>>15934824
Spellforce 3 is mediocre. The writing is described as dark which means there is a lot of rape, and it is actually plot important, actual spoilers: the main character is a rape baby, and the plague that kicks off the main story is his mom using magic to try to find and talk to him since she is sealed away. Your opinion on that may vary, and they did the usual bullshit of adding black people to a european setting. The gameplay has some good points, but it is again another attempt to reinvent what Spellforce 1 did rather than look at what it did right and try to do it better. In fact, I'd say it is somewhere in the middle between 1 and 2 for what you do with your heroes, and the RTS aspect is very different. They also included the Bioware-ish home base where you have the majority of your party member interactions, except that is a massive issue for a couple of reasons. I don't think I can fairly judge the RTS aspect given that I did my best to cheese that aspect of the game rather than play fair.
There are quite a few technical issues with the game, or just decisions that I outright disagree with. Combat is mostly fine except they had the brilliant idea of having a lot overhangs and bridges. If, for whatever reason, you get into combat under an overpass or bridge, you will curse them because spells and abilities will go to the top most area, which may mean you wasting precious time and mana on a wasted spell that could have won you a fight. The Orc areas are the worst for this, but it happens in quite a few other areas as well. Loading takes a long time, which is one of the reasons the base area is such a terrible idea. The main base is split between three different maps, and you want to keep up on those quests because the highest level spells/abilities for characters are very nice; so you are going back somewhat frequently to keep up on those quests and you will be seeing those loading screens a lot. They also tried to do a mid road approach to how death works between SF1 and SF2, so a character dying completely can be recovered up to a point depending on how many of a certain item you have. Once you lose those, and don't save the character in time, you end up losing the mission the second someone dies. Nice idea, but it still means that your heroes need to move as a party at all times just so that they don't get overwhelmed and killed.
As much of a slog Spellforce 1 is, I'd still recommend that over 3. It is far clunkier, but dealing with that is more rewarding due to all the bullshit you can pull off.