meant I had to select which enemy would take the attack (even though that would result in an unnecessary extra step), but no matter what I did, the cursor went back to normal and the power never activated (I know this because my mana never went down). Because of this, I just stuck with the powers that appeared below the unit icons rather than the ones that showed up exclusively on the bottom row, so there’s probably a whole slew of powers I never used because I couldn’t get them to work. I will say: I don’t think I ever tried selecting which of my heroes would deal the extra damage, but that’s kinda unintuitive since the power would disappear if I selected a different hero.

Speaking of the game not making things clear, what is it with RTSs and not explaining the benefits/drawbacks of units? The game explains the basics of RTS mechanics just fine, but of course you start off only being able to deploy a couple different units, and when new ones are unlocked, they’re done so without any fanfare, so you might not even realize it happened. Likewise, if you want to know what any of these new units do, you have to dig through your building options to see which building you need to build in order to have the privilege of deploying said units, then hover over the unit’s icon and read its description, all while the enemy is building a sally to blow you away, because the computer doesn’t need to worry about mis-clicks or time-management (and then you reach a point where the game randomly makes you use a different faction and you have to learn about the units all over again). Honestly, I found it easiest just to build a bunch of the cheapest unit (and sometimes defense towers if that alone didn’t work) and swarm the enemy as quickly as possible. The only time I didn’t just build default HQ units was on the map where the game went out of its way to say “hey, you should build stone golems.” (and not long afterward when the game told me I had to build shadow units to sneak past the enemy).

On the CRPG side of things, the game is surprisingly boring. Since you only have access to your small group of heroes during these parts, the game can’t do anything too crazy to you, but this results in you only fighting against a small group of very weak enemies at a time, making it nearly impossible to lose (and that’s when you aren’t just walking back and forth talking to people). This is half the game. If you do somehow end up running into a group of enemies large enough to pose a threat, there’s one tactic that never fails to even the odds: baiting. Leave most of your heroes behind and send one in, and when the enemies notice you, run back to where the others are. Even if some of the enemies don’t register you as going out of bounds and return to their designated “wait here” spot, you’ll be the one who gets to surround and take out them one by one. This tactic is even useful in certain RTS segments. If one of your heroes does end up dying (most likely in an RTS segment), you have three minutes to have another of your heroes use a spell to revive them (which they can do even if they’re not a healer), though revived allies only get back a small fraction of their health (but on top of healing spells and equippable healing staffs, everyone heals a little bit automatically over time).

To be fair, the game does try to spice up the CRPG segments near the end. For example, there’s one map where you never get access to a headquarters, but the opposing factions do have HQs. However, the enemies are weak enough and spawn slowly enough that the strategies listed above still work just fine. The only time I had to rethink my CRPG strategy was at the very end of the second-to-last map, where the portal to the final map was guarded by a giant: baiting wouldn’t work since it’s just one enemy, and reviving allies takes long enough that it can eventually wipe you out just by keeping the pressure up. What I had to do was send my archers and healer to the lower floor, then bait the giant to be in range of my archers. The incline effectively acts as a wall, preventing the giant from attacking the archers directly (the slope connecting the floors is out of bounds for the enemy), but it won’t go back to its “wait here” spot since it’s still technically in battle. That exploit allowed me to heal/revive my melee combatants as needed. Still kinda boring in execution, but at least it made me stop and think for a few seconds.

In contrast, the RTS segments…well, they’re still not that great, but there is a bit of variety. Unfortunately, that variety is mostly at the beginning, while you’re still learning how to play and don’t have access to many units, so rather than starting simple and progressing in difficulty, it starts by changing the rules before petering out into repetition. The very first RTS segment is the barebones tutorial, and the very second RTS segment has you protecting a group of computer-controlled horses on a linear path that only has small dead-end branches that lead to enemy headquarters; destroy one, and the horses move to the next spot, but while you’re fending off enemies from one branch, the horses can still get attacked by enemies from the next branch, and each branch spawns progressively more/stronger enemies. I don’t even know if the game lets you build defense towers at this point, but either way, I didn’t know they were a possibility; all I knew I could do was gather resources and spawn swordsmen and archers, but that wasn’t enough to destroy an HQ from one branch and defend the horses from another branch, even after I lowered the difficulty to Normal. Eventually, I found that if I attacked a headquarters enough, it would stop spawning enemies (only for this map, it seems), and I could go ahead and destroy the other HQs without worrying about them spawning more units or attacking the horses behind my back. Yup, another exploit. This type of segment (multiple enemy HQs + escort mission) really should’ve been later in the game, after the player is more familiar with (or has more access to) the game’s units.

Beyond that, there aren’t too many noteworthy RTS segments. The one right after the dwarven mines (where you fight against the ice witch) has the enemy be more defensive, with most enemies guarding the camps, and the one at the Bulwark encourages your own units to defend the camp since this is the only map where you have AI controlled ally armies (which you utilize by talking to their commanders, telling them which of four points on the map you want them to go to). The former required some thinking in my experience, but the latter was, once again, really easy, not only because you don’t have to worry about offense as much, but also because there’s an NPC that lets you skip the “Bulwark” part of the Bulwark map entirely, turning it into another CRPG segment. In fact, once you get past that RTS segment on the dwarf map, all the RTS segments become as thoughtless and easy as the CRPG segments, at least until you make it to the Fireforge. You see, this map has not one, but two enemy HQs, and your HQ is right in the middle of the path connecting the two. Naturally, I went with my usual strategy of “build a bunch of default units and go for the enemy HQ,” attacking any enemies and towers I encountered along the way, but as I was destroying one of the enemy camps, the other enemy HQ had built a sally and was blowing away my own camp. There were too many enemies for me to fend them off with my own towers (and merely trying that led me to run out of resources), and even if I tried to build another HQ where the one I had destroyed was, then go around the sally and try to reach the enemy HQ while they were busy attacking mine, I’d just end up running into another sally and get sandwiched before I could fight them all off. I was considering giving up, but as I was playing one of my Twitch Prime games, something occurred to me: my strategy wasn’t flawed; I just wasn’t doing it fast enough. So I loaded an earlier save, built my army up, and went straight for the enemy HQ, this time ignoring all the enemies and towers along the way, and it worked.

Now, you may be thinking “of course a Real Time Strategy game would punish you for bad time management,” but hear me out: if you know where the enemy headquarters is (and, by extension, know which enemy outposts to avoid), build your army to its maximum size (maybe even without building a farm, which increases the max size of your army), and rush forward to blitz the enemy headquarters (often ignoring and maybe even deliberately taking damage from less-strategically-important enemy outposts along the way), the game suddenly becomes too easy since the enemy hasn’t had much time to prepare for an assault. In other words, the whole “strategy” part of this Real Time Strategy becomes moot since there’s only one real winning strategy. This is the other half of the game. Need to assemble parts of a book but keep getting assaulted by Orcs riding large cats? Blitz their camp. Need to reach Malacay’s lab but those pesky soldiers keep getting in your way? Ignore the cluster of archers and towers on the right and blitz their HQ in the upper left. It means the difference between fighting a losing battle of attrition vs. a swift and decisive victory, as any kind of defensive strategy simply isn’t viable for the most part. I feel like the only reason this game has fog of war is because the only way it can be challenging is by catching you off guard, exploiting your lack of knowledge (which would also explain the lack of details in the tutorial)…

…which leads me to the last unique RTS segment that I’d like to bring up. At least 2/3rds into the game, maybe more, there’s a map where your spawn point is quite a distance from your camp, which almost immediately gets assaulted by spiders, some of which spawn six little spiders when they die; if you get caught up fighting the stationary spiders along the way, your HQ will be destroyed before you can even get there, so you have to rush over to be on the defensive. Despite the tutorial, by this point in the game, you’ve likely learned that enemy units are always spawned from buildings, and buildings can be destroyed. Combine this with the sheer volume of spiders assaulting your HQ, and you might think it would be a good idea to fight back against the spiders and destroy their spawn points, but for this map and only this map (and one other map where it’s significantly less significant), the enemies are spawned from caves, which can’t be destroyed. There’s a difference between variety and breaking established rules. What’s worse, this is another escort mission; while this AI controlled character will help fight enemies, it won’t follow you if it gets caught up in a battle, which is extremely likely when there are a bunch of enemies being spawned around you. In other words, if you did try to fight back against the spiders, you’ve basically already lost, and for reasons you couldn’t possibly have anticipated. Once again, what you have to do is take all of your units and beeline towards your objective, making sure to bait some of the enemy soldiers into your army (and keeping your main character back to prevent your escort from dying, of course). After this, there’s another CRPG segment with the promise of removing the spiders at the end, where your initial escort decides to wait behind at the previous goal point, and then the game surprises you with another RTS segment right afterward. Yup, the main enemy HQ was behind a gate this whole time, and needless to say, the enemy quickly makes a sally to blow you away. Sure, you could wait on one of the branches for the sally to pass you by, then assault the enemy camp, but there isn’t enough time to finish the job before your escort gets killed, so guess what? If your resource gatherers were killed by spiders, you have to reload a save and do it all over again! This was the closest I came to giving up on the game. So yeah, repeat what I said a few sentences ago, making sure to bring some resource gatherers with you, but leave them by your escort so they stay safe during the battle, then before triggering the CRPG segment, build a new HQ right by where your escort stays (since apparently the spiders don’t feel like attacking that spot), then clear a path to the closest resource deposits so you can build up your defenses (which will take a while due to the fact that the nearest resource deposits are still a decent distance away, and resource gatherers slow down while carrying resources).

So yeah, this isn’t a game I’d recommend. I did get some satisfaction when I cleared a tough map (see previous paragraph), but a lot of the game was boring, and when that wasn’t the case, it was usually because the game wasn’t really being fair, and you had to know exactly what’s coming to be able to overcome it (see previous paragraph).

P.S. if you play a bunch of RTSs, and you’re running out of space on your computer, check your save files: