I cannot recall the experience of first playing Elemental: War of Magic, spare that it
was arrayed amidst the ruins of my life in Oregon. A bunch of crazy shit had gone down in my
world in July of 2010, enough crazy shit for a decade, and I was eager to lose
myself and most of my free time to a game.
I was also trying to apply for graduate school for the second time, so I
was welcoming of distractions that would keep me from doing that. My entire world was in the midst of a chaotic
shift, a freefall of sorts where I essentially began leaping into various
ill-conceived relationships and picked up serious drinking again while giving
up exercise for the umpteenth time. Elemental: War of Magic arrived at a
perfect time for a 4X game: a time when it could’ve distracted me and made my
life a brighter, happier place by sucking me into its quaint, delightful world.
It did not.
With a mess of an interface, a tech tree that even a mother
couldn’t love, a rough, unpleasant tutorial and a non-functioning diplomacy
system that bubbled with promise just under the surface, Elemental was another disappointment, a more penetrable version of Gal Civ 2 that lacked the polish or
poise of Stardock’s more venerable 4X title.
With RPG elements, an economy that allowed for both gradual and
instantaneous construction based on two separate resources and a creative quest
system that promised to integrate seamlessly with an empire building game, it
should’ve been a slam dunk. Even its
more conceptually demanding magic systems were attractive.
But instead the game was something of a mess. With a tutorial system that barely worked, a
totally unfinished single player campaign and an artificial intelligence that
consistently lost the easiest fights in the game, Elemental was a spectacular disappointment. The skirmish mode of the game was even
unfun. It made the concept of a sandbox
style of play into a horrifying, disorganized mess where you would wait to see
how the game would break and whether or not it would break in your favor.
On Monday of this week, Fallen
Enchantress, the “actual release of Elemental:
War of Magic,” premiered. I didn’t
know it was coming, personally, but I found out when Brad Wardell sent me an
email telling me I had a free copy of the game waiting for me on Stardock’s
website (alive and well, despite Gamestop’s purchase of Impulse) and apologizing
profusely for the mess that was Elemental.
It was a nice surprise.
On Monday I also woke up to the start of hurricane
Sandy. Most of my readers already know I
currently live in New York, but it’s difficult to actually illustrate the
surreal havoc that Sandy wrought on this city without being here, and it’s
impossible to understand the fear and isolation that gripped many New Yorkers
as the storm began descending. I discovered, day by day, that I would have time
off from school and work and that I was now free to do…whatever I wanted, after
checking in with my students to be sure they knew that the school would be
closed and their assignments postponed.
I woke up to an ideal situation for playing Fallen Enchantress, a game that could
have very easily disappointed me just as hard as Elemental did, leaving me stranded in a world of perpetual twilight
and isolation as I waited for the storm to pass. It did none of these things.
Aside from a somewhat anemic tutorial, designed for players
unfamiliar with the rudiments of Stardock’s intensely nuanced games (the group
who would benefit most from a tutorial) there isn’t a single dull part of Fallen Enchantress. I say this as I play through a single player
campaign mode (renamed scenario mode, I presume so that modders can do their
thing with it without apparently infringing upon the dense history Stardock has
imbued the game’s flavor text with) which I am less than an hour and a half in,
but unless the core play differs significantly from the rest of the game it’s
difficult to imagine the game growing less enjoyable.
Every single activity in Fallen
Enchantress, from selecting a building to moving a unit to deciding which
unit to construct, is fraught with importance.
For instance, before training a unit you might notice that, aside from
the meager selection of units presented to you, there’s a “design unit”
tab. And if you click on this tab you’ll
see that layers upon layers of unit options lay within the “design unit”
tab. Some of them make units easier or
faster to produce. Other make them
hardier but considerably more expensive.
All of them can be tweaked and customized to an unreasonable extent in
order to craft the most specialized (or not) unit possible to fit the mission
role you want it to attempt. Will you
make a fast moving, hard hitting skirmisher in light armor who can rapidly
strike the enemy and then fall back? A
group of heavily armored archers who can bombard enemies from a distance
without worry of being damaged? Massive
squads of expensive myrmidons who can crush enemy formations and allow your heroes
to rush in without fear of death to mop up the carnage? Or dozens of tiny, weak squads that overwhelm
enemies with sheer numbers, soaking up resources and doling out bits of damage
before finally succumbing to their wounds.
All of these choices, all of these branching and opposing
decisions, come during the design phase of unit production. Before you choose which unit to produce,
when. And the menu involved in this
process is every bit as intuitive and well designed as every other menu in Fallen Enchantress, with exception to
the Spells menu, which is woefully obtuse given how important global spells
seem to be to playing the game at a macro level. There’s a tremendous amount of nuance, all of
which is rendered in plain language and mathematics. It’s unusual, but wonderful to see. There are some truly remarkable twists as
well, such as special items that wipe out half the world’s populace, including
the player’s population, massive dragons that can be recruited at the end of
long campaigns which, in and of themselves, can devastate entire armies. Swords that drive the wielder mad and make him
into a killing machine capable of scything through an entire enemy force… Fallen
Enchantress blends old school RPG and hard core macro-management 4X game
magnificently into a flawed masterpiece of sorts.
Maybe masterpiece is a little bit superlative, but in light
of the recent slough of new releases, including two chest thumping hurrah
patriotism FPSes that have as much to say about the reality of war as Saving Private Ryan does, Fallen Enchantress is doing something
big. It’s doing something important, and
it’s doing something that threatens to fall through the cracks in light of a
massive push towards holiday revenue generators by large publishers who are
turning out samey blah games that, frankly, you shouldn’t feel the need to buy.
You’re given an opportunity to buy a new NBA or Madden game
every year, a new Call of Duty or Medal of Honor which is, at best, only
cosmetically different from its predecessor (though often not even that). You’re rarely given a chance to experience a
new fusion of gameplays that attempt to capture the magic of uncovering and
rebuilding a fantasy kingdom in a world gone mad. It’s rare that you’re given so much control
over the subtle machinations of troop formations, armament and training. It’s particularly rare that you’re permitted
to assemble a cadre of heroes, mount them on wolves and send them off to win
the allegiance of dragons so that you might undo the blight of your foes upon
the world.
Or just sit back and building a kingdom, collecting and
researching the technology needed to use magic to heal the blighted landscape
and restore peace to the world of Elemental. And then use that magic to fuel an economy
based on a combination of fantastic creatures, magical crystals, mundane metals
and shiny, shiny gold.
It is difficult to foresee the release of another game like Elemental: Fallen Enchantress. It’s the realization of a concept initially
posited a year ago, a concept that took a tremendous amount of time and effort
to bring to light, and it’s actually returning on the promises it made. This is Civilization
meets Lord of the Rings. This is the Gold Box Dungeons and Dragons meets Mule.
If you like RPGs, if you like 4X games, if you like high
fantasy at all, play Fallen Enchantress.
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