Zach Goodier
Fallen Enchantress is a PC strategy empire builder RPG that
puts the play in control of a faction.
You must then settle your initial city, building outposts and trying to
control resources on the map in order to secure yourself while conducting
research, training troops, and sending your heroes on quests to acquire items
and gain experience to level up. These
heroes can also be used to lead your armies or form adventure parties to clear
the map of hostile creatures or rival empires.
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| I do love the pride in building a successful civilization. |
Gameplay is turn-based, with a map view that contains all of
your empire/unit management interfaces.
There are local maps that appear when armies engage in combat, with
initiative determining what units move in what turn. This further adds some RPG elements to the
game, and heroes can become very dangerous when they level up. While playing, I enjoyed taking on larger
armies, and still winning just because I had a hero or two mixed in, which
really made a difference in combat that the calculator won’t give you in the
estimates or auto-resolve, so fighting your own battles can be very rewarding
if done right.
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| Customizing your heroes with looted gear has a very strong, yet traditional RPG feel to it. |
The story is fairly flimsy, with each leader (which you can
make on your own, if the presets don’t appeal to you) taking command of a race,
and then seeking to become dominant in whatever area you wish, whether you
research, trade, or conquer (I prefer the last one). You can set up the win conditions as you see
fit when you start a game, if you only want to play one type of campaign. Maps include presets or randomly-generated
maps, each with different regions with various characteristics and native
monsters, whether they include bears, giant spiders, or various, much more
lethal foes. You can even take control
of certain beasts if you are lucky/resourceful enough, which adds a new element
of strategy when approaching enemies, and can really tip the scales if done
right. This game is about the struggle
to dominate, and you are more or less free to choose the means.
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| Battles will start out small, but grow into big encounters as the stakes are raised. |
While the foundation of this game feels solid, neither the
graphics nor the gameplay feels all as polished as it could have been. Character customization is nice when making a
leader, but it lacks the depth and variation that the option implies. You have some variety, but not much. You can select gear and such for training
units to truly make the armies feel your own, but they also lack the variety
and depth beyond simple upgrades. It
would have been neat to see more options geared towards unit specialization and
the like. You can find and recruit
randomly spawning heroes, and they do add some neat mechanics towards army
management and questing, but they never feel like more than just a different
type of unit, aside from the ability to gain traits as they level.
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| Maps aren't really all that huge for a game of this genre, but random generation keeps the replay value somewhat high if you enjoy the game. |
Overall, this is a game that entertains, but doesn’t really
impress. I found myself coming back, but
not because the game itself was that impressive, just because I didn’t have
anything else I felt like doing at the time.
So in that sense, it does a decent job of helping keep you entertained,
but it certainly lacks the depth and polish that you find in other strategy
games, and it doesn’t delve as deep into role-playing as other RPG games. It ends up feeling like an interesting attempt
to meld the two, which might have been more successful with more time and
polish, as well as some variety and originality in how both the strategy and
RPG elements were implemented in this game.
Fallen Enchantress is an
interesting game at first glance, but starts to lose its sense of intrigue and
wonder as you delve further into its world.
Good:
-Nice combination of Strategy and RPG elements, melding
empire management and strategy with questing.
-Randomly-generated maps make replay value relatively high.
Bad:
-Attempts at variety are shallow in both character and unit
customization.
-Doesn’t really do much with the strategy/RPG combo to
really make it feel at home in this game.
Scully Rating: 7.5 out of 10
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