Walkthroughs & Tips

Review by: Terrel

Reviewers Score: 10 / 10

Posted: March 28, 2006

Spellforce: The Order of Dawn
System: PC
Genre: RPS (Role Playing Strategy)

Storyline: 10/10
It is years after the Convocation, one of the biggest wars of all time! The land and civilization is broken and alliances have fallen. You were once a great warrior in the Convocation Wars, slain in battle, you are now brought back as a rune warrior by a great circle mage. Your soul purpose is to restore the order of the land, although this has to be the most difficult thing ever. There are so may plot twists in this game, it will keep you guessing what is behind the next gate, although the ending was a bit too short my liking...

Gameplay: 10/10
There are 2 different types of gameplay, depending on your gaming style of choice and on the level. Sometime you need to swap between the two.
The first is a 3rd person RPG perspective, controlling the character with the mouse and arrow keys. Very effective when controlling your main character while letting the AI for all the other characters do their work.
The second gameplay is a standard 3D strategy mode. Selecting units with the mouse in the standard point and click system.
Your main character is the only one that will gain experience and level up. Each kill that is done by any unit you control will give your main character experience. As you increase in levels, you can put points into anything you want. You can specialize in a certain type of magic, or you can spread your points out through all the abilities. There are no character classes so you can do anything with any type of character giving you a massive amount of flexibility. There are also many cities in the game that will allow you to purchase items, get quests and level up your spells.
Units don't have any leveling systems, but they will increase in level as you go through the game. Like most strategy games, you need to build a massive base and level up the structures to increase the power of the units. There are 6 different unit classes (Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Trolls & Dark Elves), and you are limited to which ones you can use in each map. Each map has one or more 'monuments' which allows you to summon the workers of the set class. Easy enough to control at the beginning, but later you will end up controlling all 6 armies at once, with hundreds of units on the screen. Large fights are something you need to get used to quickly.

Audio: 9/10
The music is incredible. From the moment your main character appears, the music will get you in the mood for whatever is happening on the map. If you are in peaceful plains, it will be calm and tranquil, but as you move up a mountain or desert it will become more intense. Since each map has more than one type of area, expect the music to change many times in each map.
Every units speaks, and I mean everyone! Some of the characters have incredible voiceovers, while others sound like they are reading a book with no feeling what-so-ever (although they don't have key roles so you only hear them a few times).
Each object in battles even have there own sounds. While staves have a wooden sounds, swords and such will swish through the air until hitting the armor - again sounding different depending on the armor being hit. Even each spell has a completely unique sound, depending on the caster and level of the spell.

Graphics: 10/10
One word - incredible! This the highest quality of graphics I have ever seen in a strategy game. Everything moves, the grass, the trees, the hair on each character / units head. Even the level of zoom can be changed as you need to. You can zoom out to see all your units or once, or zoom in to one unit and see the blood stains on their face and armor from the last battle they fought.

Replay Value: 9/10
With the amount of customization in the main character and side quests, you can play through the game several times without getting tired of it. There are even some areas that you can choose the other side and twist some former enemies into allies if you want!

Overall Rating: 10/10

One of the best Strategy games yet!

Aside from the speech being lame on a few characters, this game excels in almost every other way. This is definitely my favorite strategy game. If you are looking for a long game (a couple hundred hours is not out of the question here) with lots of plot twists and customization, this is your best bet!