Played in co-op mode with up to three players, SpellForce 3 can even feel a bit like a traditional RPG, although unfortunately, only the host gets a persistent save. By keeping the RPG and RTS systems uncomplicated, SpellForce 3 ensures that they can both live on the battlefield at once without ever becoming too much to handle. The RTS sequences require base building and gathering resources, but they're spread fairly far apart and the laborers and caravans usually do their work without outside management. Simplicity is the key, as seen in the way it bundles all abilities for your four-person party into a simple action wheel that pops up when you hold Alt over an enemy. SpellForce, though, has been doing this kind of thing since 2003, and never before has the mix worked so well. Most skirt the issue by barely involving the protagonists in the larger conflict at all, letting the battles unfold in flashy cutscenes or even in text descriptions in loading screens.
These metronomic shifts between the big picture of a wider war and small moments within it are rare in RPGs, no doubt in large part because of the problems they present for intuitive play. The familiarity blunts some of tale's emotional impact, but SpellForce 3 usually manages to make up for that with its richly detailed settings, some of which were made solely for brief sidequests. Its companion characters are merely likeable rather than memorable. It's a good story, too, if derivative to the point that finding Dragon Age and Witcher parallels starts feeling like finding Easter eggs. These metronomic shifts between the big picture of a wider war and small moments within it are rare in RPGs. It's a bit like Russell Crowe's Gladiator: sometimes you've got the world's best legions at your back, while at other times those legions are at your back because you're running from them, disgraced and falsely accused, in this case through a smelly sewer with a single other companion.
It's a tale of a constant and drastically changing fortunes, casting you as a reluctant outsider who can't escape the sins of his or her father or the prejudices of a world that treats magic with the same contempt we find in Dragon Age or Skyrim. Happily, the concept usually works because the well-written story gives believable reasons for it to play a bit like Pillars of Eternity sometimes but an RTS other times. The fate of the world depends on defeating an evil wizard? Screw the personal heroics, send in the reserves. SpellForce 3 presents a mishmash of small-party roleplaying games in the vein of Baldur's Gate and real-time strategy games in the style of Age of Empires, which initially made me wonder: If I can have an army at my back at any time, why wouldn't I use it? There's a band of trolls? By all means, send in the infantry.
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