The structure serves it well, not only because it’s tried and tested and, for the most part, replicated here competently, but because it also creates the type of scale that can support a strategy layer. It would still be missing something, however. There’s enough crammed inside the 30+ hour adventure that it could be just an RPG without feeling like half a game. And hybrid though it may be, SpellForce 3 is first and foremost an RPG, complete with shiny loot and customisable character classes. It’s familiar, then, but it’s also a proven solid foundation for an RPG. There’s even an ancient stronghold that can be turned into a base of operations. Tahar, child of the mad fella on the losing side of the aforementioned Mage War and the game’s protagonist, is a reluctant hero who finds themself gallivanting all over the world, forging alliances, recruiting an army and trying to stop a magical threat that’s poised to make the world a deeply unpleasant place.
Plenty of comparisons to the BioWare formula in general could be made, but with Inquisition, the similarities are especially strong. I don’t have particularly clear memories of the last SpellForce, which I haven’t played since 2006, so when I felt a twinge of familiarity upon starting my adventure through Eo, a land beset by magical plagues and still reeling from the Mage War - you know, typical fantasy problems - it was not because of the previous game, but rather, unexpectedly, Dragon Age: Inquisition. Considered individually, neither layer is going to set the world on fire, but SpellForce 3 is the poster child for being more than the sum of its parts.
You’ve got your jolly old fantasy adventures, pilfering dungeons and beating up hardworking goblins, and then you’ve got outposts to build, trees to chop down and troops to train. SpellForce 3 might sound like the name of a magically-inclined superhero team - and it absolutely should be - but it’s actually a chimera, a beast created by smashing together an isometric RPG and an RTS.
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