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..