An intriguing idea that's less than the sum of its parts.
As far as genre-blending titles go, you should be hard-pressed to find such an ambitious and attractive BattleForge. EA's new game combines social and competitive aspects of online multiplayer games with the flexibility and occupation of collectible card games and packages them in a gorgeous real-time strategy experience that is chock full of wyrms, were wolves and witches. And although the concept is undeniably exciting, BattleForge suffer the fate of many titles that are trying to blend oil popular genres in that the individual elements are not strong enough to stand on their own and the synergy between those who are missing.
The story of the game are the same problems. Players are flush Word, immortal inhabitants of a floating fortress called Forge. This is probably the staging site for all your adventures in the game, and it is also the central hub where you interact with players and test your tires. There is something happening on the world below you and you and your fellow Flush Word will have to intervene to ... yes, I am not really sure why you anticipate, and that is the problem of history.
The actual story is only one piece during the loading screens before your mission. Although I know there is a curse of some sort, a collection Twilight, and although I have helped a man named Rogan and a giant named Jorn (fighting sometimes, but still seems to be on the same page you are ), I'm not really aware of what is happening. It is a pity, because the snippets you get before each mission contains some interesting elements, but the story seems completely random to the action.
After a short tutorial introduces you to the basics of the game, you will find yourself in the practice area of the Forge. Here you can test your basic starting deck against a variety of enemy types. But the most important thing to do here at the start is to click the tab for the online store and spend your points to get some additional booster packs. If you use all your points here, you will have around 150 cards you can use to create your own unique deck.
Each card is linked to one of four elements - Fire, Frost, Nature and Shadow - and the individual aspects represent a general tactical strength. Rating, for example, has plenty of healing spells with some crowd control abilities while Shadow focuses more on sacrificing its own units to deal lots of damage to the enemy. There are lots of fun trying to find out which cards work well together. You can combine a Healing Gardens shrine, which promotes the regeneration power of your creatures with a regenerative magic like regrowth and regenerating creatures like Werebeasts. Throw in a couple of Shaman who can heal your damaged units and you've made your low Werebeasts unable to cope with much stronger opponents.
To play every card in the missions, you need two things. First you need to manage a mana tower and associate it with the aspect of the card you want to play. Each successive ORB you capture requires a greater power costs, but gives you access to your stronger cards. The remaining revenue is power. You gain power by taking control of special towers scattered across the map and it feeds slowly into a pool, you'll need playing cards and maintains more towers and orbs. To play a card, you must have a sufficient amount of orbs and then using the power costs.
As you complete missions in PVE and beat opponents in PVP arenas, you will gain access to special upgrades that you can use for your card. Some may give a slight boost to a certain effect, while others simply beef up the card's core abilities. You can even use your duplicate cards to increase the number of times you can use an ability or call a creature before having to wait for it to recharge. The upgrading system is fun, but the rewards are random, so it is likely that you have plenty of upgrade options for the cards you never use.
One of the disappointments here is that there is little appeal in the deck is built around more than one aspect. While some other card game invites players to combine the powers of various aspects of their tires, BattleForge seems to be designed around more focused deck. It is true that the continuous casting some cards require a specific color ORB and then further orbs of any type, but the lower units are not attractive enough to encourage players to share their orbs between two powers. While you may be tempted to combine damage dealing power with four defensive strength Frost, divide your focus does not seem to offer many direct rewards.
The biggest disappointment in connection with the short system is the terrible auction system. Since there is no advantage to have multiples of a card in a deck, it is worth considering to sell off the cards that you do not need upgrades later. Puts them on sale, is easy enough, but browsing maps, track your bids and even collect money from your sales is tiring and awkward. For one thing, you have to manually collect money from each sale you have completed (not that there is no other option), and the system did not even tell you what card is that you just sold. Furthermore, there is no way to sort your cards by duplicate or rarity. The game did not even tell you how to tell which cards are rare and are not. Fortunately, players can turn BattleForge Wiki for information on the game should have given.
The last point in design is the controversial relationship between your cash and your ownership of these digital maps. EA's decided to use an in-game currency to buy these boosters and that the fund can only be increased through auctions and trade with your existing card or via cash injections. It is true that you get well over a hundred cards at just $ 50 to buy the retail version of the game, but if you want to add to your options, you pay through a series of microtransactions. And given the random distribution of cards in each booster, it may take a while before you find the card you want. Of course, it's hard for me to talk about the overall balance, because I can only judge based on the maps I have in my collection, but this system seems designed to balance problems with PVP. Players who are willing to dump a lot of extra money into the game will find themselves with many more strategic options than other players have. BattleForge multiplayer has a clear focus, while the few single player missions offered in the game must be played in the online world. The basic interface and overall presentation to find games and tinkering with your tire is flat. There are a couple of tabs at the top of the screen so you can access all the tools and information you need. It is true that the chat windows is a bit cramped, but they get the job done. (For some reason, there are a lot of German players on the server so that cooperation during missions and product distribution in between are not always easy.)
Once you clear a deck, you'll want to open up the world map to see what tasks are available. There are about fifty missions in the game, and there is a very clear system here, which shows you how each task will take place, how many players it takes and how many open groups that are looking for players. The path to the missions themselves are scripted, but you generally have a few routes open to you at the same time, so you will not find you even turn your head against a wall because you're on a mission. Even after you complete a mission, go back through it again at a higher difficulty to get better rewards.
Once you've had enough experience under your belt, you can even participate in the massive 12-player cooperative activities struggles, there is plenty of fun on the rare occasions that your allies are not leaving in the first five minutes of the game. The coolest aspect of the 12-player games is that they are divided into three four-player maps. Each map will have its own unique goals that can actually affect the difficultly of the other cards. And when you do not know how your allies on the other two cards do, it creates a wonderful sense of expectation when you are waiting to see if they're going to close down some enemy gate, or send you some reinforcements.
There is also a PVP area, where you can go to test your deck, head to head against other players. The matching system here seems pretty fast, but we are not sure how the game can rank players based on their win ratings without regard to what types of maps and upgrades they have in their deck. In any event, PVP offers the opportunity to upgrade rewards that can not be achieved during solo or cooperative missions.
Unfortunately, the communication system is not great. Talks dealt with in a small window that has spammed by lots of other match updates, so you might miss an important message from your allies, particularly if there is a colorful and explosive battle on. There are some flags you can escape to the other players' attention and the strategies needed to win has never been so complex that you need more than that.
The RTS missions are fun enough, but they tend to get repetitive, despite the different goals. Whether you take out several targets, escorting Treasure ships or break the siege, the overall strategy never varies. Make your starting force, grab some orbs and towers, build a larger force, grab multiple orbs and towers, build your super units and then just throw them against the enemy until you win. There are a few time-bound targets that make you sweat a little more, but they just challenge you to go through the same steps faster.
Without any real formations and no rules of engagement, what BattleForge boils down to ultimately a giant whirl where all your units are crammed together and attack whatever target you need to destroy. This is especially ridiculous in the four player missions, where all players have built a lot of their biggest and best units and are all clumped around or whatever giant fell God is what they are supposed to kill. (It is even more confusing, the designers have opted for blue, green, light blue and light green color as the player.) I realize that the interaction or synergy between the units can be as important as their tactical formations, but the game does not offer any individual unit stats interval, so you can see which parts of your army is out of balance.
The good news on the RTS front is that the creatures and spells are incredibly varied and imaginative, both in terms of their general competence and their physical presence on the battlefield. You can turn promotes an army of harmless pigs or rain down a massive, screen-burning meteor storm. You can order frost resistant bitten cavalry to trample the enemy units while giants pound enemy fortresses with their bare hands. The range of units and abilities are simply spectacular.
What is even more impressive is that the engine handles it all with elegant ease. Sure there are some frequent freezes here and there, but at least they seemed to be due to latency. When the data started flowing again, the engine would play out the action nicely. The magic effects are vivid and the animation is convincing at all levels in this game.
The sounds are doing a good job of supporting the effort, but is not likely to stand out on their own. The music is appropriately warlike and adds a small measure of excitement, while the sound effects help to bring a bit of realism and power struggles. The few bits of dialogue in the game helping to tell the story in the loading screens, but not doing much else.
Concluding remarks
BattleForge acts as a very good idea and in reality it contains many seeds of greatness in it. The visual style of the world and the huge variety of creatures and powers are clearly the strengths here. But to see these games in action will give you an inflated sense of fun you can get here. The embassies themselves repeating the same formula over and over again, which severely undercuts the point of having such variety and flexibility of the card system. When you add in the auction interface awkward and the extra money needed to collect the cards you really want, it makes it so much harder to see the value in the few things that BattleForge get right.
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