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In their immeasurable greed and constant thirst for power,
the thirteen most powerful Mages of all time doomed the land,
hurling it into an endless spiral of chaos and despair. Entire
countries were wiped out in the blink of an eye when the devastating
power of the Elements was unleashed - Elements summoned by
dark rituals. The prophecies tell of a human. A human damned
to immortality, bound forever by the power of the blood runes.
The time is near, when the power of one may change the destiny
of many. For better or for worse...
First
impressions of Spellforce: The Order of Dawn is not
a very good one
as we had to download a patch to ensure that the game worked
at all. Seeing the "Incompatible System Configuration" error
messages as the game starts is going to annoy users - although
apparently this will only be a problem on systems with Intel-Chip
Sets with the Intel Application Accelerator (Intel Busmaster
IDE-Driver) installed and on nforce2-chipsets with ForceWare
3.13. Not only that, but if I had managed to get the game
to start there is a long list of other bugs that hadn't be
fixed by the developers before this was launched to an unsuspecting
public.
To
make matters worse the patch takes over 5 hours to download,
if you have a standard modem with dial-up connection, and
it gets worse. The chances are if you have a standard connection
it will get dropped before it is totally downloaded and you
won't be able to continue downloading where you left off,
which means you will have to start from scratch. It's really
only going to work if you have a broadband connection and,
sadly a lot of the people who have bought this game won't
have access to that. So, not a very good start. Bad news for
BigBen, because some users may just take the game back to
where they purchased it from because it doesn't work.
Now,
I don't know about you, but the mere fact that it is going
to take me the best part of a day to load a game onto my computer
is going to put me off giving it a glowing review. In fact,
it had better be the best damn game on the market. I don't
want to have wasted a day of my life for a naff game. So,
already the game is set to get 2 out of 10... and I haven't
even started playing it.
So
I was happy to discover that the game is everything it should
be. There are a total of six races for each player to choose
from (Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Dark Elves, Orcs and Trolls)
and more than 30 different enemy races, from cowardly goblins
to powerful demons and dragons. A multitude of spells, divided
into different categories of magic (white, black, elemental,
etc.) There are also impressive 3D
graphics with zoom levels from isometric to 1st-Person-views.
Now
this is a very impressive game - and one that is certain to
appeal to the Lord of the Rings fanatics out there.
It's challenging, engaging and looks fantastic, but unfortunately
the fact that it was rushed through development without being
tested properly means that we are giving it a much lower score
than we should (The game itself is worthy of 9/10). The fact
that you may have to mess around for ages downloading patches
means that we are going to be harsh.
Think
carefully before parting with your money.
Nick
Smithson
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