Spellforce 3

"I can't stop, y'all
Tock-tick y'all
And if you think that you're slick
You'll catch a brick y'all
[...]
Well, on and on and on and on
I can't stop, y'all, 'till' the early morn'"

Beastie Boys - Pass the Mic



If it weren't for my completionism, I'd never have finished this campaign. Nordic Games has made a name for itself by buying a name for itself, snatching up any brand name that happens to land in the bargain bin, most notably gobbling up the detritus of detritus-prone THQ. Still, in between dumpster-diving for intellectual properties they've apparently managed to promote a few successful products like Darksiders or ELEX, though it's hard to find anything by them not labelled an idiot-friendly "action" degradation of some worthier concept. Thus, so far I haven't really taken an interest. The last thing the PC game market needs is another knockoff-factory like Blizzard Entertainment. Still, I decided to snatch up the first Darksiders thingamajig and the Real-Time Strategy / Role-Playing Game hybrid Spellforce 3 during G.O.G.'s winter sale.

Mixing RTS with role-playing, much like mixing it with first-person combat, has never entirely taken off as a concept, though in this case the failure's rather more warranted. The fiddly bits of RTS and RPG simply interfere with each other. FPS mandates no fiddly bits. Warcraft 3 made quite a splash, as does anything fed by Blizzard's hype machine, but that's as far as it went. Even back then, I and others were quick to point out that the concept of upgradeable heroes in a strategy game was nothing new. "Heroes of" Might and Magic had already been doing that for a decade... in a turn-based system where it probably belongs. There's simply no time to role-play through dialogue trees, slot items and mind your alignment while micromanaging a battlefield. Even the Baldur's Icewind Torment lineage of RPGs depends on stop-motion to let you manage your party.

So as an RPG campaign, Spellforce 3 is shallow but somewhat engaging.

You get to choose three possible skill trees out of six (leadership is standard for your main character) and specialize in one of them late in the game, even if it actually boils down to selecting just three skills for your hotkeys. You're obviously intended to bank on 2-hit combos (like my black magic exploding targets I've arrowed with a bleeding DoT effect.) No thieving or dialogue skills, but at least there's also no convenient all-purpose dump stat like charisma.

Aesthetically, this is a standard linear "sword and sorcery" tale complete with standard Tolkien fantasy races, standard inescapable medieval stasis, standard ancient ruins of godlike Atlantean civilizations and lots of standard fireball-flinging. That said, it's well enough executed in the tradition of Moorcock or Howard. The characters and setting are more believable and consistent than most RPG tropes, and moral choices (though few and far between) are rather well balanced instead of simplistic benevolence or malevolence - to the point that I willingly drove away an otherwise highly sympathetic and useful companion for breaking my own personal taboo against mind control. The graphics mostly stick to reasonably-proportioned figures and spaces; the soundtrack is at times pleasingly minimalist, but mostly banal, generic heroic music fitting the setting's whole Conan-ish vibe.

While the game's writing is perfectly competent and even occasionally poetic, it also features some outright bizarre wording. For instance, what the fiddlesticks is with everyone refusing to say "hell" despite swearing with appropriate gusto in other ways? In a setting full of casual mass torture, head-exploding iron hoods, eyes being gouged out, gang-rapes, genocides and lurid descriptions of a plague rather aptly termed the Bloodburn, why are all the characters constantly breaking out into campy 1970s cartoon cussin'? I'm getting whiplash hearing the words "Help me for Heck's sake!" from Uram the Demonologist. And, while the voice acting is shockingly nuanced and professional for such a relatively small company (Gor, Yria, etc. and even lessers like Whateley) the script's constant abuse of British slang (everything's "sod" this and "bleeding" that) might have sounded less jarring if it hadn't extended to the more yankee-doodly voices.

But if it's shallow as an RPG, Spellforce 3 can be outright infuriating as an RTS.

The blue territory on the right's mine, with each cluster of resources representing a base. The enemy starts out in the top left. Can you guess which of my bases will be getting attacked? The answer is all of them, all at once. In fact that red ping in the bottom right corner represents a single enemy scout killing my workers.

Back when I was playing The Lord of the Rings Online, my guild had come up with a term for the common group activity of having to alternate defending three different entrances to a base: windshield wiper instances. Spellforce 3 is not a strategy game. It is a windshield-wiping game. The AI constantly sends attacks to your every forward base, occasionally also slipping past your lines to attack undefended resource buildings or workers. Maps are almost devoid of defensible positions. The entire challenge of the game consists of running from one base to another in time to thin out the number of attackers. In itself, multitasking is a valid virtue, but not when it's the only virtue. Spam is not strategy.

As with other recent games like Galactic Civilizations 3, static defenses are either absent or laughably weak, which means you cannot take your eyes off any forward position for even a second, and unit automation seems to have been deliberately crippled to deny you even the possibility of stationing guards.

"Dude, stop chasing!" - is a constant refrain in multiplayer team games, especially MOBAs like League of Legends. Don't be so eager to chase down a potential kill that you get baited into traps. Your units in Spellforce 3 are programmed to do exactly that. They're given a ludicrous aggro radius and often won't leash back to wherever you sent them until they've been baited to over a screen away. The AI will constantly regroup its forces, take a few potshots, back off, regroup, back off, in order to split off your units as it's doing to mine in the screenshot above. Which, just like testing your defenses and hitting weak points, would be wonderful example of algorithmic adaptation if the player wasn't deliberately hobbled to magnify its effectiveness.

Failing simply because I'm getting set up to fail doesn't make for a very satisfying playthrough. And unfortunately, abusing such gimmicks is the only thing the AI can do well. It doesn't yield strategically deep gameplay. In fact you can even use its obsession with constantly tagging every single one of your bases against it: keep reclaiming one particular forward base (for free) and leave it defenseless, thereby letting the AI waste its time rushing over to destroy it every single time. This is a pure button-mashing game, and it's not aided by the fact that all four of your heroes have two or three short-cooldown commands each to constantly mash. Hitting four two-skill combos every five seconds while also spamming move orders to keep your horde of Leeroys from rushing to their deaths gets old by the end of the first "strategy" mission. Even more infuriatingly, scripted events keep adding and subtracting heroes from your group for storytelling purposes, thereby altering the keys you need to spam.


Even weirder, the campaign shoots itself in the foot when it comes to player choice. I wanted to play the elves and bought every single elvish upgrade I could afford, only to discover most of the last few missions railroad you into playing whatever's on the map. Also, after painstakingly building up my four-character dream-team of Uram, Undergast and Gor, I found those same missions force me to replace one of them with a designated plot-centric NPC I couldn't give a rat's ass about. Also, for a game with such large-scale battles, a lot more attention should have been paid to pathing, collision and line of sight issues. I've lost track of how many times my heroes have ground-targeted rooftops that aren't even considered playable terrain, or run into the enemy force trying to point-blank range a sniper skill.

"We're being attacked!" Spellforce 3 does a lot right. "We're being attacked!" For instance, units are given very decisive 50% damage resistances "We're being attacked!" hero combos can be devastatingly powerful is used right "We're being attacked!" but can't completely win out against rank-and-file troops "We're being attacked!" each race has its distinctive pace of development "We're being attacked!" attrition can be managed in more than one way "We're being attacked!" some missions offer strategic solutions beyond merely exterminating enemies "We're being attacked!" etc. "We're being attacked!" Unfortunately "We're being attacked!" this otherwise interesting game's good points "We're being attacked!" tend to be overshadowed "We're being attacked!" by the constant spam of "We're being attacked!"

It's a worthy attempt at trying to reconcile single-player with multiplayer and RTS with RPG, but I'll have to go into the difficulties of reconciling these notions some other time.




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P.S.: Some other time.