Driverheaven: Spellforce - The order of dawn

SPELLFORCE - THE ORDER OF DAWN

Review: Allan "Zardon" Campbell

Spellforce an introduction ......

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. Continents shattered like glass, the pieces strewn about like leaves in the wind. Huge armies, bound by the the power of ancient runes, brought war and destruction to the lands that survived the initial onslaught. All that was left were a few islands, connected by magic portals.

Now, only a few years after the end of the Convocation, evil is back – stronger and more powerful than ever before – to finish what was started.

Yet there is still hope. The prophecies tell of a human. A human damned to immortality, bound forever by the power of the blood runes…

Soon, the time will come when the power of one may change the destiny of many. For better or for worse...

Summary of the most important features

Innovative game design: The unique mixture of RTS and RPG elements offers a brand new game experience.
High degree of identification with the hero-avatar, whose skills and strengths can be improved by the player
Click’n’Fight: This revolutionary control system guarantees instant action, the best possible overview and completely new tactical possibilities in battle
6 races – Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Dark Elves, Orcs and Trolls – that can be used simultaneously (!) to build settlements and fight battles
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.)
Persistant game world with continuous, gripping storyline and myriad sub-quests
Awe-inspiring 3D graphics with zoom levels from isometric to 1st-Person-views

System Requirements

Minimum

Intel Pentium ® III 1GHz
256 MB RAM
3D-Graphic card with 32 MB RAM (compatible with GeForce2 or better)
Windows® 98, ME, 2000, XP
DirectX®9.0a or higher
2 GB free fixed disk storage

Recommended

Intel Pentium® 4 1,8 GHz
512 MB RAM
3D-Graphic card with 64 MB RAM (compatible with GeForce4 Ti or better)
2 GB free fixed disk storage
Windows® 98, ME, 2000, XP
DirectX® 9.0a or higher

Created by German developer Phenomic and powered by the Jowood "KRASS" engine, Spellforce is by all intents and purposes quite a new approach on several genres, combining Real Time Strategy (RTS) and Role Playing.

Installation

The game comes on 2 CDs and installation is as simple and painless as it will get, thankfully install times are very quick on a modern day system comprising of a barton 2500 and 7200 rpm hard drive - taking little more than 2 or 3 minutes. There is also a read me with support offered on the offical spellforce forum along with links to the home site and online registration of the game. There is also the usual gamespy options after install if you wish to try your hand at online game playing. I really would like to stress at this early stage the incredible standard of artwork surrounding this game, from the box art, the installation and in game art to the wonderfully laid out home site. First class.

Video Options and performance
(click for large view)

In game video options are quite indepth and cover most bases to allow you to get acceptable game performance from the Krass engine. You have a wide variety of resolutions. Texture quality, light maps, shadows, environment mapping, decorative objects, flat shades and vsync. I can quite safely run this game at 1600x1200 with 4aa and 16 aniso and generally score in the region of 30-40 fps, I have to say though, that my system is pretty high powered with an overclocked barton @ 2300mhz 210fsb with OCZ DDR3500 at performance settings. graphics supplied by a Visiontek 9800 XT @ 450 core and 400 ram. Obviously those of you on lower system will probably find yourselves having to drop the resolution and eye candy settings both in the control panel and ingame options. Overall, the engine is very nice, and capable of some good details, especially if you crank the options to the top settings.

This game is on nvidias "meant to be played" list, so I installed it on my server system comprising an XP2200+ @ 2100mhz with a professional level Quadro FX 2000 running windows 2003. This card is quite happy in 3d mode at just under 500 core and 980 ram. Compared to the system above the game runs acceptable at 1280x1024 with full IQ, AA is too much of a performance hit. with frame rates at higher resolutions dipping into sub 10 areas.

The game played perfectly fine on both ATI and Nvidia cards, with the faster ATI card pumping out more FPS as would be expected, so even if the game has been optimised for nvidia hardware, I still found very high performance with my ATI system. No visual artifacts were seen during game play either, with crisp, clear textures and vibrant colours on both test systems.

Sound Options and performance
(click for large view)

I love the sound in this game, its quite Mike Oldfield in feeling, with some truly epic passages in game bringing a very tolkienish atmosphere to what is visually a very accomplished title. Bringing back memories of the nights I played Diablo many moons ago. The control panel for audio as you see is pretty basic but suffices. You can alter music, sound effects (SFX) and speech levels if you are finding the levels a little offbalance with your particular hardware.

With my Creative Audigy 2 and Creative intrique L3500s sound was very clear, well defined and all levels worked fine at defaults with the speech remaining perfectly clear above ambient noise and music passages. No problems here then.

Next: Building your character