Sample article: A Battleforge review. It's longer than the typical article would be; in fact, it's a mighty 2700+ words, whereas a normal article could happily be anything upwards of 4-500 words. Still, tell me what you think.Video Games: Forged in the Fires of Battle
-Adam
And lo, a long time ago, the Lord said unto them, Let there be StarCraft, and it was famous, and a host of Korean uberplayers did gather.
And lo, a less long time ago, the Lord said unto them, Let there be Dawn of War, and it was greatly visceral, and there was much rejoicing.
And lo, a pretty short time ago, the Lord said unto them, Let there be Dawn of War II, and it was shiny, and there was much repetition.
And lo, just now, the Lord said unto them, Let there be Battleforge, and it was HEAVY METAL AWESOME IN GRATUITOUS ALL-CAPS.Battleforge is a new fantasy RTS, published by everyone's favourite corporate overlords EA, designed by relatively unknown developer Phenomic, also responsible for the Settlers and SpellForce games. And do you know what? It will blow your pathetic mind. Forget base-building, villagers, lengthy tech trees, dodgy race balancing, and each faction maybe having one or two gigantic tier-four toys if you're lucky. Battleforge is different, and what a glorious difference this is.
I've heard Battleforge described as an MMOCCRTSG. That's massively-multiplayer-online, collectible-card, real-time-strategy, -game. Despite being a nine-letter acronym, it sums the game up nicely, although the traditional MMO staple of grinding is entirely optional. BF's most obvious unique selling point is the card bit; it is in fact loosely based upon a prototype CCG built some time ago by the lead designer, Volker Wertich. This time, though, the cards are entirely virtual. You buy them using in-game currency, or trade them with other players with the game's lobby/marketplace system. They exist only on your online account, and each one adds another kind of unit, building or spell to your formidable arsenal.
You can get a basic version of Battleforge for free, and that's partly why I'm reviewing it for your delectation. The free version of Battleforge comes with 32 cards - eight of each colour, more on that in a moment - whereas the £23 retail version comes with 64 starter cards and 3000 BFP, or 'BattleForge Points', one of the two in-game currencies. (The other currency is gold, which isn't related to real money and is nominally used for upgrading cards.) The nice thing is that the starter cards aren't actually particularly bad. The free version is slightly limited in that you can't trade, send mail, etc, until you've played a certain amount of games, but that's to defeat the obvious exploit of making several accounts and transferring the cards. Ollie and I play Battleforge together often, and he only has the free cards plus some duplicated commons I've given him. I bought the box, and so have a lot more options, but we're still pretty well matched in most circumstances.
Cards from the original set (unfortunately named Twilight) come in four colours, known as elements: Fire (red), Frost (icy blue), Nature (green) and Shadow (a fetching shade of dark purple). These elements form a loose equivalent to four factions, but the nice thing is that you're actually allowed to mix them freely. The cards you have access to in each game are determined by the deck you're using. Decks are built in the menu system, and each one consists of 20 cards. *Any* 20 cards.
This is facilitated via Battleforge's extremely abstract tech tree. You progress through the four tiers (called eras in the game) by building Monuments at certain points on the map. Each monument bears an orb of one of the four colours; your first monument is automatically built for free, its orb matching the colour of the first card you summon. A card requires a certain amount of orbs to be played, not all of which have to be of a specific colour. Some of them are pretty restrictive, such as the Forest Elder, which requires four orbs, all green. Others are the complete opposite, such as the Giant Wyrm, which also requires four orbs, but only one of these must be a nature orb, allowing you to use it in a great variety of decks.
The expansion, Renegade, complicated things slightly. It added colourless Legendary cards, two-colour Bandit (red/purple) and Stonekin (blue/green) cards, and affinities, the latter being a cheap way to fill out a 200-card expansion by making two slightly different versions of everything in it. In practice, the affinities have significant differences in certain situations - a reworded special rule or a slightly different effect can change the card quite a lot - but, coupled with the reskinned 3D models of existing units that were used to make many Bandit and Stonekin cards, the Renegade set feels a little hashed-out compared to the rest of the game.
To demonstrate the colour system, I'll describe three of my decks that I'm currently fond of. One is pure Shadow. This may change in the future, but I have a couple of second-era cards which ask for two Shadow orbs that are too much fun to pass up, so it's likely that it'll stay Shadow for the opening of a game at least. Another is pure Fire, stacking up red orbs in order to gain access to the awesome Firedancer, Juggernaut and Spitfire cards at eras two and three. The third is a mix of Nature and Frost, based mostly around the elite low-era Nature troops and healing spells, adding in Frost cannon towers and freezing spells at the second era, and using the blue/green Stonekin cards from the Renegade expansion (alongside green Fathom Lords and blue Tremors) for an extra injection of punch as I progress to the third. Ollie, on the other hand, often uses decks built of free and common cards running on one orb of each colour, and still kicks my ass half the time.
As well as monuments, Battleforge maps tend to be dotted with power wells and wall foundations. Walls can be built facing either direction, and are a solid, defensible obstacle to the enemy - this is good, as Battleforge player-vs-player maps tend to be very small and tight. Power wells are the obvious; instant-building resource generators. Power is spent to summon units, cast spells, build and repair structures, and so on. It's the game's only resource, and it's extremely intelligently used. Instead of just being mindlessly expended, power is recycled through a mechanic known as void power. 90% of the power it takes to cast a spell, or the cost of a unit once the unit has been destroyed, goes into what's called the 'void power pool'. This drains into your pool of usable power over time, minimising the long-term loss from a skirmish that went badly. Battleforge is actually full of excellent design touches like this, and as I was getting used to the game I found myself struck time and again by how the dev-team seemed to have completely nailed the game mechanics, down to the smallest detail.
There are no bases in this game. At all. You can certainly make a base if you want, perhaps by building lots of structures around a monument in a good, wall-protected position. When you select a unit's card for summoning, you click on the map anywhere near a ground unit (or structure, in most cases) of yours. That unit immediately appears, with a nicely-executed animation. No barracks, no recruitment time. If it's near a power well or monument, your new unit can then immediately get fighting; if not, its health and damage are halved for 15 seconds and its special abilities are disabled, which is called summoning sickness. Again, this cleverly sidesteps the problem of endless base rushes. The defender has a considerable advantage in most combat situations, so the attacker has to use clever tactics, the right choice of units, or overwhelming force in order to take a position. To stop this being a no-win situation for the attacker, and to make the summoning mechanic less of a problem than it would otherwise be, things seem to die very quickly in Battleforge.
Almost every unit in the game has some form of special ability (or several). Many units have abilities that can be activated by the player; some of these cost power, some don't. There are also lots of passive abilities that change how a unit plays. As well as this, each unit has a size (ranging from small to extra-large), and a damage type (one of the sizes, or 'special'). If a unit's damage type matches up to the size of the thing it's attacking, it gains a mighty 50% damage bonus. Boom! Instant rock-paper-scissors. Structures, which are the closest thing Battleforge has to bases, don't have sizes or damage types, but units with the Siege rule gain a 50% damage bonus against them, providing a convenient counter. Siege units usually have special-type damage, and vice versa. Outnumbered? Try dropping an offensive spell to disrupt and damage the enemy, or stop them moving or attacking temporarily.
As a unit's stats and abilities are all clearly shown on the card, you don't have to play for ages to 'get a feel for' the units or spend ages memorising perused lists on the internet; you can simply pick the units most appropriate to counter your opponent with a quick look through your deck, and it's surprising how fast the stats sink into your brain anyway. Cards can be upgraded, enhancing their stats, adding more abilities and allowing you to fuse duplicates into them, increasing the amount of units you can summon with the card before it starts counting a cooldown timer in between each use.
By now you should have gotten a rough idea of what it's like to play this game. Fast, brutal, and high-adrenalin. It's also very tactical. Between the extremely explicitly-stated rock paper scissors system, the nigh unlimited combinations of units at your disposal, and the added 'random factor' of spells, the game actually encourages you to micromanage your way to victory by laying out all the options and techniques right in front of you. Clever combinations of cards can produce extremely dominating setups. Most people who look at the Stone of Torment, a tower which causes damage to every friendly and enemy unit near it and occasionally teleports bad guys back to itself, will at some point think of the trick of stacking four or more of them around a monument and laughing at the enemy's futile attempts to get anywhere near them. Ollie took this a step further in one game and surrounded the central monument with them, effectively sealing me in one half of the map as there weren't any other ways through, and used a tunnel network to transport his forces from one side of the mass of Stones to the other, avoiding their harmful effects.
On top of all this, the game looks wonderful. It's pretty demanding on your system - my laptop runs it on just-above-lowest settings in Windows XP with a dual core 2GHz processor and an ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 graphics card. Performance in Vista's a little slower, but that's probably because the X1300 doesn't support DirectX 10. Despite this, it still has plenty of visual appeal. Everything is vibrantly coloured, including the strikingly-sculpted environments. The modellers decided (correctly) that they could get away with making the small, insignificant infantry at low detail levels provided they put plenty of lovin' into the large and extra-large creatures. This means that your system won't slow down if you have 120 infantry on the screen any more than it would if you had 12 giant monsters. The animations are superb, although the return to 'at rest' between each attack is sometimes painfully obvious, especially with ranged units, who usually can't simultaneously move and fire and tend to stand there doing nothing for a second or two in between each shot. The summoning animations are unique for most units, particularly from the Twilight set, which indicates impressive effort. Battleforge makes no pretences at realism, although it does have large amounts of actually pretty well-written background. Idle animations are often irreverent or amusing (the Ashbone Pyro does football volleys with its head), and the voices likewise ("Pointed sticks!" "It's just a... flesh... wound..." "I need a vacation!").
And now, the most important bit: balance. Considering that you can make armies out of almost anything, Battleforge's game balance is very tight, and works extremely well overall. Unit spam, a staple of most RTSs, is for once not a problem - your opponent can just build lots of units whose attack type happens to be your spammed unit's size and/or whose damage type happens to differ from your attack, and any amount of infantry can be sent sprawling on their backsides with one Lava Field spell. Overpowered units do exist, but counters exist for all of them. More problematically, certain spells or combinations of spells can make a skirmish unwinnable for one of the players involved. Another negative is that the starter set cards aren't that numerous, and when playing for free, you may find yourself without options or effective counters in certain situations. It's notable that as long as you have a versatile-enough deck, there's almost nothing your opponent can do in terms of unit choices that can trump you completely, although conversely a major (dis)advantage in PvP tends to turn the game entirely. Being stuck in 2nd era while your opponent is in 3rd era (or worse, 4th) and pressing the attack often makes a counterattack impossible.
I could go on about the menu system, but I've expostulated long enough. Suffice it to say that the menus work, although they lack a couple of useful features (such as the ability to use gold in direct-trades), and having a thing where you can summon stuff (and subsequently make said 'stuff' fight) as a menu background is a jolly good idea. So, to wrap the game up, and add a couple more things that didn't crop up in the main review:
Pros- Tactical, in an approachable and intelligent way.
- Expertly-crafted gameplay.
- Lots of really awesome things (usually XL units).
- Can be played for absolutely nowt.
- Tons of fun.
- Vibrant and vivid graphics.
- Lots of replay value. Enormously variable armies, high-octane PvP play, and imaginative and varied PvE missions for one, two, four or even twelve players.
- Soulshatter. 3rd era Shadow spell. Imagine being nuked, except the bomb is a giant skull and anything in the blast radius that dies explodes, which can trigger chain reactions, etc...
Cons- Quite demanding on your hardware, more so than you'd usually want from an RTS.
- Download can be enormous (this has recently been rectified, but it's still pretty hefty).
- Getting more cards costs money, unless you have generous friends. Saying that, the boxed version costs half as much as a normal game, and will give you a solid amount of cards. Open a free-to-play account first, though, because not all of the free cards are actually in the boxed set and you'll have some handy duplicates once you put in your CD key.
- Trading is a real slog. Spending two hours trying to sell card X isn't particularly fun.
- Starter set cards aren't that numerous, and you may find yourself without options or effective counters in certain situations (any deck other than a mostly-Shadow one tends to get screwed over somewhat by extra-large units). Starter-vs-starter should be fine, however.
- Registering an account and setting up the game is a pain in the arse.
- You can't play it offline - problematic if you, like me, have a 512kbps connection through a router that isn't always on.
Overall
Get it. Whether you like RTSs or not, I can't recommend Battleforge enough.
Getting hold of Battleforge: Just go to
www.battleforge.com/en/home/landingpage.bfg, click Play Now, download an 89MB game file, then sit and watch as what you thought was a nice little installer suddenly starts downloading another three and a half gigabytes of content to your hard drive. Overall, the game eats up about 10GB of space, although a recently-implemented feature allows you to cut down both this and the initial download size massively by not downloading the high-resolution textures. Definitely worth doing if you aren't going to run the game on high settings.
