Truly a unique title that blends both RPG and RTS elements together far beyond anything I've played to this day. Nothing has come close to as good as this blend. Battle For Middle Earth was good, and so was it's sequel, but neither of them truly mixed a healthy does of RPG in to it's RTS. This is a game I would highly recommend to anyone looking for a mix of these two elements. They are honestly, the selling points of the game!

You get a nice selection of quests for countless hours of gameplay, plus large amounts of armor and weapons to cycle through during your adventure. If you want a good game at a low affordable price, I'd definitely pick up Spellforce!

Spellforce Platinum is a wonderful start to a great gaming franchise. It combines three games into one explosively good package. It includes: The Order of the Dawn, The Breath of Winter, and The Shadow of the Phoenix. The games blend deep and rewarding RPG elements with RTS tactics to create a must have gaming experience. The multiplayer online feature has been taken down, buy you can still find great multiplayer rear kicking action through LAN. A must buy for any gamer.

A really great beginning to the awesome Spellforce series. The graphics are beautiful for the release date, and the battles are too epic to describe. If you like strategy games, and even if you don't, this is a great game that you'll have a blast with.

Overall, Spellforce is a fun combination of Heroes of Might and Magic and Dragon Age style games. The quests are occasionally vague, but part of the fun is trying to figure them out. It's less replayable than some RPGs, as character types and decisions do not make much difference. However, at this prices it's still a great value for the entertainment!

This game is basically a remainder of a time when games were built to last and persisted past the first eight hours of gameplay. This game is a long ride through the story of spellforce and it is a very enjoyable story at that.

Spellforce Is a RTS-RPG which some have called a mix of Warlords and Age of Mythology. This

Platinum pack has in it, The Order of the Dawn, Breath of Winter, Shadow of the Phoenix. All three of the "first" games. The graphics are very outdated but I don't really care about such things, I care only about gameplay, and this is a fun game. A little lacking near the end but still a great game. All and all, I suggest getting this in the universe pack for super spellforce action (and value).

An excellent game, includes a great campaign and expansions. The few mars on perfection would be the in ability to take heroes to all compaign missions and the lack of buttons/hotkeys/command for basic things like attack move and hold ground. Overall a good game and worth the price, though i would suggest looking for Spellforce 2 and its expansion instead.

This game has some minor flaws with the control mechanism, mainly when you have lots of troops under your control. Assigning actions at this time is not easy, and the player heros are not great at getting involved in the combat themselves. But... lets not get away from the fact this game is very good. It matches RPG and strategy gaming very well. The story is detailed and the lands involved huge. The graphics are also superb.

Great RPG/RTS game. First one I've played in this genre, so I don't have much to compare it to. The graphics are a bit dated, but they are nice if you have a lower end or older pc.

This platinum pack contains the expansions for the base game, and is a great deal in terms of amount of game play for the money.

Unlike today, every game features some RPG element, at the time it came out, such a blend of RPG and RTS is really original and rare. And up until today, Spellforce is still almost the only RPG/RTS blend staying in players' heart. So up until today, Spellforce still offer you unique experience other games cannot, and this bundle shows you how it starts.

Amazing deal considering that its 5 games at that price!!

Although graphics for Spellforce 1 and its 2 expansions are dated this does not subtract at all from the hundreds of enjoyable gameplay hours you can expect from these games as well as from the more recent Spellforce 2 and its expansion

Ran all of them on windows 7 profession 64 with no problems what so ever

I discovered this game when I was only playing on my console. It made me love PC gaming again. Awesome !

Finished the game several days ago, so here's my review...

The game is old, and this is noticeable in the gameplay mechanics, a lot, actually. First thing that may anger you is the fact that your avatar / character doesn't attack automatically, unless attacked previously by a melee enemy unit. So my suggestion is that you play as a melee class. The graphics are a bit old too, and the music is sometimes cut off strangely, but gladly, this happens on a few maps only.

Yet despite the above problems, it caught me, and held me until the end. The character development process is good, for an RTS / RPG game. The atmosphere and lore of the game is satisfying, considering that this wasn't an AAA project while was in development.

It is DRM-free, and was very cheap when I bought it, so I'd recommend it to all that want to play a mix of RTS and RPG, although I'm sure, some will love it, and some will hate it.

A game that combines RPG and RTS genre. You start by creating a character of choice between combat or magic skill. During campaigns, you will collect runes use for recruiting heroes (elite units) and upgrades to obtain new units and buildings. You'll come across loots and items for equipping your character or just visit vendors for purchase (which is unnecessary, since items found are more often better). You can interact with NPCs for questing. There are also dialogue choices which serve no purpose other than questioning (so don't bother with good or evil character).

The gameplay is lacking as there is no hotkeys assigning making it difficult for micro managing. You'll have to select individual units to use their special skills, due to camera issue its rather hard to do such and making it quite impossible to manage a big army during battle. The units' pathfinding ability is problematic so you'll have to always monitor their movement (quite tedious).

An interesting blend on genre. Somehow you'll keep on zooming to 3rd person view to look at the surrounding or experiencing battles happening up close.

I'm not much of an rpg fan but even I loved spellforce. It's a blend of rpg/rts and its well worth a purchase. In fact buy it and buy the second game as well you won't regret it.

Most of the reviews here have already covered why this is an awesome game and worth the purchase of the 'Spellforce Universe' box from the site, though I will add my two cents as well.

This game is basically a remainder of a time when games were built to last and persisted past the first eight hours of gameplay. This game is a long ride through the story of spellforce and it is a very enjoyable story at that.

Spellforce Platinum contains the base game and two expansions. The game and expansions each offer a lot of value thanks to the lengthy campaigns. Based on the hours of gameplay alone, the Platinum version is definitely recommended, though you may want to go for the Universe edition of the game for Spellforce 2 and its expansion (plus this Platinum edition).

The game itself offers a really great blend of RPG and RTS elements. So, if you like the genres, then you're sure to find something to like.

The only downside as with a lot of games that blends genres together is that it doesn't do the RPG elements or RTS elements as well as games that are dedicated to that type of play. But it's still a good game.

its a fun game with a mix of rpg and rts elements, with the extra expansions included its well worth picking up

This game is large, fun, and only has a few minor problems. My chief complaint is the fact that heroes won't attack unless commanded to (only retaliating to melee attacks). This is frustrating as it means that in large battles hero's often end up sitting around if not furiously micromanaged and can be brutalized by ranged units without responding (and are also poor defenders as they won't attack incoming enemies until struck in close combat).

The mix of rpg and rts gameplay is fun, although I tend to prefer simply running around with my hero and fighting (as once a base is established enemies begin to attack relentlessly in ever increasing numbers).

There are a good variety of units and items, though many items are either highly similar in terms of gameplay from others and many won't even be usable by your chief hero, due to restrictions to use by characters with certain amounts of skill in the various concentrations (however you can have an entourage which can be equipped with these weapons--also the entourage doesn't share the stupid/lack of AI that the hero does).

Spellforce - an RPG/RTS genre-blender. Not exactly a unique blend, as done by Warcraft 3, Warlords, Savage 2 and more. Overall, SF plays like a great game; it has good graphics (for its time), a wonderful interface, straight-forward mechanics, a huge world, relatively bug-free (haven't had a crash or glitch yet!) and more. But you might be asking, what makes it different from the other RPG/RTS behemoth - Warcraft 3?

For starters, SF has a more seamless world. You can traverse levels, completing old quests or killing a high-level monster that you were unable to kill before. This makes the world huge, as you can go back and forth between the maps, talking to old NPCs, selling equipment and so on. This is unlike Warcraft 3, which essentially plays like a classic RTS with hero units and lootables thrown in.

Next, an important aspect of SF is the "click-and-fight" interface. This operates similar to what you see in games like Guild Wars or World of Warcraft - Press tab (or click) to 'target' an enemy, and you can select the skills you want to use on the enemy. It actually works great because you are no longer pixel-hunting for the boss enemy in that massive battle. Just press tab, and you can quickly focus fire the boss, or cast spells on him and so on. This also works for cast spells on friendly units.

The story in SF essentially evolves around the player character being somewhat of a 'prophet', destined to save the world and must work to earn your trust amongst the factions. There are plenty of side-quests, some are mundane such as fetching some ingredients for an NPC's job, or helping find prisoners on the battlefront, to discovering vengeful ghosts of past expeditions to hell. There isn't much choice involved in them (you either do them and get rewarded, or don't). Granted, I'm currently playing through the original campaign (Order of Dawn), so there might be decisions made in future expansions, which would definitely makes things more interesting. There is a 'teleport' system involving these magic stones, which makes it easy to traverse back to previous maps/towns in order to sell items or hand in quests.

Again, this is different from Warcraft 3, which has no quests, no merchants and a extremely linear story. While SF does indeed have a linear story, it is more exploratory, rewarding the curious gamer with quests, quest items and so on.

Finally I'll touch on the RTS element. It's pretty straight forward, you have many types of resources (wood, iron, stone, food, aria, lena and some others ) and it becomes more and more important to manage these resources properly and to keep your eyes open for more. Worker units seem to be "free", with only a limitation on the max you can have. The caster units seem to have very little micro; they auto-cast their spells and I don't think you can manually cast them. This is great because with 6 heroes, you do NOT want to be microing your caster u

this game seemed pretty fun at the beggining and very inovative but it quickly got boring and it seems to have alot of small bugs that get very annoying as you play it took me abaut a wekk to get tired of it i also tried the second game and that isnt much better if not worse

I just installed the game and it looks as lovely as reviewed by all other game sites. It is definitely worthy of it's 74/100 averaged review on Metacritic.

I am playing it on Vista and had only one problem about the serial number continually being asked everytime I restarted the game. But this was resolved after reading Jowood's forum - you have to set to administrator mode.

I enjoy the RPG and RTS elements and it is a pleasure to explore this huge game world thought up by the developers at Phenomic. There is an editor available at Jowood' official website but you are required to disable anti-virus software to run it - I don't think it supports the expansions. I wonder why it was not included over here at Gamersgate.

Anyway, the game is at a steal bargain price for it includes the two great expansions Breath of Winter and Shadow of the Phoenix. I know I am going to get a couple of sleepless nights from this game - this is my type of game - which to me seems to be a mix of Dungeon Siege and Age of Mythology, etc..