An RTS that's "fryhtaning" for all the wrong reasons.
Five years ago, Brian Reynolds arrived on the real-time strategy scene and broke the rules with Rise of Nations, a deep but manageable game that put the S in RTS. But five years before that, when Reynolds was just getting warmed up on turn-based strategy games, a fellow named Trevor Chan was already breaking those rules and putting that S into RTS. Chan's Seven Kingdoms series did things you just didn't do in real time strategy: diplomacy, espionage, hiring neutral units from the map, mixing fantasy with history, and the sort of depth you weren't supposed to do in real time. Unfortunately, the games had the dubious honor of being "cult hits," meaning they didn't sell well enough to spawn imitators. It would be another five years of Command & Conquer and Warcraft clones until Reynolds showed up.
So here we are now with a new Seven Kingdoms. The first red flag is that Trevor Chan's name nowhere to be seen. The second red flag is that you're going to have a hard time getting it to run. The third red flag is the lack of helpful documentation. The fourth red flag is that it looks awful. The fifth red flag is that it's hard to tell what's going on. And on and on it goes, red flags piling up relentlessly until there's no denying that you've got a real stinker on your hands.
On a certain level, reboot wasn't necessarily a bad idea. As a design, Seven Kingdoms: Conquest is promising. Someone in Enlight's China studio knows the genre, and there are some clever concepts here. The peon-less economy is based on a simple but strategic resource system based on cities, which are also used to control the map and customize your faction. There's a bit of Rise of Nations in how each city allows a certain number of buildings, which in turn determines your economy, which units you can build, and how many units you can build.
The size and composition of your army depends on expanding out onto the map by either capturing or "buying" new sites, and then developing them. Villages can support a few limited structures, but they can be upgraded to cities, which support more and different types of structures. Humans can build units from other cultures by capturing their villages. Your army causes a constant drain on your food supply (or blood supply, for demons), so bigger armies will need more farms (or blood totems), which will take up more valuable building slots.
The dynamics vary a bit between humans and demons, and each has several sub-factions. There's a variety of units, and many of them have special abilities you can purchase with "reputation" or "fear", which is each race's global pool of experience points. Furthermore, different units have different special abilities that can be researched. Each faction has powerful hero and god units, which can buff your armies and give you even more powerful spells. When it comes to armies, Seven Kingdoms: Conquest is varied and generous.
But no such luck here. The first and biggest problems are technical. This is a primitive 3D engine with fancy effects slathered on top of dated graphics. Do these blocky polygonal units really benefit from HDR lighting? Is bloom going to do any good with a palette this muted and artwork this uninspired? Seven Kingdoms: Conquest has the look of a five-year-old game dug out of the attic and repainted in the hopes that you'll mistake it for something new. The sound is also horrible, featuring screams and clangs you've heard elsewhere, presumably drawn from some cheap sound library.
But even more damning is the game's instability and utter lack of QA. On three completely different computers, I was unable to get it running until I dialed the graphics way down, turning an ugly game even uglier. Somewhere in all the settings are some seriously broken features that cause black screens, permanently opened windows, hard locks, and rampant graphical corruption. Given the variety of hardware and drivers I tried, the problem seems to go much deeper than some isolated hardware incompatibility.
Even if these problems were fixed, the interface falls far short of what this level of complexity needs. To the game's credit, there's ample information available about each unit, and you can even right click on the "train unit" button to find out more info about the unit before you actually spend money on it. But for the most part, this is an awful interface. There are hotkeys that don't work, clicks that don't take, and pathing AI that falls apart, making messy unit management even messier. There are no formations, which is a dire problem with larger armies. Features like customizable hotkeys for unit powers are all but useless when there's no easy way to specify which unit is going to use its power.
Closing Comments
This is an even worse game than Empire Earth 3 for the simple fact that the design shows promise, but it's utterly undermined by the horrible execution. With a better interface, a stable engine, and better pacing, this could have been a decent RTS, particularly for multiplayer. To the developer's credit, it didn't waste its time on a turgid storyline (see also Sins of a Solar Empire), and it knew enough to borrow from better games.
But for whatever reason, the execution completely falls apart. Even with the latest patch (v1.04), it's still an inexcusable mess. In its current state, Enlight should be ashamed for releasing it and Dreamcatcher should be ashamed for publishing it. You're better off taking almost any RTS at random from the last 10 years than you are playing Seven Kingdoms: Conquest. The only good to come from this soupy half-baked mess is that maybe it'll pique your curiosity to see how one of the original Seven Kingdoms holds up. Hmmm, I wonder if I still have those disks in a closet somewhere....
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