Lacrymas
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2015
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1. A long-expected Retro Review and Introduction
When Phenomic announced they would shortly be celebrating Spellforce 2’s 10th anniversary with a release of a special edition, there wasn’t much talk and excitement on the ‘Dex, or anywhere else.
Spellforce has always been very grandiose and peculiar, and had been the wonder of many a (German) fan of RPGs, ever since 1’s release and unexpected further expansions and sequel. The “mix” of RTS and RPG it brought unto the world has now become like a local legend, and it was popularly believed, whatever the old guard might say, that it’s successful with elements of both. And if that was not enough, there was also the aforementioned longevity and vigour to marvel at. Time wore on, but it seemed to have little effect on the sales and popularity of it. The first sequel is much the same as the first game. At its second sequel they began to call it better, but almost unchanged would be nearer the mark. There were some that shook their heads and thought this was too much of a grind; it seems unfair that a game should possess (apparently) bad design choices as well as (reputedly) good enough sales to justify its almost 20 year history.
Having said that, I’m not going to go into detail about dates, development history, troubles therein, sales figures or anything similarly technical. This retro review is also written with the assumption the reader is at least familiar with the game or what it’s trying to achieve. My desire is to explore the game as it is presented and as it is being played, as opposed to giving a historical account which can easily be found on Wikipedia. Maybe, I haven’t checked, sue me. I am particularly interested in the supposed mix of RTS and RPG, and whether that is true or something nefarious hides in the midst. While I’m not going to give a formal/academic overview of genre as a whole, especially in the context of the 20th and 21st centuries, because frankly I’d have to read a whole bunch of books again to be able to summarize it in a satisfying way, I would be remiss not to mention at least some kind of history pertaining to the topic at hand. The first serious, or more appropriately said philosophically intentional, attempt at “genre mixing” was famously conducted by Wagner and his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork, standing-as-one artwork, there is no literal translation). His idea was to bring all available art types into a single work that can enhance the piece as a whole in order to change society into something more to his liking. That didn’t really happen, but we got almost unbearable operas in the process, so there’s that.
This is not, however, genre mixing, but it does set the stage for such later intentional phenomena. Art theorists usually talk about a genre disintegration in the beginning of the 20th century, with works like Schönberg‘s Chamber Symphony or James Joyce’s infamous Finnegans Wake. I would argue this is a misnomer, because it doesn’t have anything to do with the content of each piece, the frame is changed and the way the content is “brought into being” is changed. Without going into further rants that would once again require extensive reading to justify, I want to bring this trainwreck back to video games and make a hot take about their usual mechanical genres, why they always seem unsatisfactory and why oceans of pixel ink (if I’m allowed to steal this phrase from our own venerable pomenitul) have been spilled on the topic of what an RPG is. I’d like to propose the idea terms like RPG, RTS, point-and-click adventure, third-person shooter and so on, aren’t actually genres, but the way the content is “brought into being” and how we interface with it. Just like a Chamber Symphony is still in-genre a symphony, the difference being what role each instrument plays and what weight is being granted to each one in relation to each other; the mechanical video game genres only redistribute the weight and role of each “agent” within a game and do not constitute a genre-formation aspect.
The best way I can express is this is the noticeable divide between the instrument that is playing a given voice and the in-“narrative” role of the voice independent from the instrument. The instrument still has its own qualities that contribute to the work, but that is independent from the structural function of the voice. This is the key to explaining what the difference between an RPG, a shooter, and an RTS actually is without resorting to my usual arguments of petty exclusionary archeology. When I remove the need for the usual genre signifiers, we are left with the way our agents frame and “bring into being” the content and consequently how we interface with the game. The aforementioned independence-interconnection between an instrument that is playing the voice and the voice in-“narrative” is what the “agents” in a video game do. This is why Warcraft 3 is not a mix of genres, even though in-“narrative” the heroes are defined characters and have better statistics, they relate to the other agents the same way they do with each other, being unique has no bearing whatsoever. Mobas are also not RPGs due to the way the PCs relate to the NPCs. Shooters are not RPGs due to how the PC is “playing” their “voice”. This is all keeping in mind how we interface with the game. I’m not making myself clear. Maybe I am also arguing with myself.
My point is, given what I’ve said; there can be no “mix” between an RPG and RTS because an “agent” cannot have a dual nature in relation to the others. God, I sound like a philosopher. Anyway, this is perfectly exemplified by Spellforce and the reason I started thinking about this in the first place and why I find this game series fascinating from a philosophical point of view, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. In terms of story and map design, I’ll be concentrating on the first ever campaign, the Order of Dawn, with a few remarks on what I think is the superior one, the expansion Breath of Winter (in the main menu called the Aryn Campaign), which I haven’t completed yet. Without further ado –
2. The Irrelevance of Tolkien’s Ashes
I’m not sure if you, dear reader, are familiar with a person called J. R. R. Tolkien. He wrote a few scribbles. That’s not important, what’s important is the developers of Spellforce 1 wanted to sneakily influence you through your assumed knowledge of his works, and specifically his iconography.
This is the cover of the original game, a scheme and reference material they chose to abandon for later entries. There is a very good reason for that. Where does your mind wander when you manage to take your eyes off of the womanly figure in the center? It is indeed an obvious …homage to the imagery of the Lord of the Rings, at least its mainstream representation and the way it has become a cultural monument akin to a bulldozer. There is a certain Faustian nuance to selling your attempt at originality for immediate recognition, but just like Leverkühn you don’t think you need a soul when you have genius. What if I told you this cover doesn’t have in any way, shape or form, anything to do with the story or presentation of the game? Misleading covers are nothing new in whatever entertainment industry, but the binding with Tolkien smacks of a particularly nasty case of tastelessness in this specific scenario. It’s in this curious niche of “it’s not even wrong” in the sense of representing what you’ll be seeing, and a hefty whiff of sympathetic vibrations of sadness that the devs thought they were forced to play by the rules of late stage capitalism in order to succeed (pecuniary or otherwise) and be noticed. It is quite a tragedy to behold, really.
Yes, this is an attempt to pad out this section because there is nothing much to say about the story, I’ve already forgotten most of it, with 3 exceptions that I want to go over. The game after the tutorial starts when you, a Runewarrior, are summoned by the tutorial characters from a monument (this is important) to help against a war between rival mages who have inadvertently divided the land into islands connected with portals (put a pin on that as well). Your task is to find one of these mages who has constructed a legion of iron soldiers and is threatening the human capital of Greyfell. As a Runewarrior you are able to summon other Runewarriors and units from different types of monuments depending on race. What I’m not 100% sure about is whether anyone who has the runes you do can summon units, or only specific people (the mages and other Runewarriors). Suffice it to say, you go through a whole bunch of maps, excavate McGuffins, and use all 6 races, along with a cornucopia of different heroes (who do not gain experience), to find the mage, but ultimately fail to stop his plan. This is all pretty standard and in no need of “in-depth analysis”. What is out of the ordinary here is some of the lore, what exactly it’s missing, and the relationship between the races, you, and your troops.
The Lore™ says the runes you gather and use to summon your armies are magically sealed people taken during that mage war who are made immortal (in the sense their soul is brought back into the runes when they die) and forced to battle over and over, and over again. While this is not a shockingly innovative idea in the fantasy genre, it does produce some eyebrow raising questions about our role in this universe and some of those pesky ethical concerns some people like to talk about. This is exacerbated in one of the first maps of the Breath of Winter campaign, where your objectives at one point is to kill rival heroes and take their runes in order to enslave them. The original justification is they are slaves to “others” and would join the Rebellion™ if they had their will back. That is all fine and dandy, but that justification is dropped for one of them (if I’m not misremembering) and you have the power to free them by giving them their own rune, which you never do and this is not an issue that is ever brought up in the text, making it even worse. It’s worth mentioning you are given your rune at the start of the campaigns. You do also encounter a shifty-looking guy who offers to trap the souls of powerful creatures/people to do your bidding, something you take gleeful advantage of, enslaving at least a goblin rogue, an orc warlock, and an elf archer. This might get addressed further into the campaign, however. I kind of hope it is because it is an interesting talking point and slavery is not claimed to be an ordinary occurrence in this setting except in the case of the dark elves.
The third and final observation I’ve made and want to talk about is the relationship between the races themselves. Like I mentioned in the beginning of this section, you go in expecting some kind of confrontation between the Good™ and Evil™ races, but that is noticeably absent and it’s not a thing one can easily forget because mechanically they are separated into light and dark. They don’t share resources if you command a race of the light and dark side simultaneously and they actively attack each other if they get too close. This is an outright contradiction of their slave-state and the way you act before you are freed. Can they make their own choices, i.e. to attack each other, or not? I couldn’t find an explanation for any of this in the game itself, or at least I don’t remember such a thing. You do fight some orcs while you command the elves or humans, but you also go against other humans as a human yourself. What I can only guess is that the light and dark dichotomy is actually a product of the same magics used to bind the people to the runestones, they are in essence programmed to fight each other. Outside of that, there is rarely a reason for why you control any particular race on any map and it seems like it’s only because the developers thought you haven’t played with those for a while. It’s uncanny, it’s strange, and it feels like someone changed the story halfway through because they decided they were being too much like LotR. In spite of this weird dissonance, or maybe due to it, it doesn’t resemble LotR at all outside of the superficial, i.e. iconography and terminology. You seem to be in very good diplomatic relations with all the races even though you are a human, so I am at a loss about what exactly is going on here. Speaking of races:
3. The Art of Doing Nothing and Succeeding
These are the ever-present humans, the blithe and bonny elves, the geo-centric dwarves, the endearing orcs, the “there” trolls, and the refined, silvery dark elves. Each race has an equal number of units (to the game’s detriment) that use the same model with different textures, theoretically different strengths and weaknesses, use some combination of the 6 resources, and require food to increase the military population cap. There are two population caps, one for the military and one for the workers, the worker one only requires specific buildings to be built in order to increase. It’s not stated in-game, but each race has a hidden mechanic, some of them better than others, to the point of bewilderment in fact. The humans fight worse at night; the elves take less damage when fighting near trees; the dwarves level up when they kill units and become better; the orcs flee if they drop below a quarter of their health; the trolls go berserk at half their health and do more damage for a few seconds; and the dark elves raise skeletons when they fight at night. Quite an assortment there. You’d think this has something to do with balancing, but it actually doesn’t, some races are simply superior to others. I haven’t tested PvP, but I very strongly suspect nobody can stand against the orcs due to their best unit (the orc veteran) being very quick and inexpensive to produce. In order to move this along because there’s a lot more to cover, I’m not going to give an overview of each race. What I can say is the devs managed to differentiate them enough for them to feel distinct when you are playing them well. The problem is the consequences of that “playing them well” part, which I’ll get to in a moment.
When you claim a monument, you have to start producing workers which take some of your rune power, the less rune power you have the slower workers and heroes, but not military units, are produced. All units are produced at the monument one by one, and each has its own production time which can be sped up by building more of their corresponding buildings. We come to our first extremely important criticism I have of the game and the reason for the title of this section – the RTS part is too slow and uneventful. This is not due to rune power, but it does contribute to the waiting and doing nothing, and it’s completely unnecessary in the campaign, especially since you can’t actually die due to lore reasons. Once you create your first batch of allowed workers, you start reading a book (or the ‘Dex) to wait for enough resources to pile up and give your first building order. Once some needed buildings are completed, you wait some more because the basic units of each race are not good enough to win any map outside the first ones with. You set up food producing buildings in the meantime because you need at least a 30 unit cap (most of the time more) to overcome the resistance. Hopefully, you’ve remembered to start gathering the appropriate rare resources to train the better units. These special resources are such not due to scarcity on the maps, but due to not having a designated building to double their production. Since resources are basically infinite (if you are willing to wait), this is moot. When you finally have enough of an army of the advanced units, you steamroll the map and feel a bit wrong for liking this game.
All of the races suffer from a purely mechanical flaw, you cannot control their abilities, the best you can do is make a deathball and pray you’ve made it big enough to kill everything on the map so you don’t have to wait to produce it again. Each of them has its own special overpowered combination that is so beyond any other kind of army organization that once you discover it, you’ll use nothing else for the rest of the game. These usually feature a mass of a single type of ranged unit supported by a few healers and a few melee units. The outlier is the dark elves, whose units are all quite capable with the exception of the Assassin. I found them the coolest and most satisfying to play, they have poetic battle calls, the most elegant buildings, they are quite gothic, which is an aesthetic I’ve always been attracted to, and have a creepy titan. They come off as a serious people who have a penchant for art and culture without wallowing in decadence like the acolytes of Dionysus or Slaanesh, or being too cruel like the Drow. Although I’ve mentioned the races are distinct to play, that is mostly a visual distinction and not a kinesthetic or cerebral one. This shouldn’t, however, be underestimated; the purely aesthetic has its own strong pull that can compensate for many a flaw. Just ask Nietzsche or my ex. Titans also provide a nice visual flair; leading an army of rampaging orcs through ravaged lands with what is essentially a balrog is awesome. The actual gameplay experience of moving the army is less “Sound! Sound! my loud war-trumpets, and carry me to victory!” and more Don Quixote battling the sheep if he had to herd them single-file first.
Another intensely controversial and questionable design decision that permeates the campaigns of this entire series (and is only connected to the RTS portion) is how the enemies don’t build buildings or train units; they spawn at specific time intervals and directly come to your base. As far as I’m aware, the difficulty slider only affects this interval and nothing else. As a side note, this is the only game I’ve played in the last decade in which I felt the need to lower the difficulty from the hardest at some point, I’ll get to the reasons why in the next section. I want to focus on the respawning enemies a bit because I think the way this game is designed forced the devs between a rock and a hard place. There is a particular word I want to add to this discussion which is appropriate when we compare these genres – permanence. Not only of character but of the world we inhabit; in Spellforce you can freely travel between all the maps you’ve reached which fulfills the purpose of making the world feel like something whole (which is ironic given how island-like it is) with concrete characters having agency and presence, as opposed to a series of skirmishes like an RTS. Perhaps they had no other choice but to make it like this, which throws the first of many wrenches into the idea that this type of RTS/RPG hybrid is possible and one of the reasons for my little rant at the beginning of this review/retrospective. The most damning evidence I have is how they have not changed this throughout the entire run of this whole series and I’m reluctant to blame their designers for that.
The situation is a bit difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t played the game and experienced firsthand why exactly something else wouldn’t have worked. It’s a combination of tiny aspects working together. Let’s start with a hypothetical situation in which there are no respawning units but all fights on the map are fixed challenges to be overcome with your army (which doesn’t sound bad). The base-building would’ve been obsolete and only a waste of time because nothing would come to threaten it. I’d say the whole RTS part would be obsolete and you’d constantly ask yourself why it wasn’t just a pure RPG. There are some problems that arise if the enemies do build bases, the first and most important would be the role of your hero. If they started from scratch, you could just demolish their workers before they have a chance to create an army (which as mentioned is very slow). If they started with already built bases and a standing army… that’s basically what it’s like right now and the thing we are complaining about. Most of the enemy types you’ll be facing do not have specific buildings or workers, so that is also a factor along with budget and time constraints. These three factors/scenarios might sound as if they aren’t a problem, but when you are trying to create an RPG/RTS hybrid, they are massive and insurmountable issues. You might be asking yourself, “but wait! Why don’t they make it like Warcraft 3?” Two problems with that: you have to take into consideration Warcraft 3 is an RTS, it’s not trying to be a hybrid, the heroes there are simply unique units with better stats, they aren’t RPG characters you can imagine having a character sheet. The second consideration is the permanence aspect, you start each map at a particular place and you have to explore to find monuments, if they let the AI build an army and collect resources they’d either have to be very weak in order to not just overwhelm you before you’ve built your first building, making it very easy for your character to just mop them up at the start, or not start building before you claim a monument, making it very easy for your character to just mop them up without activating it. You see the catch 22?
All the permutations of design choices I can think of revolve around these contradictions or even worse design choices that invalidate a selling point. There has to be some attention paid to being engaging in some way, waiting uneventfully around for 20 minutes just to build an army and take on static enemies is counterintuitive, boring and a literal waste of time. This element is even already present, a point I devoted an entire paragraph to. I honestly think they took the highest ground they could when taking into account all the other ways the game works. It’s a logistical nightmare, it truly is and I have nothing but sympathy for the devs. Maybe there is a way to fix this deeply rooted flaw in this franchise and I’m just a dumb-dumb who can’t see it. Perhaps it’s just a matter of hastening resource collection, unit production, building construction, and movement speed, but that would only fix the waiting around, not the increasing divide between the RTS part and the RPG.
4. The RPG part
I avoided talking about the RPG up to this point to show how easy it is to separate the two halves and how they don’t really interact with each other outside of creating clear borders between themselves. I do want to try to exonerate the game with this section, talk more positively about it, and try to convince someone to at least give it a try. The character building is surprisingly in-depth; giving you a buffet of play styles and allowing you to be imaginative with the type of avatar you want to create. There are 6 attributes, 3 martial categories - heavy, light and ranged - and 4 magic categories, mental, elemental, white and black. You can freely mix whatever you wish, but the more categories you have the harder it is to keep them all at a reasonable level. The reason for that is each category requires certain attributes (you gain 5 attribute points to spend each level-up) and a point to spent in it to increase the sub-categories, which also take a point, you have 2 category points each level-up at your disposal. The way this system is tied to abilities and items is a bit counterintuitive. You need the main category to equip items when they require magical stats, but the sub-category when they don’t. You gain martial abilities from the main category, but spells want the sub-categories. If I’m not explaining it clear enough, it’s not really important. The main thing to take away from this is if you want to build any kind of hybrid, you more than likely won’t be able to equip the best items available for each category.
For Order of Dawn, I made a full-on black mage and for Breath of Winter I made a dagger dual-wielder with black magic support. I wanted to be a necromancer, but the skeletons and undead goblins you summon are actually very weak compared to the enemies, so I mostly spammed damaging spells. The main criticism I have is how unbalanced everything is. The undisputed best character has heavy martial arts with a dip in Boons of white magic; it only goes downhill from here. Black magic is perhaps the best magic school in terms of damage, especially in the expansions, but it doesn’t even come close to the melees in the original campaign. Melees are still superior in the expansions too. I suspect there are some builds which will be almost useless due to their spell selection (Nature + Curses + Light Armor for example). The reason I changed the difficulty from hard to normal in one of the last maps is a result of this. As a mage, I neither had the damage nor the mana to be able to hold back the relentless waves of enemies that constantly assault your base from the moment you activate the monument while you are trying to build a base with limited resource spots, especially wood. I purposefully didn’t put the following in the previous section due to it being connected to your character - your units are considerably weaker than the enemies’, and you require an army larger than what they have in order to not lose everything and have to start all over again. You can easily fall into a cycle of producing just enough units to hold the enemies at bay but not enough to actually make any progress. This is made worse by you needing to have an army in your base to defend it while your other troops are trying to destroy the defenders’ buildings to stop them from respawning. You might be wondering what does this have to do with your character; it actually is very much dependent on them. If you had the good judgment to make your character martial, you have no trouble with dispatching all attempts on your base all by yourself, even entire spawning points. When I was considering lowering the difficulty, I watched a few random Let’s Play videos on YouTube to see how other people are managing, and there wasn’t anybody I encountered who was anything other than a heavy melee. Breath of Winter is more merciful because it gives you access to hero monuments more frequently and you aren’t as dependent on your main.
There is another way out, however, it’s the tip you constantly see on forums – don’t activate race monuments and just kill everything with your hero. While this works, it becomes more and more tedious the more camps you have to clear and the higher level the enemies get. It was frustrating to no end as a mage, even as a black mage which has access to very damaging spells like Death and Pain, so I opted to lower the difficulty and go with the base building at the last 1/4th of the campaign. Even then, in the second-to-last map I was completely burned out from the waiting of base building and having to destroy 8 enemy camps, so I opted once again to clear the humongous and empty map (more on maps later) alone. The disadvantage is the lower amount of xp you get by not killing more enemies when they respawn and not having access to the most powerful spells by the end. I’d argue it’s not much of a con because you have to grind in order to get to level cap in both the Order of Dawn and Breath of Winter. Not getting to level cap is actually a big deal because both of your characters are protagonists in the second and last expansion, Shadow of the Phoenix. I didn’t care all that much and didn’t grind, but I can imagine it triggering some people. The end-game spells are also quite good, so you do miss out on some extra toys. The way you grind is the same way you do everything else, doing basically nothing. You can clear the entire map outside of 1 camp, park your army there, build an entire fortress worth of towers and go do something more productive while the game plays itself. There is an upper limit to this, you gain less and less experience the more you kill the same type of creature on each map, so you should wrap up after a while. The difference by the end is not gigantic, I was level 26 and the let’s player I checked, who did grind, was 30, but like I said, you miss out on the best spells (some of them unique) and equipment. I prefer this to be more intertwined with the amount of side quests you do, rather than how willing you are to grind.
The game features quite a lot of side quests, some of them of the Codex’ favorite kinds, like collecting ingredients from bosses and exploration in order for an NPC to create an item for you. The best mage robes are received like this, but the best melee armor is from a very lengthy narrative-driven side quest (it literally spans the entire game). I want to say there are very few fetch quests, but I honestly don’t remember due to having played the first 2/3rds of the game back in 2017. Doing side quests was the best part of the game for me, along with leveling up and finding more spells and items. I actually don’t want to spoil any of the side quests because it’s always cool to discover them yourself first, there are quite a lot of fun things to appreciate, and the lore is well utilized. In terms of itemization, Breath of Winter is definitely better, but there are unique weapons and armor which mostly give you damage, armor class and attributes; there are some cool weapons that have other bonuses like an effect on hit (in BoW, there are other types of bonuses on other types of items as well). What made an impression on me is how mage characters don’t have a ranged option and will gleefully run into melee if you don’t keep an eye on them, I think that’s definitely an oversight and at least some of the magical weapons should’ve been ranged. It could’ve also been a separate sub-category that allows you to focus on these types of weapons, but I digress.
The last thing of note here is the maps and exploration. I was consistently astounded by the imaginative map design, big areas and entertaining ideas they put in every zone. One moment you’ll be climbing a winding mountain step by step, claiming monuments along the way, the next you’ll be sandwiched between impassable terrain and a demon horde, and even further you’ll be taking part in a slaughter between rival human armies. They held no punches back when it comes to maps and scenarios to put you in; BoW continues this trend with new tricks and quest objectives to keep you on your toes. Exploration is richly rewarded by providing you with better runes for heroes, races (the higher level the worker rune is, the better the army and towers as well), rare items, rare spells, side quests, and so on. Heroes come with their own set of spells and attributes you can’t change, and they don’t level up, but you can equip them with items, so it’s always beneficial to search for higher level heroes. There are spells you can only find by exploration, you can’t buy them from merchants, which I found extremely giddy and comfortable. There are even reasons to go back to some maps to clear higher level territories and complete side quests. Some other designers could learn a thing or two from this 17 year old game. Everything negative I can say about the maps is tied to how the game is played, so consider this glowing praise. Yes, there are some maps which are duds, but they are rarely seen. Extensive character creation you can experiment with, exploration done right, comfortable playing speed for a game with no pause, no excessive spell SFX, no absurd epicness by the end, some thinking which spells to use (auras cancel themselves when you cast anything else), complementary party gameplay, etc. That is quite the pedigree.
5. Of RTSes and RPGs
Throughout this write-up it might seem I’m accusing the game of setting boundaries between its elements instead of trying to find a way to combine them. There’s certainly quite a lot of truth to this indictment, the game itself segregates the last map into 3 (using the portals only your character can go through), a dark portion, a light portion, and the RPG portion, and it’s a quintessential boiling down of the philosophical/artistic/categorical problem I wrote about in the very beginning. I might not have solved it, but as I kept writing this I came to the conclusion it might be valuable as a discussion starter, or at least a new way of seeing how games are experienced as an academic inquiry. I think everyone would agree the current status of the discourse around “RPG” as a label is not satisfying, especially since it can become so inclusive as to be meaningless. I wouldn’t be able to distinctly talk about the RTS and RPG “portion” if RPG was this nebulous all-encompassing umbrella that only requires some spice in the mix, not to mention nobody can agree on what exactly the spice is. It seems like half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election. An appropriate question to ask is, why is this (claimed to be) a hybrid and not only an RPG? Why is New Vegas claimed to be only an RPG and not a hybrid? The same question can apply to numerous first-person or third-person shooters/action games which are routinely slapped with the label of RPG on the grounds of the vaguest justifications like “I know it when I see it”. When we remove the requirements of retrospection and focus only on the way the game presents itself to us, in effect our “window” into the game world, and the relationship between that and the characters/”agents” on screen, our understanding has the possibility to become clearer.
I hope I’ve managed to convince someone to at least give it a try and elucidated its perplexing popularity. They might also look at it through this skeptical lens I attempted to build around its genre. It’s not a perfect game, far from it, and I’ve not managed to cover every minutiae of how the game works, especially in the context of changing maps and its fog of war, but it’s a comfortable game that I’d recommend to any RPG fan (not so much to someone who is looking for an RTS). The UI is definitely not the most usable, but the pathfinding is surprisingly good. Without stalling any further, I’d like to summarize it by noting how much verbiage I managed to produce about this semi-obscure game without going into excruciating detail about its content, so that must count for something. Even though it’s small comfort, I’d like to paraphrase what a commentator once retorted against Leonard Bernstein’s criticism of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, “if a piece continues to be played so many years after its premier, how flawed can it really be?”
