SpellForce 2 - Anniversary Edition Steam Charts & Stats

Very similar to the first in a lot of respects, and for that reason, also a non-recommend. It just can't create the same tight and compelling gameplay that is inspired by its rivals; namely Warcraft 3.

[h1]Peak Eurojank[/h1] Game will crash and erase 2 hours of progress. Repeatedly. Including quicksaves, for some reason. Perhaps the game just stops quicksaving at some point. Don't know, don't care. Already uninstalled. [h2]Story[/h2] The game has a generic RPG story with a Big Bad who wants to rule the world, and we as a player control a bunch of heroes trying to stop them. It starts off just like any other 2004 RPG, where the heroes cluelessly bumble around various maps for no reason, suffer attitude from everyone for no reason, and where no one wants to believe them, again, for no reason. Despite the army of darkness lurking around the corner. [h2]RTS combat[/h2] There's actually no RTS combat in this game. It's just point move units and let the AI do the fighting. Units act too fast for the player to successfully perform any tactics, and there's no tactical pause. The most optimal startegy is to actually just run the entire army into the middle of the enemy camp, sit back, and sip coffee until the AI cleans it. Units will go out of their way to do whatever they want, attack who they want, and stand wherever they want (often just taking hits without reacting, and dying). There's no stances, formations, action commands, nothing. All you get is command groups, but can't assign a building to a command group either... AI will chase every enemy they see unless given a stop order, at which point it just stands there doing nothing, not even defending itself, just tanking the damage until the units die. There's also flying enemies in this game, as early as mission 4. Without any sort of ranged attackers, the entire army is absolutely useless against them. May as well reload a save and build the army again, this time with archers. They don't even give mele units a basic "throw rock" attack for this eventuality. As a result, armies end up having one single composition in every mission, where the player is forced to, at all times, taxi around a bunch of otherwise useless archers, just in case a flying unit shows up. Oh, and. You can't even see all the health bars on the screen. In an RTS game. Gotta select units manually for that. Pathfinding is just bad, units often die because they got stuck on terrain. Heroes stand in a spot uselessly because they get stuck behind... other units! AI takes forever to respond to commands and will often run in circles, or position units in nonsensical spots. The game will randomly grind into a halt when attempting to execute AI pathing for what feels like more than 10 enemy units at a time. And then the battle will fast-forward hilariously. Complete with smashing all the units into a single overlapping bag of polygons. Aha! So the game CAN overlap units, it just chooses not to for... reasons??? Base building is more of a chore than an actual part of the game. There's maybe 15 buildings total and all races have been squished into a single headquater building. There's about 10 different unit types, whereas SF1 had 10 units per race??? No sidegrades either, just straight upgrades, so all your battles will end up looking the same and using the same 3 types of soldiers. [h2]RPG part[/h2] There is no RPG part either. Game has a skill tree that's completely pointless. Player can choose where SOME of the skill points go... only to be forced to spend the rest on completely unrelated skills, before the game even allows to progress the desired build further. Want to be a cool ice mage in SpellForce 1? Pick Elemental -> Ice in character creator, boom, cast ice spells. Want to be an ice mage in SF2? Sorry, spend 18 levels (!!!) derping around with generic spells like "steal life", "decay armor" or "healing", from completely unrelated magic schools. Because the devs stuffed it all into a single tree and, couldn't be bothered to actually MAKE DIFFERENT SPELLS IN A SPELLFORCE GAME. WHAT. Loot is sparse, uninspired and borderline useless. If you're going to give me items that are worse than my current items, that I can only vendor or destroy, then what's the point of having loot? The game doesn't try to get the player attached to equipment either, it's just toss that sword and replace with a +1 sword, only to replace it with a +2 sword later. Many items also look the same, making it hard to figure out which of the 5 identical looking talismans is the best. Comparing equipment is infuriatingly masochistic, as there's no way to automatically do this and the game doesn't help. No +/-, do the math yourself! Equipment is extremely barebones - just 7 slots - and despite that, it just looks unfinished. The game has 2 slots for weapons and rings, but it can't even compare against both at once. Character stats don't exist, everything has been dumbed down to stat sticks - just so people don't accidentally build their characters wrong (this is ususally solved with a respec feature). So everyone is just a cookie cutter template warrior or a mage with a subset of the same 20 abilities. That's about the number of spells that existed in a single magic school in SF1. [h2]Graphics[/h2] All objects in the game are very hard to see against terrain and it quickly gets physically tiring to look at. It's easy to miss interactables like levers, loot chests, and... enemies too, as they blend against the background too much. Game is unfit for 16:9. There's obviously some hacks done to "fix" it, but it still results in broken UI, weird scaling, and cinematics with the camera pointing at empty space. The game will randomy stop loading textures, resulting in black blobs, or the ground becoming transparent. It'll also crash often with "out of memory" and "access violation" errors. UI is clunky. Menus with multiple levels that don't close with a single X. All icons look similar and are too hard to resolve. There are, apparently, shortcut keys, but there's no way to configure them and they aren't displayed anywhere. Menus also blur the screen so it's not possible to see what's going on in the game while having a menu open. --- Everything in SpellForce 2 is a downgrade from SpellForce 1. Don't even bother playing it. Yes, it's that bad.

Once upon a time I enjoyed the Spellforce series immensely. Nowadays I'm too old and lazy to make this game work on newer hardware. Needs a remaster or possibly a remake. If you still want to play this game I would advice to download the hardware mod, to combat the FPS issues.