Rating: 
Summary: Best Roleplay game 2003
Review: Love it. It is like reading and playing a fantasy book.
You can move into the play in a first person view and feel like in Dungeon Siege or Gothic 2.
You have a story like Baldurs Gate or Icewind Dale with a lot of carefully created characters. Not the crap like in DS.
You have Realtime Strategy like in W3 and AoM with hundreds of units battleing.
It is epic. You have a huge world consisting of lots of islands connected by portals. Even after finishing one island you can/sometimes must return to old islands and you may find out that the situation has changed.
Playing it for 1 week now and it feels better than all I have had in my hands the last 3 years...
Rating:
Summary: what a game...
Review: Perfect blend between strategy and role-playing. Visuals are simply stunning and the storyline is so immersive, that it will make you forget to eat, drink, sleep and anything else for 24/7, one week straight. That is, unless you don't start over again once you're through... Go, get it!
Rating:
Summary: spellforce is about 2 rock
Review: Spellforce is a mix of an roleplaying game and a realtime strategy game. so it is comparable with warcraft 3 but here the mix is more advanced.it features a detailed world, 6 different races, a new click'n'fight system, awesome graphics and multiplayer modes. the was honored to be the "best game" on the games convention in leipzig, germany. check the homepage...i own spellforce since some weeks and i can say its great!
initially i got some bugs which are fixed or will be fixed in short time. my rating:
check out that ur computer and graphicscard are not low-end, because otherwise u wont see the great graphics.
after that: BUY THE GAME!! tons of great entertainment awaits you.
Rating: 
Summary: Flawed, but otherwise great RPG/RTS
Review: Spellforce is one of those games that makes me really want to like it, and that would be truly awesome if but for a few very irritating problems. All in all, I must say that playing the game was a mixed experience- there were great moments, and there were times I felt like cracking the discs with a sledgehammer. Despite these, I would recommend the game for any RTS player that also has a taste for fantasy.
The game introduces some truly unique aspects to the old (in both time and overuse) RTS formula. You create a character- the avatar- that is your `hero' for the game. This unit is exceptionally powerful, levels up with experience, and can equip items. This might sound like Warcraft 3, but suffice to say that it holds much closer to the traditional fantasy RPG norms than that game (there's a paper doll, for one, and you get to pick skills at level-up). You find runes to summon worker units and unique heroes, which are basically weaker versions of your avatar. You can also find plans for buildings of any of six races. When you discover a monument of a particular race, you can then summon workers and build a base, which is what one would expect of a typical RTS. The main difference is that you can command armies of multiple races, if there are monuments available. There are also many quests in the single play campaign, which yield experience and items (some of which are very powerful) as well as providing some break from the typical `build up your army, kill everything on the map' deal. The world is somewhat persistent, though resources respawn when you return to an area.
Since I'd say the game was generally quite good, I'll start off with the positives:
First and most noticeable, the soundtrack is great and the opening cinematic fantastic. I wish there was more than one combat track, but otherwise this was one of the better game soundtracks I've seen- likewise for the introduction. The sound in general is well done. All dialogue is spoken and the voice acting is at least passable all around (and sometimes quite good).
The graphics are second to none. This is truly a beautiful game, and the locations are varied and breathtaking. Some of the larger cities in particular look great, especially from third person perspective. Units look great- especially the 'titan' unit each race can deploy once.
The single play campaign is generally well designed and executed. The quests are quite interesting, as is the main plot. The world is also well done, and side-quests are generally intuitive and don't require you to go too much out of your way. Replay value is decent, since you have many choices for customizing your avatar. You can choose to be a warrior, ranger, one of several types of mage, or healer. All are pretty fun and interesting to try out, and the unique equipment and spells are worth seeing in action. The campaign is also long, though not to the point of tedium.
The unit balance is generally good. To sum things up, the six races are as follows: Humans are good all-rounders, but not particularly strong in any area. Elves are excellent ranged fighters and great healers. Dwarves are peerless close combat warriors. Orcs have the best support units. Trolls have the strongest melee and ranged units, but all are very slow and expensive. Dark Elves have the best magic units. It is quite beneficial to mix and match, but the three `light' races will automatically attack the three `dark' ones, which adds another interesting aspect.
The developers did a good job in `making the show go on.' That is, your avatar can't permanently die and will respawn at the nearest bindstone. This makes it less necessary to reload frantically, provided you don't mind losing a bit of experience. Even if you get completely routed, you can pick up the pieces and play on. This is both realistic and fun.
The game is also quite challenging to master from a sheer gameplay perspective. There's many tactics and counter-tactics available, and none particularly stand out.
As I mentioned before, the game is not without flaws. Some of them are so bad that I almost didn't recommend this game.
Though the sound is generally good, I do have some complaints. When you zoom into third person mode on your avatar, the sound FX gets extremely loud. You can remedy this by turning it down, but then when you zoom out it gets too soft. This is annoying. There's also not enough unit voices- all the workers of each race have a voice, all the combat units have another, and your avatar and heroes have their own. That's it.
The controls are only partly what an experienced RTS player would expect. For example, units don't attack-move by default. To make them do that, you need to hold down ctrl while right clicking. This would be fine, provided you could rebind the hotkeys. However, you cannot.
Your avatar doesn't auto-attack, which is very annoying at times since it's almost always your most powerful unit. Getting them to attack buildings (which you want, since they can destroy them very fast) is a particularly major problem. Defensive tower fire can't be targeted, and the attack-move AI is generally insufficient. Only a certain number of units can cluster around a target, which is realistic but sometimes very annoying. You also can't control most summoned units. Once again, all of these would be just fine, provided you could somehow turn them off or on in options. However, you cannot.
Though the camera generally works well, the game really isn't manageable in third person perspective. You simply can't see things you need to click on. This is unfortunate, because a lot of detail is missed in the isometric bird's-eye view.
Experience is also something of a problem. To reach the higher levels you have to exploit monster spawn points (usually by spamming the area with towers and letting the game run unattended for hours). This is a bit tedious, but if you don't do it you simply won't have a very powerful avatar.
Multiplayer is also very lackluster compared to the campaign. There's no skirmish mode, and not much to do online.
The graphics, though spectacular, taxed my machine (which greatly exceeds the recommended specs) when large numbers of units were moving. Turning detail down didn't seem to do anything but make everything look ugly.
Whoever did the translation and text editing for the game ought to be fired. Enough said.
Last of all, there are very serious problems with the saving system. I'm not sure what it is with JoWood games and save crashing (I had similar problems with Gothic 2), but they apparently are unaware that the VERY WORST time to crash is during saving. That's the only time Spellforce ever crashed for me, and it did it more and more often as the campaign progressed. Furthermore, sometimes instead of saving a game, it deletes existing saves. It also arbitrarily saves corrupt data and still displays `game saved successfully' upon finishing. This is really bad, because the only other mechanism keeping you afloat in the long campaign is the autosave. This is only triggered when you exit the game, which probably isn't too often. I really hope they address this in a patch, because it's a showstopper issue.
Despite its flaws, Spellforce was a pretty decent play. Dealing with technical issues and the odd controls broke the flow of it somewhat, but it's forgivable for the great campaign, graphics, and the unique RTS features.
Rating:
Summary: Great RPG, good RTS, quality control stinks
Review: Spellforce is probably the best RTS/RPG combo ever, essentially combing Warcraft II (build a big base) with Heroes of Might and Magic (get a hero to go kill something). I'd give it 4 1/2 stars if I could, knocking the 1/2 off for fairly bad quality control, no real explanation of game mechanics, and a slightly annoying UI. Basically, you play an avatar going out to save the world. The character development is actually quite neat - you aren't limited to classes like wizard or fighter; rather, you get to pick up skill classes like heavy weapons or death magic. This allows some really interesting combos that vary the difficulty level dramatically - playing an archer/white mage specialist is not something I'd like to try. Like Warcraft, you go through about 20 or so maps in the single character version. To solve them, you're allowed to summon either units or heroes, with the heroes being classed into 6 skill sets (warrior, archer, etc). The mainquest is relatively straightforward, although it seems to me trying to solve the game without doing the subquests is near impossible. Still, one of the most compelling games I've been locked into for a while. I have 3 nitpicks. First, the quality control on this is atrocious - having a couple of subquests in German (the developers are in Germany) would be amusing, except that it took months upon months to get version 1.10 to even get several quests working. Yet, they still haven't fixed that. Second, even looking at the 'official guide' you still don't get much in the way of game mechanics, which is really disappointing given the uniqueness of the engine. Comparing heavy to light weapons damage, for instance, is impossible. Finally, its very difficult to control units at times; I found myself simply seperating heroes individually to even get close to reasonable combat (e.g. your mage doesn't go in to punch the bad guy, which the AI seems to like to do rather than zapping him.) Still, great game despite the teeth grinding. Looking forward to the expansion pack, which has already been announced.
Rating:
Summary: Great RPG, good RTS, quality control stinks
Review: Spellforce is probably the best RTS/RPG combo ever, essentially combing Warcraft II (build a big base) with Heroes of Might and Magic (get a hero to go kill something). I'd give it 4 1/2 stars if I could, knocking the 1/2 off for fairly bad quality control, no real explanation of game mechanics, and a slightly annoying UI. Basically, you play an avatar going out to save the world. The character development is actually quite neat - you aren't limited to classes like wizard or fighter; rather, you get to pick up skill classes like heavy weapons or death magic. This allows some really interesting combos that vary the difficulty level dramatically - playing an archer/white mage specialist is not something I'd like to try. Like Warcraft, you go through about 20 or so maps in the single character version. To solve them, you're allowed to summon either units or heroes, with the heroes being classed into 6 skill sets (warrior, archer, etc). The mainquest is relatively straightforward, although it seems to me trying to solve the game without doing the subquests is near impossible. Still, one of the most compelling games I've been locked into for a while. I have 3 nitpicks. First, the quality control on this is atrocious - having a couple of subquests in German (the developers are in Germany) would be amusing, except that it took months upon months to get version 1.10 to even get several quests working. Yet, they still haven't fixed that. Second, even looking at the 'official guide' you still don't get much in the way of game mechanics, which is really disappointing given the uniqueness of the engine. Comparing heavy to light weapons damage, for instance, is impossible. Finally, its very difficult to control units at times; I found myself simply seperating heroes individually to even get close to reasonable combat (e.g. your mage doesn't go in to punch the bad guy, which the AI seems to like to do rather than zapping him.) Still, great game despite the teeth grinding. Looking forward to the expansion pack, which has already been announced.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome
Review: The game is awesome I did not have a single problem installing the game on my computer. I have an Ati card myself. They game runs just fine.
Rating: 
Summary: fun game but a bit reptive
Review: the rpg part is a neat idea but if youve played a game like warcarft then youve played this i did like thee fact that you had you own hero but having to start in each land with nothing got on my nerves but its ease of actual play was nice not that the game is easy its not even on easy i had a rough time agaist the cpu a draw back is your rune heros dont level like you do but if you like warcaft and games of that sort this ames for you
Rating:
Summary: Excellent.
Review: This game is wonderful.
Richly developed and detailed, I appreciate all the effort that has gone into the interface, the gameplay and the quality of the logic behind it. It varies from hard to easy. But more than anything, I appreciate the fact that they've introduced a story that's interesting.
This game is wonderfully addictive and I can't help but agree with all the reviewers who state that this is easily the most innovative and interesting RPG/RTS game of the last year.
Rating: 
Summary: Warning!
Review: Warning, I bought this and although my system seemingly meets the minimum requirements on the box it wouldn't run on my computer. What they don't tell you is that it requires a nvidia card in order to work properly, or at least not a ATI card like I have. Their website offers no help except the discussion boards suggest they may issue a patch to fix this at the end of the year or the begining of next year! That's just TOO long to wait. Why didn't it say this on the box? If it had I wouldn't of bothered obviously. Add to this that it locked up my computer and even their latest patch didn't fix the compatability problem... So unless you have an nvidia card don't waste your money!
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