Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars

James Matson knows that glowing staffs and wavy grass aren’t always the measure of a good game.

Successful ‘hybrid’ games that mix up genres are phenomenally hard to pull off. Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars claws desperately towards the golden mark of a good RTS/RPG mix, but loses grip along the way.

Set against the backdrop of the shattered islands of Eo where the magical portals that connect each island are slowly losing their mojo, the player can tackle the game in campaign or ‘free game’ mode as a member of the Shaikan race in their quest to protect Eo against impending doom and fend off the hordes of the Shadow, or as a pure RTS in skirmish mode. The campaign option delivers the Spellforce 2 experience in the truest crossbreed fashion, with elements of army building and resource collecting mixed with a continuing storyline and quests available to your ‘avatar’ – your player character in the world of Eo.

The first 20 minutes or so of Campaign mode are spent in tutorial land, where voiceovers guide you through the various commands windows and options until you’re ready to brave things on your own. This is largely unnecessary; to the credit of Phenomic the interface is smooth and one-click friendly, with a quick flick through the manual you should feel ready to tackle all that the game has to throw at you.

Your can either choose a template avatar or create one from scratch, and this hero forms the central focus of your campaign. The RPG mechanic is driven by the player completing quests with their avatar and whatever companions they pick up along the way, equipping enchanted armour and weapons from fallen foes as well as branching into new abilities once enough experience points are earned to level your character from completing quests or vanquishing foes. The skill trees have a Paris Hilton depth about them, with only two main paths of ‘combat’ or ‘magic’ available – they do however provide some mildly interesting spells, buffs and effects for you to play with.

Being waylaid by Ziggy Stardust on your road to glory is a frightening prospect.

While journeying in campaign mode you’d be hard pressed to ignore the impressive landscape. Whether viewed from a 3rd person view or isometric Spellforce 2 is pant-wettingly gorgeous, every blade of grass swaying in the breeze while day-to-night sequences cast moody shadows in the afternoon sun. The visuals are aided by a beautiful high fantasy soundtrack that drives up to a frantic crescendo during battle scenes before subsiding to a more ‘let’s make daisy-chains’ pace afterwards.

It’s a good thing that the lighting and shadows evoke atmosphere, because the storyline is in serious danger of turning us all into coma patients with no will to live.

Every chat with quest NPCs is plagued with generic ‘I swear by the Dragons blood in my veins’ or ‘may the Gods curse you if you fail’ statements, while quests range from making little sense, to none at all. You’ll constantly find yourself doing things and going places and being entirely unsure of why it even matters. The cookie-cutter dialogue isn’t helped by the lack of emotive animation in your avatar or other characters, the whole narrative leaving an empty feeling that can’t be filled by pretty shader effects. Once you get through the initial quests, a ‘hit space to skip’ option becomes available and with tears of joy rolling down your cheeks, you’ll hover over that button like a vulture to bypass the bad voiceovers and cliché lines.

There’s nothing wrong with some tradition in fantasy, but Spellforce 2 is on narrative life support with the prognosis looking gangrenous. The characters that join your little troupe along the way as party members just sort of rock up on the scene for no good reason. They happen to be on the same hillock as you at the same time, and reckon you look like the leadership type.

It’s unfortunate because it’s these story driven quests which link up the RPG and RTS elements, with your avatar sometimes given the task of heading to a particular waypoint, setting up a city and producing an army with which to attack objectives.

So, after mashing the Space key and doing your own fair set of ‘swearing by the blood in my veins’ you’ll probably find yourself heading for the Skirmish or Free Game modes.

That big scary fella is a Titan, the ultra heavy unit available to each faction in Spellforce 2

Skirmish mode is the pure RTS arm of the game. While hero/avatar units can be brought into the conflict by constructing an ‘Altar of Life’, that’s a fair way up the tech tree so conventional units take the limelight. With a choice of three major factions – evil catered for by the Pact or Clan and the Realm for good – the player engages in resource collection, base building and opponent crushing. There are three collectible resources in the game (silver, stone and lenya) and only silver is needed for you to pump out the early units. Depending on how you like your strategy, this can be a blessing or a curse, sacrificing complexity for faster pace. There’s a decent swag of units to wreak havoc with; everything from Paladins to Necromancers making an appearance depending on your faction choice. If you manage to stay alive long enough, you’ll be able to construct faction specific Titan units – great hulking monstrosities capable of dealing out death and destruction on a grand scale. Unfortunately, the enemy AI knows exactly where you build your base on each and every map, so the fantasy equivalent of tank rushing (Sorceress rushing?) is the only viable tactic to keep yourself competitive.

It’d be nice to dumb down the difficulty setting a little for those first few virgin rounds, but despite an options menu difficulty setting there appears no way to actually change it. Even after downloading the 166MB retail patch, using the difficulty option still eludes us.

For the most part the sides are balanced well and fun to play but there are still hiccups. If you choose ‘Clan’ faction, your first unit (the bowman) is as effective against early attacks as salt & vinegar chips are against thirst. The Realm also has in its arsenal perhaps the most curiously named hero unit ever – ‘Girl Scout’ – and she didn’t once try and sell us a box of cookies.

The last game mode available is ‘Free Game’ which allows you to play on the campaign maps with your hero but unencumbered by the plot driven arc of campaign mode. This is the most freeform mode to play in with plenty of questing and monster killing to be had, and you can level your character offline in preparation for online play. Unfortunately as in campaign mode there’s just not enough to hook you in and make it seem worthwhile to push through the map.

Despite being uber tough, once your avatar is left to fight solo bad things happen.

There’s a distinct impression that for all its attempts to weld various genre mechanics together, at best Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars is a mildly fun RTS game with a lot of extra fluff tacked on.

If you’re up for a pretty game with some fun zerging moments (and you couldn’t care less about story or real character development), then Spellforce 2: Shadow wars will prove fun for a little while. But really – you’d be better off finding one of a number of more polished fantasy RTS or RPG games out there if you’ve got the urge to hurl icebolts or raze cities to the ground.