Battleforge

7/10


Battleforge is an RTS that uses a card mechanic (like Magic: The Gathering) instead of base building to create units and spells.

Battleforge gets awesome points for:

* Awesome graphics, everything looks fluid and amazing. Explosions have ripple effects that distort the air and the animation is excellent. Even the art surrounding the UI and the rest of the game is very well done.

* Awesome sound and music, things sound like they look - freezing things makes them creek and crack, and when they break they make a shattering noise. When you move a lot of units in a group, you hear the sound of armies marching. Overall, great job on the audio.

* Intelligent gameplay AI (gasp!). No seriously, things behave the way you'd expect them to, for example if you have 4 or 5 shamans (which heal other units) and you have 8 or 9 groups of other units, the shamans will heal the one with the least life first, not just randomly.

Further, when you summon units near a control group you've set (remember starcraft? ctrl + 1 was group 1?) it will automatically add those units to that group, and even better, if it's not entirely clear which group you're dropping them in, it will prefer the group of similar units.

* Good resource management scheme. You suck money from "power crystals", and you need to control "monuments" (also called orbs) to summon more powerful stuff. After you spend your power, it goes into something called the "void", where it slowly drains back to you at a reduced amount, so you very rarely find yourself in an total economic death situation, only in a "I dont' have enough power right now" situation.

* Your main menu is something called "The Forge" whereby you can play any card in your library and summon enemies to test it against. You can play any card any number of times without restriction here, and it's really helpful. You can test card combinations without having to start a game. Want 4 collossus? Coming right up. Want to drop 1000 towers and run some bandit raiders through them? No problem.

* Battleforge has a really crazy campaign - basically the main story line has a bunch of different maps you can play that all take different players to do it. A bunch of maps have 4 player slots, 2 player slots, and some are single. You don't actually have to group to do all the maps, but I found one that I actually needed help with, and it made it easier.



Battleforge gets lame points for:

* Having an extremely trite and hard-to-believe story line. Yeah I know this is standard with computer games, but when you have a policy of one-upmanship on EVERY LEVEL it gets old really fast. If something is supposed to be some ancient amazing power, don't take a shit on it in the next level, come on now.

* Having a pretty rough learning curve, combined with a main menu interface that is unorthodox and confusing.

* Forcing you to purchase booster packs to get different cards. You can not earn them through achievements in the game. You can trade for them though, and the prices are pretty cheap. You have to buy "battleforge points", which run about a penny a piece. An 8 card booster pack is 250 points, which comes out to $2.50. You can buy 2,250 points for $20, so you get a little break if you spend that much.

* Not having a "save" option. Yeah, you can't save your game, wtf?

* Having really frustrating lose conditions on some of the campaign maps. (This probably ties into the above gripe)

* Needs more cards. I heard expansion packs are planned, but I'd like to see things go in the direction that M:tG did in reference to fuck-with-the-rules kind of cards. Currently there are probably 40? 50? of each color.






All in all, Battleforge is pretty sweet. It's obvious that it spent a lot of time in production, this is not a "squeeze one out on the toilet" kinda game. Not everything is for sale either, you can upgrade your cards (For example, more HP for your archers) by playing the game and completing maps. You get a random upgrade when you finish a map, and you can not trade them or purchase them directly. It's nice to know that something is still sacred in the game.

If you like RTSs, and you don't like having to manage base buildings and resources, Battleforge is for you. Battleforge is probably what CO is to NS, if NS were Civ 4.

Battleforge is also free to play. You start with the standard cards that everyone has, and you can get in and actually *play* the game unhindered. You don't have all the neat fancy cards that everyone else does, but you could technically play through the whole game without buying a single point.