Sorcerer King: Rivals Reviews

I have been on board since Fallen Enchantress and much that was good has been stripped away, given a new coat of paint, and put back on the market as Sorcerer King. I still pourchased and enjoyed Sorcerer King but felt it to be repetetive and simplistic. Now we have the new stand alone Sorcerer King : Rivals and I hate to say, I'm underwhelmed. After playing a full game in Campaign mode it is no different than the old Sorcerer King. Same map with no difference, a few new animations but nothing to get excited about, same graphics , music, and bugs, the longer you play it, the more confused the program gets and interupts deisions you are making to swing across the map to show some minor incident. There is nothing here that could not have been in an inexpensive DLC or patch. Here are some impovements that may help... 1. an all NEW Camaign map 2. work on the bugs, this is important, by now this should be running like butter 3. more content ie: characters, heroes, some new music etc. 4. fix the pointer getting stuck with it's changes not keeping up with the game 5. put back battlefields in castles and towns that look like a castle court yard as in fallen enchantress, taking a town should feel special 6. even though i had four races as allies no one was there during the last fight, the last battle has become a big letdown I am waiting to see what if any changes the developers will make, Stardock still makes some of the best strategy games, and I'm not giving up, the construction set and map creator may bring us all some great adventures

Game is extremely unbalanced, unfair and unpolished. - The factions vary greatly in strength and abilities. One of them gets a 50% boost to production! Another has a spell to create a random item, usually a potion. - Your rivals can build cities anywhere WITHOUT clearing out the enemy camps! - The rivals fill up the entire map with cities in about 10 turns, long before you can get any pioneers out - Why can I equip a sword on a wolf? Lots of examples of this. - Because leveling your characters is pretty critical to success in this game, it feels really terrible that the tactical AI always targets your character with the weakest defense, making it very difficult to keep them alive - Spells are very unbalanced. Some can essentially clear the entire battlefield for about 20 mana

Don't bother with this and get Fallen Enchantress instead. This is basically an extremely watered down and unreasonably harder version of that game. Also if you're hoping that the technical problems would be fixed: They aren't.

Full disclosure, I love 4X games and especially Stardock 4x games. That being said I am reccomending ths game only provisionally to those who liked the previous title and those who like RPG-esque 4Xs in general, as it is not quite as in depth as Fallen Enchantress. If you haven't played the original Sorceror King, it is essentially a 4X with a doom timer in the background, where you are playing against the guy who already won, before he can consume the life of the world to become a god. In and of itself it plays a lot like Fallen Enchatress or other 4xs with RPG elements, the familiar quests return, hereoes will lead your armies and your ruler can throw spells into the mix, both in battle and stratically. In terms of what's new, Rivals adds several new playable factions (Ice dwarves, fuck yeah!) as well as changes the nature of the game a bit, you can still assault the sorceror king directly, however you now have several other paths to victory, including beating him in the race to godhood, or constructing a tower to steal his power out from under him. the game otherwise plays nearly the same as the original where you must manage your expansion in such away to avoid the SKs wrath untill you are big enough to smack around his armies. This is truly just an expansion pack with the added bonus of being standalone if you don't already own the original. I wil say that Stardock did the right thing by offering 50% off if you own the original game because the expansion really doesn't add a lot, if you loved the game, this will add some replay value with the new pths to victory and races and if you didn't this will not change your opinion in any way. I am glad to see the signature snark and medium awareness in the quests returns. Overall a decent game but somewhat lacking in depth compared to Fallen enchantress and Legendary Heroes. Overall 8/10, fun but doesn't add a whole lot, if you liked the original you'll like this, if you didn't you wont, if you'e thinking of jumping in to the series, here is a great place to start.

TLDR: play Fallen Enchantress instead. I pressed thumbs down with a heavy heart. While the concept itself is great and game undergone very important modifications comparing to its predecessor it has one huge flaw: Every single session is always the same due to limitations placed by very rigid Sorcerer King mechanic. You have very strict pipeline how you should play the it and would be punished severely for trying anything else.

I have played Fallen Enchantress and SK:R is a stripped-down version of the game with better graphics and a slightly updated and cartoonish interface. The game adds more RPG and narrative elements which I feel are mostly likely the strength of this game. Unfortunately, I play 4X games with narrative elements at the back of my mind, I look for engaging 4X and RPG game mechanics, diverse choices of units, races, spells, loots, etc and extended game replayability, these are not the strong points in this game even with Rivals. At the end of each gameplay, I feel like as if I have played the tablet version of Fallen Enchantress.

If you enjoyed Fallen Enchantress Legendary Heroes you'll want this sequel. It is more stream lined then its predecessor, making it easier to get into. Although, I do wish it was a little bit more complicated. The graphics are a big improvement from the previous game. Sorcerer King is less fun to replay than Fallen Enchantress Legendary Heroes, but with 8 sovereigns and 3 factions to choose from you’ll want to replay it at least a few times, there are also 2 campaigns. The sense of humour in the game is great, you’ll often find yourself cracking up at the jokes that are made during the many quests. Overall this is a fun escapism game and definitely worth your money.

The game plays more or less identically to previous Stardock 4X titles along the 'Fallen Enchantress' series, but with half the features removed or simplified. Shrines are now just shrines with no elemental assignation; units cannot be customised (so far as I could tell) and must instead be individually equipped with individually crafted items made from materials found around the map (primarily from battling). Needless to say, this mechanic is considerably more time consuming and annoying than customising units but produces the same exact result. The only real advancement the game has made is in making the game story-driven, with the main interactions being between you and the eponymous Sorcerer King. The player must either defeat the Sorcerer King's faction on the campaign map or cast a particular spell on the campaign map several times. As the player's faction grows in power and/or casts the spell, the SK recognises this and responds, resulting in dialogue options which can provide benefits at the expense of advancing the timer. Positives - The interactions with the SK are fairly well done, if a tad predictable. They provide one of the sole bright spots to the game, as you're (in theory) forced to juggle advancing yourself with avoiding the SK's notice before you're ready to deal with it. - As with previous titles, the game's humour is somewhat entertaining, if a little obvious in places. Negatives - Unfortunately the game's design lets itself down where SK interactions are concerned - by expanding your realm you immediately draw SK's notice, and there are few other options for advancing other than just sitting around doing nothing while beating up the ludicrously numerous hordes of bandits and spiders to gather the endless crafting materials you arbitrarily need to arm your troops. - There are typos throughout, as early as the opening screens of the game. I realise this is a very minor point on the face of it - indeed, many players won't even notice - but to have spelling errors in the most prominent and unavoidable text in the game betrays a startling lack of quality control and attention to detail. One of the most basic aspects to corporate professionalism is proof-reading work before submitting it; to release a game with so many errors shows either that the developers don't care about presenting a professional image or rushed release to meet a deadline. - I logged approximately two hours of playtime. During this time I managed to crash to desktop mid-game once, and had another crash while reloading a save. The latter required me to reboot my PC after the game audio crashed and refused to go away. I don't know enough about tech issues to really comment on how poor this is, but I can say that I buy a lot of games (from both large and small developers) and I can't remember the last time I averaged a gamebreaking crash every hour. - As noted above, I logged only two hours of playtime so there's no doubt a lot of things I didn't get to see. Regardless, the game feels empty and hollow. With no tech tree beyond a fairly basic talent tree for your faction leader there are limited options for upgrading your cities, and by the time of the second crash my capital had already built every possible building. To unlock most of your faction's unit choices you have to spend points on the talent tree, meaning that you're forced into these options if you don't want to be spamming the same weak troops over and over. Spell selection felt similarly lackluster. Overall: If you'd given me this alongside Fallen Enchantress and its sequel with no further information, I would have guessed this to be the FIRST game in the series, not the latest. The gameplay felt bare-bones and rushed; the game itself felt so rough around the edges as to appear unfinished. The sole positive of the game is the dialogue and text descriptions, and I'm honestly not sure whether these are actually funny or just seem to be because they're not as poor as the rest of the game. I do not recommend this game. To anyone. If you really want to play a Fantasy 4X, I would probably recommend Endless Legend instead - a game with its own set of problems but which at least feels like the dev team spent more than a month making it.

i more or less liked the origional sorcerer king... dont get me wrong, it defintely had its flaws but i thought it was a nice new concept. Now this game... is basicly the same game with a new spell added... it leaves me verry disappointed. They did not even fix some of the bugs in the origional version. I am sorry but i cannot reward this kind behavior with a good review.

This is a very hard review to make for me. Wall of text incoming below. TL DR: Fun game, has some flaws, don't expect endless replayability like other 4X games. Personally I bought and played both the original Sorcerer King and this updated version offered as stand alone (but discounted for owners of the original putting the price in line with a Dlc/expansion pack as it is). I think the game is very fun at the beginning, the mixture of elements from different genres make it an interesting experience, with a focus on hero developing/small army. Unlike a typical 4X game, there's a lot to see and do for what concerns the eXploration and eXtermination part, but much less when it comes to the eXpansion and eXploit sides of the game. Aside from adding more focus on the rpg elements compared to the other more well known Stardock game Fallen Enchantress: Legendary heroes, Rivals offers a different twist from the rest of the 4x. You are not fighting for supremacy against other civilizations, but rather trying to survive and avoid for someone else to ultimately win by destroying all the magical shards on the map that will fuel his spell of the making. In reality, the game starts with the main villain believing to be "already victorious", and with the player having to play along by pretending to be a pawn under his control while trying to gather enough resources to eventually confront him. The sooner you make acts of defiance against the sorceror king, the sooner he will dispatch larger armies to take care of your puny cities. Now the idea in my own opinion is great, but unfortunately in reality the way you behave since the beginning with the Sorcerer King is too "forced", meaning that there's no reason not to play "nice and dumb" with him at the beginning until you are strong enough to confront him. You have a lot of different answers, similar to a dialogue tree in an rpg when you interact with the sorcerer king, who will come to talk to you anytime you do something that upsetted him (like trying to expand) or just because enough turn have passed and he's scripted to come to you and pretend to be "your friend". The real problem lies in the fact that it's not a real "freedom" of choice. Meaning that any answer aside from pure submission and reverence to the sorcerer king does not justify with other benefits the big malus you get by making the sorcerer king upset sooner than needed. The same happens when dealing with other "minor" factions that in the story are treated as "conquered" by the sorcerer king. They will not have any proper diplomacy, you'll just have the possibility of becoming their friends by doing a couple of quests with them or by giving them gifts (mana), however there's no way to interact properly with them, every now and then if you made friends with them they will come up with a dialogue tree asking you which gift you want or if you want to make a trade. They feel more like a random resource. They hardly try to attack if at all, as I have never witnessed it, the sorcerer king or try to be of any real help whatsoever, and in fact they won't even manage to defend any shard that will spawn in their proximity. Compared to Sorcerer king, which used a "doomsday counter" meaning that you needed to win before he managed to cast the spell of the making, in Rivals you also get the chance to cast the spell yourself. It should have resulted in a fight for power, a battle of attrition between you and the sorcerer king. However, the design and balance are flawed, because it's too easy to gather and save up a lot of mana while the sorcerer king is still "friendly", only to start repeatedily casting the spell to gain control over the spheare of influence and gaining control before the sorcerer king has time to react at all, making the victory very easy. Another flaw of the design lies in the fact that you, as player, have access to a multitude of spells that you can cast on the strategic map, while the AI can't. Among such spells are those that allow for terraforming. Needless to say, the AI does not know how do react to that. It's way too easy to turtle yourself by cutting your lands with the sea, or even better in some maps (depends how lucky you get with the random generator) to completely shut in the sorcerer king troops from ever leaving his own starting area. Only to find later on that he has huge armies roaming around his catle being stuck without a clue as to how to get out of there. The exploits thanks to the terraforming are infinite, but at the same time, not using them feels like you are purposedely "handicapping" yourself. The tactical battles are also nothing great, they are quite simple, there is no line of sight or any other advanced feature like special terrains, cover, morale/bonus for adjacent units and so on. However units and heroe thanks to special abilities / your own spells / items can still be fun to use for a while, until your heroes/units are so leveled up and well equipped that it become too easy and you simply autosolve every fight. In general the eXploration and rpg part is well done, it's fun, the quests are purposedely written without taking them too seriously, they a little silly, which can be either amusing or annoying depending on your own preferences, I didn't mind it, and depending on how you solve them, you will be "judged" by giving birth to your "personality" in that specific game. Meaning that depending on that, your rewards will change accordingly. In the end, at the moment this is the sort of game I'd give a neutral rating, it has a lot of potential, but so far it didn't manage to fullfill it even if the developer for now claims to be working on further updates that could improve the situation. I decided to recommend it because it will still give you enough hours of entertainment before it starts to get too easy/repetitive, and because the price tag feels just about right, especially if purchased while on discount like at the moment of this review. Just don't expect a masterpiece, you'll have fun with it, but it's definitely not the kind of 4X with nearly endless replayability. It will last you much less, but it's a unique experience.