I bought this game called Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars last year for about $6. For a new copy. I played it for about ten minutes and then forgot about it. A year later, I picked it up again and decide to try another round. So far, I've been hooked.
The Spellforce series is developed by Phenomic, one of EA's German subsidiaries and the developer of the card-battle game BattleForge. It has party-based combat and questing, as in Baldur's Gate, along with loot-whoring, as in Diablo [although item variety seems a bit limited], and base-building and army-raising, as in Warcraft. Neither part is fleshed out as much as in the other games I mentioned, but somehow it all comes together to be more than the sum of its parts.
The game is played out over a series of huge maps that you can return to whenever you want to finish up quests that you missed or search for hidden treasure chests filled with loot. There are two skill trees that each characters can use [melee and magic] and each tree has various branches to allow you specialize your characters.
As I mentioned before, you can build bases and raise armies. There are three basic resources types that you use to recruit soldiers and build buildings. There are three basic units, but at least six or seven more advanced units that are unlocked as you progress farther into the game. Armies are mainly used to push your way into enemy territory and take out their bases. There are certain points where you units will disband and leave you to progress on your own.
Now the bad: The voice acting and writing are really bland. There's not too much of it, though, usually just a few lines here and there. The story's okay, I guess. Nothing really out of the ordinary for a low-profile fantasy RPG. The music, while decent, can be really repetitive in certain parts.
Anyway, it's a pretty good game and it's really cheap these days.
