SpellForce 2: Faith in Destiny Reviews

I played through SpellForce 2: Faith in Destiny. Well—almost. To be precise, I dropped it halfway, which is really out of character for me. I mean, I even sat through Saint Agatha to the end—and believe me, not many people did! This is an add-on to the main game, so I’ll focus solely on what’s new or different here. Overall impression My overall impression of this game? “Well, this is shit.” That’s the short and polite version. Pros? Well, optimized graphics and a new enemy faction. And even within those "pros" there are plenty of caveats that do nothing to salvage the overall experience. Story, characters, and ideas The main storyline continues the tale of Eo, inching us closer to its final chapter, which will unfold in the next expansion. If you just read the plot summary as text, it’s a meaningful piece of the larger narrative—a solid fantasy arc about how “we meant well, but it all went to hell.” But the way the story is delivered here completely undercuts its importance: the pacing is erratic, the writing is clumsy, and the overall presentation is just plain messy. The new characters made me truly understand the phrase “malignant fanservice.” And the surprise return of some old faces doesn’t do much to redeem the situation. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not a prude. A purple half-elf, half… cat (?) girl with a long tail, wearing practically nothing and flat-out refusing to put on armor? I mean, I’ll always welcome a character like that! But she’s so poorly integrated into the story—everyone somehow just knows her, even though it’s literally her first appearance—and there’s no explanation for her race, which didn’t exist in the setting before and still doesn’t, really. Still, she’s nice to look at. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. The new enemy faction—the Nameless—is a fresh demon race with a full roster of units, unique building trees, and cool synergy between units. It should be awesome. But… the balance is a wreck. SpellForce has never exactly been famous for balanced gameplay, but this is way beyond even their usual standards. There are a couple of units that can literally wipe out half an army—even if they’re ten levels lower! And no, I’m not talking about titans or high-tier monsters. Just regular enemies. In the end, I had to fall back on a tried-and-true cheesy tactic from the first game: park your army outside the enemy base, bait out a small chunk of their troops with your hero, mob them to death, replenish cusaualties, repeat until the city’s wiped out. It works. But it’s dull as hell. Design and atmosphere The graphics themselves haven’t really changed, but the engine has been optimized. On my rig, the game doesn’t just run smoothly—it flies. In the previous entries, which squeezed everything they could out of GPUs back in the day, the game didn’t exactly lag, but scrolling the screen always felt sluggish, especially when a lot was going on at once. Now the camera glides effortlessly—just like in modern games. That said, even this optimization didn’t come without issues: after about an hour or so, the screen starts flickering. The lighting might be bugging out, or maybe it’s something else entirely—I honestly have no idea. But if I were epileptic, this thing would’ve definitely triggered a seizure. As it happens, I did have a seizure later—just not from the flickering. From pure, unfiltered rage. Gameplay As far as I can tell, the devs’ main selling point this time was the campaign editor, which supposedly allows players to create their own stories, characters, and entire custom campaigns. I didn’t try it myself—I never even opened the editor—but judging by what they managed to do with their own campaign… it probably didn’t turn out great. They also added a dragon-riding mechanic. At a certain point, a dragon joins your party. You can use him as a regular unit, or have your hero mount up and… fly around. In theory, this is meant to help you reach special high-altitude locations with (mostly useless) loot. You fly over, dismount the hero, send the dragon away (he’s too fragile for combat), summon the rest of your heroes, rinse and repeat until the map’s clear. I only did it once. That was more than enough for me. I had better things to do—like ironing shoelaces, walking my fish, or solving the Tamam Shud case. The campaign itself? Short, boring, incoherent. The story is weak, and the gameplay is so painfully repetitive it becomes exhausting. It honestly felt like the designers were forced to make it against their will—and they neither knew how nor wanted to try. At some point I even thought I was playing Diablo: go into dungeon, kill monsters, level up, return to town, buy gear, go back into dungeon. With all due respect to the franchise and its success—personally, I hate Diablo. No offense to its legion of fans. The only map that actually had interesting design, with space for strategic thinking, planning, and roleplay, was the fourth one—which I never even got to play! Because here comes my biggest complaint: broken quests. Quality and execution Toward the end of the third map, there’s a cutscene built using the game’s own engine (whose brilliant idea was that?!), and every single time it froze my entire PC so hard I had to restart. I checked the forums—I wasn’t alone. There was some convoluted workaround to skip it, but I wasn’t about to waste another 5 hours of my life. I “finished” the game on YouTube instead. I even tried the official (paid, by the way) mini-scenarios, which were meant to showcase the power of the scenario editor. A great idea, honestly—little stories about side characters, exploring their lives and personalities. I started the first one, playing as Flink McWinter—a charismatic bastard who’s been around since the very first game. The scenario was going pretty well, and then… After about 90 minutes, boom—bug. One of the NPCs I needed to talk to for the main quest simply vanished from the map. Back to the forums—yep, tons of people had the same issue. Plus a bunch of other campaign-breaking bugs I didn’t even get to experience (lucky me, I guess?). Look, I get it: games can ship with bugs. And back when games were sold on physical discs, patching them post-launch wasn’t always easy. But come on, guys—it’s been over ten years. You’re still selling this thing on Steam, for money, and because of some scripting bugs—something that’s trivial to fix—the game is literally unfinishable?! Final verdict I’m deeply disappointed and honestly pissed at the devs’ attitude here. That said… I’m playing the next expansion. Already started, actually.

I really enjoyed this part. At first I was a little concerned about the character creation, in that this was the only one where you were locked into playing a male character. It wasn't an issue, but it did make me feel like I was missing a button or something in character creation. It was fine though, as he was very well acted. I thoroughly enjoyed the dialogue in this game and the overall play experience was smoother than the base game too. Not sure about the bonus scenarios though. I played through one and couldn't really be arsed to do the others. Buuut they might be worth playing if you're into it enough and they're not exactly expensive. Overall, a solid 8.8/10 from me.

If you liked the base SpellForce 2 game, you’ll like this one too (or to be more precise, SpellForce 2: Anniversary Edition, as it’s known these days). This is basically just more SpellForce 2. And if you’re not familiar with SpellForce in general, it’s a game similar to Warcraft 3 – a combination of RPG and RTS. Just keep in mind that this is rather old, so it can be clunky and annoying at times. Still a great game. This standalone expansion unfortunately seems to have been a bit of a cash grab back in the day. Like, don’t get me wrong, the game’s not bad, but it’s extremely short, and if you want more it offers you several DLC mission packs you can buy. The story also has some questionable moments, if you've been paying attention in the OG Spellforce 2, but it's tolerable. I do recommend this, especially if you like SpellForce in general, but get the game and the packs on sale, it’s not worth the full price.