SpellForce 3

This game brings me back to the Warcraft days!!

Learning this game is easy and the voice acting and the story are actually amazing!

buy this game and have a blast!!

As a dedicated fan of Spellforce 1 and 2, as well as a long-time RPG/RTS player, I found my time with Spellforce 3 enjoyable. The graphics, optimization, story, and world design are solid, but none of these elements stand out as extraordinary. It's a well-crafted game, but not a truly great one.
What I enjoyed most was the story. The RPG and RTS aspects, however, didn’t particularly impress me. For most players, Spellforce 3 offers a solid 40-60 hours of single-player campaign content. While you can find other games with better strategy mechanics, deeper RPG elements, more compelling stories, or richer world-building, Spellforce 3 offers a decent mix of all these aspects.

So I was hesitant in getting this game due to the mixed reviews, though I'd played previous games in this series and really enjoyed the blending of RPG and RTS mechanics.

After playing this game for >15 hours I have to say I am blown away by how good it is. Key points:

- beautiful graphics and scenery
- interesting and engaging story
- a lot of good character development and interaction
- fun and engaging RTS battles
- immersive world building and lore
- long and enjoyable learning curve for mechanics and factions
- initially very easy and gets gradually more challenging/complex

It really feels like they stuck to the strengths of previous titles in the series but really improved and expanded on the mechanics. The environments look really amazing, good lighting and dynamic effects. It's clear that a great deal of effort and care went into making this game.

I am only really interested in the Singleplayer at the moment, at a glance I think one reason for the mixed reviews may be to do w multiplayer, which seemed pretty dead to me. I think if you enjoyed the previous games in this series for their campaign experience, you should definitely play this one. It's a work of art that deserves a far more positive exposure and reception IMO.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☑ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☑ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☑ 10

I’m thrilled to say after finishing the main campaign of Spellforce 3 this is the most similar to Warcraft 3 for the RPG side. Multiple unique heroes, diverse skill trees(one even has necromancy and demonology!), can equip varied amount of gear, and unleash devastating aoe spells. Complete with passives, active aura’s and summons! On the RTS side, you can build a base, make your soldiers, upgrade your units buildings, collect specific resources structures, and increasing the population cap. And the setting is basically medieval fantasy. Complete with races such as humans, orcs, elves, dwarves, dark elves, trolls, etc. Though with a different premise.
You play as the child of an infamous rebel mage leader. Who has been granted amnesty by the queen of the human faction and allowed to train in order to become a Wolf Guard, think of them as a special force in the army. Though, you’re not special at all considering its been years after your father’s failed mage rebellion and having to endure scornful comments about your past doesn’t help through the years, but hey you made it! Now we're off on a mission to stop a magical plague called the Bloodburn affecting the lands of Eo(the continent). No idea how it works, who it targets, or what are the conditions to activate, but its important enough to find a solution quickly before all human territories perish. Oh before I forget, your superior? Geralt of Rivia. Yeah you heard that right. Doug Cockle’s voice graces our ears once again.
Good o’l RPG + RTS
Great sense of gradual progression for newbies in the genres. Starting out, you’ll learn the basics of both building an army, setting up a base, how to manage your units to attack, how to bind units/structures onto a keybind for easier access along with a spellbar for easy use during engagements. For those unaware or find it daunting to juggle building a base and managing armies on the go. Have no fear, there’s multiple settings in the game and I played on normal, finding it a good middle ground for RTS veterans. If you’re having trouble remember you can pause and take a breather or set the difficulty lower. No shame in doing either actions considering I always switch to a lower tier myself when things get too hectic for me.
One of the most gratifying qualities SP3 nails is the RPG element in hero management and customization of your heroes. To an extent, I wish more RTS games followed through from WC3’s example and implemented them further. Dawn of War I’m glad has their own version which is equally great and stands on its own too. Here I felt a greater sense of WC3 nostalgia when launching my devastating aoe spells, buffing my allies with defense, empowering them with unique items from common to legendary with oh my lord NOT-Borderlands-style of a gajillion gear to pursue and mix-match to make my min-maxing lifestyle succumb to retirement.
Concerning the RTS component. I found the experience decent, with some minor issues i’ll detail later on. First off, on positives. Build order is pretty easy to remember, you basically always start off with your main base, having to construct resource gathering houses to accrue more wood, stone, food, iron and a water essence. You can easily see which resource nodes are nearby to erect quickly.
Satisfying Strategy Synergy. A guilty pleasure of mine in strategy games is using the least amount of units possible to wipe out a large force. In Total War(a mix of turn based strategy and real time combat) games I've done skirmishes against a force with similar 1 to 3 odds or larger, not give or take 300 Greeks against the gazillion Persians. Using clever unit compositions similar to rock-papers-scissors maneuvers that would make Shouzou Kaga(Fire Emblem creator) proud. Shoutout to Total War: Warhammer for using heroes right in the series!
I found the storytelling to be strangely compelling in ways that surprised me considering I doubted the grounded fantasy would work in ways that would keep me interested. I admit to having major doubts after the early game concluded and I felt the weakest part was the middle-half of the narrative to keep me interested. Yet the endgame, reeled me back in like fish on a hook. Without going into spoilers the whole world of Eo at the time is a mature setting delving into topics of class hierarchy, corruption, innocents suffering, duty and orders, slavery, genocides, is merely a small drop of what else the title offers.
Casting a Mixed Feelings Spell!
Sadly I must admit to some mixed feelings in varying degrees from minor to major that I feel should be noted.
Lots of yapping, the biggest weakness is loads of npc’s, questgivers, companions and generally antagonists will yap your ear off until you get sick of it. The amount of expository lore, backstory, and in general needless information you’ll succumb to is something I felt was overdone and should’ve done more on showing us than telling us.
Dialogue history box to see past conversations, why this wasn’t implemented with loads of discussions I have no idea. With the loads of text you’ll read and listen through and to voice actors credit, a large chunk is voice acted. Sucks to accidentally move forward and try to recover from your mistake only to see you can’t re-listen to what your companions/npc’s said. Feels like a missed opportunity to include.
I’m not sure if it’s just me but I had to rebind controls to proper RTS protocols. Using a mouse to move the screen isn’t optimal in my opinion. Personally I prefer using the w,a,s,d, format to optimally adjust the screen in the up, down, left, right direction which is faster than using a mouse to drag to the corner/edges of the screen.
Not a fan of breaking apart upgrades(blueprints) for each of your factions by endgame via finding them around maps, by endgame if you are missing upgrades and units you likely didn't grab the blueprints tucked away in some previous maps/sidequest maps. So by the time you reach maps before the end credits roll you may not have everything to upgrade your units/buildings. So enjoy playing against the toughest enemies with a handicapped build order because you didn’t exert enough effort to explore every map.
One and done strategy I don't think works for a RTS/RPG combo. Primarily in regards to sector grabbing for resources. For those unaware i think rapidly expanding to gain resources feels too limiting in spellforce 3.
Wish there were more varied objectives beyond the standard go to point a to point b quests. Accept quest, go to area with npc/item, return to quest giver complete. Combine this with the occasional kill and im straight into yawning city. Sure there’s some outside the norm to finish puzzles, play detective, investigate, but these seem too little compared to the majority in the former. I wish the developers decided to go bolder with their design.
Despite my mixed feelings affecting my overall experience in major & minor ways, I don't think it takes away from the positives much. There’s still a decent to great RTS game here coupled with the slice of RPG pie I haven’t felt since my Warcraft days. Evoking similar feelings of nostalgia with enough content to stand on its own two feet, hopefully when I feel I'm ready I'll tackle the expansions to see if the story is better and see if they fix any of my criticisms from the main game. Honestly we don’t often see these types of games that evoke the old Blizzard magic, there are some I've been keeping an eye on in the indie scene like Age of Darkness: Final Stand, Darfall, Godsworn, The Scouring, Liquidation and perhaps Lessaria: Fantasy Kingdom Sim. But the rest in the sea of indie RTS don’t go forth to take direct inspiration. I sincerely wish one day another developer studio will lead the charge for another in a heroesque RTS mindset, for the potential is there shining brightly.
7.5/10

Wow, this is quite the hidden gem that I wish I knew about earlier: if you're a fan of RTWP RPGs like Dragon Age Origins and hero-focused RTS like Warcraft 3, well, you've got the ideal mix here!
As it says on the tin, it is an RTS/RPG hybrid. As for what this means, well, for the most part, the game is a RTWP party-based RPG where you'll be adventuring around to different regions searching for allies to solve an impending crisis, undergoing sidequests and building up your gear and abilities. Every now and then, though, typically as a climax for a region you've been working in, the game will change into an RTS skirmish where you'll be conquering territory, building bases, gathering resources and clashing against an enemy army with your own, with your party now recontextualized as hero units who can change the tide of battle with their powerful abilities. It's a very fun back-and-forth between small and large scale that keeps things interesting, and everything flows seamlessly between the two modes of play!
So yeah, the game is pretty great and boasts an engaging story, cool characters to get to know, loads of side content and legendary loot to find, challenging combat, fun customization of classes with easy respecs for experimentation, and so on!
If I were to have any complaints, though, it'd be:
*The game didn't make the greatest first impression for me as it kinda throws you into the deep end, particularly when it comes to RTS mechanics, which due to the lack of pause, stressed me out as I wasn't able to read all of the tooltips and learn things bit-by-bit in a comfortable manner while enemies were pounding at our gates. It feels like you're either expected to learn on the fly or to have already played some skirmish maps beforehand to learn. For some people this might be a plus, though, as it can be nice to not be hand-held so much and have your legacy skills rewarded.
*Visual clarity isn't the best in this game and I'd easily keep losing track of my characters not only due to the overly-detailed environments but the lack of distinguishing colors for friendly and enemy armies. It all just kinda blurs together.
*Difficulty can be rather spiky at times, particularly depending on whether you're playing an RPG section or an RTS section. A lot of the time it felt like I wanted to make the RPG sections harder, but the RTS sections easier, though that could just be a consequence of me being a bit of a newbie in RTS and overestimating the enemy always having an early lead which I feel can always be turned around as long as you keep going.
*It's fun to have so many cool abilities for your party, but it can end up feeling like so much to juggle as they don't all easily fit on a quickbar, so you'll have to be swapping back-and-forth between bars. And this is on top of managing your army in an RTS section!

I went from Dying Light, Lara Croft and Snaper Elite to play SpellForce III and this game is just great.
I thought it won't run well on my PC, but it is constantly over 60 FPS {GTX-1070 / Intel i5 10400F, 16 GB RAM} with everything set to max. {1920x1080}
Game has great graphics and beautiful interesting world.
Love to explore the maps and find different items to shape my characters the best possible way.
Just don't know if i have created my lead character: 2/3 Soldier and 1/3 White Magic very wisely?!
Well, progressing well so far. Playing on normal difficulty.
Building, creating soldiers, take care of the food and needed materials etc. is making this game even more interesting.