PC
Published by Stardock Entertainment
Developed by Stardock Entertainment
It's been a long time since we've had a
quality high-fantasy 4X strategy title. In fact, some would argue that
the last memorable game in this sub-genre is a game called Master of
Magic which was released back in 1994. Experienced 4X strategy game
developer Stardock Entertainment have tried their hand at such a game
before with a title called Elemental: War of Magic but
unfortunately the end result was slightly disappointing. Not to be
deterred however, Stardock have given it another go with Fallen
Enchantress and the result this time around is much more
satisfactory.
In Fallen Enchantress you'll play as a
Sovereign. These Sovereigns are fighting for control of their world.
There are not just rival factions to battle against however. The world
itself is full of creatures that are quite capable of crushing your
forces. You'll develop cities, just as you would in games such as Sid
Meier's Civilization, although there is less emphasis here on
attempting to create as many cities as you possibly can. Cities are
important however and you'll develop them in order to provide you with
the necessary research, funds and resources needed to give you armies
that are powerful enough to help you attain victory. As you'd expect
from a 4X strategy title, there are various routes to victory. By far
the most obvious route is conquest but there are other options such as
diplomacy and completing epic quests.
In Fallen Enchantress, in addition to taking
a tutorial, you can opt to start a New Game or jump into the Scenarios
mode. The New Game mode is where you're going to spend most of your time
with the game and it allows you to pick one of the factions to control,
choose one of six pre-configured maps (or randomly generate a map if you
prefer) and select from a range of variables including choosing victory
conditions, difficulty level, resource levels and so forth. What makes
this mode so satisfying is that all of the factions play very
differently from each other and aren't simply slightly variations of
each other. The Scenarios mode offers a different experience in that
there's more focus on the storyline and less emphasis on building up an
infrastructure for your faction. You are put into the shoes of Lord
Relias and your mission is simply to find the lost Temple of Odenvell
but there's much to be done before you'll get there and things go a
little pear shaped once you do. Suffice to say that finding it is only
the beginning of the story and your problems.
4X strategy games usually begin at a
leisurely pace with the complexity gradually increasing as the game
progresses. To use chess parlance, in the mid and end game there's
typically much more to consider. Fallen Enchantress does things a
little differently. The key difference here is that the opening phase of
the game can be quite difficult. You can be confronted by enemies who
can give you a good hiding if you're not careful. This means that you'll
need to be cautious when engaging in combat during the early stages of a
game. The Champions you recruit also have a good chance of being
defeated in battle early on and in the process they will acquire
injuries that will almost certainly hamper their future development and
fighting prowess. In some respects this could be seen as punitive but in
actual fact I found that it caused me to be much more alert in the early
stages of a game than in other 4X titles. It also forces you to not
simply attack every enemy you encounter.
Prior to the commencement of a battle you're
given a breakdown of how your forces compare to those of the enemy so
you can rescind your battle orders if you feel your opponents are going
to overpower you. That said, the breakdown you're given doesn't always
make you fully aware of the nature of the enemies you're up against.
Some opponents can appear to be rather weak but still have a sting in
the tail meaning you're not going to walk away from the battle without
any casualties.
It’s a minor disappointment that the battles
are pretty standard affairs. If you have decided to control the battle
yourself you're taken to a battle screen and here you'll take it in
turns moving units (the order is determined by each unit's initiative).
Getting in powerful ranged attacks from distance is certainly the way to
go although this isn't always an option. Hand-to-hand combat can be
brutal so it's something you'll only want to engage in if you're
confident that you can overcome your foes. The game doesn't appear to
take terrain and elevation into consideration which is a pity and you'll
see spells and projectiles fly straight through objects such as rocks,
trees and stones which seems a little bizarre. However, for all of the
problems the battles are fairly enjoyable and the AI does a good job of
handling the combat should you choose to auto-resolve a battle. You can
even hand over control to the AI during the course of a battle if you
wish.
Some aspects of the game will feel familiar
to you if you're used to such games as Sid Meier's Civilization.
You could argue that the various enemies that you'll find in the game
world are comparable to the barbarians you'd find in a Civ game
but as I've already mentioned they can actually be much more brutal than
that. Notable locations are essentially the same things as the Goodie
Huts you find in the Civ games and in fact in the game's built-in
encyclopaedia they are referred to as Goodie Huts. You'll also need to
conduct research and attempt to make your faction more technologically
advanced. There are three technology trees in the game for civilisation,
warfare and magic. There's also a similar focus on the scramble for
valuable resources here too although this can be a little more difficult
than in the Civ games, particularly in the more punishing early
part of the game.
Fallen Enchantress is
also an RPG too and one of the key differences between it and other 4X
games are the quests that you'll find scattered around the game world
(indicated by the use of scroll icons). I found the quests really added
to the experience and helped to give some added purpose to the map
exploration, incidentally the game comes with a collection of maps and a
random map generator. Completing quests allows you to find useful items
that can be equipped to your Sovereign or Champions. Not all of the
quests feel like they tie in with the game's storyline but that's not
really much of a problem. Speaking of which, the game tells the story of
the aftermath of a cataclysm in the world of Elemental. The fallout of
the cataclysm left a collection of factions that have designs on
establishing dominion over the world. The factions, and indeed even the
Champions you'll encounter in the game, are aligned with either the
Kingdoms of Men or the Empires of the Fallen. On a basic level, those
who are aligned with either the Kingdoms or the Empire are sworn enemies
of the other but differences do run deeper than that. The storyline on
the whole is decent and mostly good enough for a game of this nature
although, as I'll point out later in the review, it's not as accessible
as it could have been. You could argue that some of the quest dialogue
isn't so hot but nevertheless I felt that it was good enough so as not
to detract from the experience.
On a basic level all of your units will gain
experience from a victorious battle and level-up making them more
powerful and more capable of tackling stronger enemies. Sovereigns and
Champions can be equipped with various items such as robes, armour,
weapons, scrolls, potions and weapons. They will also acquire their own
collection of spells and skills during the course of the game. On
levelling-up, Champions and Sovereigns will also gain traits and you'll
get to choose which trait they attain allowing you a further degree of
customisation. You can also choose a particular path for your Sovereign
or Champion to follow during their development. While standard unit
types can be lost in battle, Champions and Sovereigns are simply knocked
unconscious and will need time to recover after the battle. Whilst
Sovereigns aren't penalised for being defeated, apart from not earning
any experience from the battle, defeated Champions will acquire injuries
that will hamper their fighting prowess as the game progresses. There
are items which can remove some of these 'permanent' injuries however.
It should also be noted that if your Sovereign falls in battle and you
don't have control over a city, it will be game over.
Sovereigns, Champions and trained units and
not the only things in the game that will level-up. Your cities too will
acquire levels when certain population targets are met. On reaching
level two you'll have a choice to make. You must choose one of three
specialisation paths for your city: they can become either a conclave,
fortress or town. The conclave is a city which specialises in research,
magic and other studious pursuits. You'll have a boosted research output
when nothing is being built and you'll gain access to structures that
earn you extra research, influence and mana when your city attains
higher levels. As you'd expect, fortresses are preferable for
militaristic aims. They essentially allow your city to specialise in
defence and military might and are useful if you intend to wage war on
your opponents. They will help you to create stronger military units and
these will be at a cheaper cost. Finally there's the town. Towns are
cities which focus on infrastructure and their economy. Town
improvements can enlarge your borders and boost resource supplies. The
improvements a town offers can improve the health of your faction as a
whole rather than just the individual city so you'll want to make sure
you have a few of them if you want to truly develop your faction.
One of Stardock's real strengths is their
ability to give the user the power to customise and there are plenty of
customisation options in Fallen Enchantress. On starting a new
game you have the option of choosing one of the available Sovereigns,
each of whom have their own faction to control. Should you not like the
look of these Sovereigns you can create your own, male or female, and
align them to the faction of your choice. The factions all play
differently and all have their advantages and disadvantages so you'll
want to choose wisely when deciding which faction to align with. If
that's not enough customisation for you, you can go the whole hog and
create your own faction too. You'll have the ability to choose the
faction's race, strengths and weaknesses, appearance, ideology and even
write their story to fully set the background for them.
The customisation options don't end their
however. You have the ability to design your own custom units in-game
and even post them to Facebook if you’re so inclined. The game also
comes with a collection of tools that allow you to create custom
content. The Builder's Forge allows you to design tiles which can be
linked to Goodie Huts, Improvements and Resources. The Cartographer's
Table is a powerful editor that allows you to create your own maps with
minimal effort. The Particle Cauldron allows you to design spells and
their visual effects. Finally, as we've already mentioned, there's a
Faction Creator which gives you full control over creating your very own
faction. The real beauty of these tools will be seen over time of course
but at least the potential is there for quality user-made content to
appear over the coming months and give added value to the game.
Graphically Fallen Enchantress is no
slouch although it's not quite as impressive as some games in the genre.
The look of the game certainly has its plus points however. I had no
problems at all with the interface and it all felt natural which is
actually impressive for a 4X game as they are usually more complex in
nature than other strategy games. The colourful look of the game world
and its characters felt appropriate and it was pleasing to see the frame
rate hold up well even on the larger maps. If you zoom out far enough
the game will switch to a cloth map view which essentially gives you
both a more basic and clearer view of the game world. In this view your
forces and enemies are represented as table-top miniatures and cities,
resources and other important information is viewed as a drawing on the
cloth map. I really appreciated this view when I wanted a clearer view
of things and I really like that you can set the zoom level at which the
graphics switch to the cloth map view. In fact you can play just from
this view if you prefer.
Whilst I have enjoyed, and indeed am
continuing to enjoy Fallen Enchantress, the game isn't as
accessible as it could have been. The main problem is that the game's
cut scenes are not subtitled. Neither the opening movie nor, more
disappointingly, the cut scenes that are shown between the chapters in
the game's Scenarios mode are subtitled. The main problem with the
absence of subtitles is that you're missing out on some of the storyline
which is unfortunate and it detracts a little from the Scenarios mode.
The game does come with a tutorial and this tutorial does make use of
videos to help you get to grips with the game's concepts. None of these
videos are subtitled. There are two important points to make here
however. First of all the tutorial is actually pretty lacklustre and can
easily be skipped without any real problems. Secondly the game comes
with its own built-in encyclopaedia called the Hiergamenon which
includes text information for each of the game's concepts and reading
this is much more useful than playing through the game's tutorial. There
are some videos to be found in the Hiergamenon and these aren't
subtitled but at least you have text information for each of them which
helps to compensate for this.
For the most part Fallen Enchantress is a game that's easy to recommend to fans of 4X strategy games. For a 4X game the opening phase can seem more challenging than usual but this is compensated for by entertaining mid and end game phases that don't ever get too bogged down like some other games in the genre. The role playing elements have been implemented surprisingly well and serve to make an even more addictive experience than it would otherwise be. The customisation creator tools that have been included with the game should guarantee a healthy supply of user-generated content too which will only help to add longevity to the game. Stardock Entertainment already has a superb 4X series on its hands with the Galactic Civilization series and Fallen Enchantress shows enough to suggest they may have another one, particularly if future games can build on everything that's impressive about this one.
