I like Fallen Enchantress. It's the closest anyone has come to producing the game I've been dreaming about since I was an adolescent with visions of wizards carving fantastical empires out of a hostile world. But as much as I feel like I should be head-over-heels in love with it, my 50-plus hours with the game leave me satisfied rather than ecstatic. Maybe some enterprising modder will use the included tools to expand on the base game's good parts while mitigating its issues and add a little soul to the mix. I'll gladly dump another 50 hours into Fallen Enchantress on that blessed day.
after i played this game for +150 hours i can safely say that it's worth my ****'s a very addicting game and deep ****'s hard to please the 4x crowd but for me this game is a 10.customizable factions+customizable units+customizable leaders+deep strategy=9000+ Awesomeness
What A fun game, I cant stop playing. The start of the game is the most fun, i find my self starting over and over. Lots of quest and great build for Hero's. A lot of people keep trashing the graphics but i think the game looks great and plays great. The MOD making is fun also. A must have if you are not some D-bag who wants the game to be some BS super game. Oh and Civ games are good but there not that good.
Fallen Enchantress engenders a feeling of real accomplishment, without requiring the investment in time and study demanded by truly hardcore strategy titles.
Fallen Enchantress improves on the first Elemental game by leaps and bounds, but still fails to enchant. Heroes and armies are fun to play with, but the mediocre empire building lacks that something which really would hook you in. [Dec 2012]
I like a game that tries to combine several different gameplay styles, but the overall experience seems rushed and unpolished. It offers plenty of content and skills, yet doesn't seem to excel at any particular one. Elemental: Fallen Enchantress does a lot of things right but never truly delivers on any of them.
From my view point as a an 28 yeal old 4x, mostly Civ-like and HoMM series games this game "fills the gap" that I didn`t even knew existed in my heart and mind. If you are like myself this type of a player that like to have impact on almost every aspect of the game (while not so overwhelming like in Master of Orion3) which is made inteligently you`re going to love this game from first play. Where?
The game presents to us a very damaged world filled with ancient creatures, hordes of bandits or similar bloodthirsty ruffians roaming the land. A world with deep history with connections and old grudges betwenn nations. Civilizations are one step from oblivion and the only person which can lead your men and women to the safe harbor is You!
How?
The options! Game designers presented to us a very big arsenal of customization to the civilization we pick to lead. Picking default soveregins or making your own is just a first sign of options the games presents to the patient gamer. The more you sink into the game, to more you try to understand and master the more you realize how good product have been given into your hands. I will just say, the way developers made the whole city managment, army customization, magic and economical system in my eyes is worth of a Nobel prize in game designing! Marvelous!
To sum up, for fantasy lovers with a taste for world domination this game is a must have!!!!
This game intended to "fix" what they did wrong in the original Elemental: War of Magic, but in my opinion turns out to be a little less fun. Not saying that it isn't a fun game in its own right, but they removed my favorite 'elements' of the old game and dumbed it down a little but forgot to do anything to add to the overall 'fun'.
If you like turn-based/4X games, you should give Fallen Enchantress a try, because it has a lot of promising pieces to it, but don't expect a great game, or you'll be disappointed. And, I recommend waiting till you can get it on sale. If you really like it after you buy it, you can give **** more money by buying the map packs. That said, great 4X games come along once in a long while (Total War: Shogun 2 is an excellent example, while in my opinion, Civilization V is not). Unfortunately, Fallen Enchantress is not one of them. **** does some fun things with this recent addition to the 4X/turn-based strategy/RPG genre (such as being set in a fantasy world with armies of wandering monsters and challenging quest areas), but it lacks in enough fundamental areas that I just wasn't excited while playing it. **COMPOSITE SCORE: 6.875/10**
**ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: 7/10**
Fallen Enchantress has enough good pieces to interest a player in spending a couple hundred hours if you give it a chance. It has the standard explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate aspects of games like the Total War series and the Civilization series, but it actually allows you to join in combat between armies which Civ does not (Total War does). Being challenged by behemoth monsters early in the game if you expand too much is a fun twist as well. However, there are a number of weak aspects to the game too. Winning diplomatically seems far too easy to me. Unit movement is very short: two spaces without roads until you get horses... and that will take a long time for a full army. Army sizes feel miniscule at the beginning, and champions always feel underpowered.
**GRAPHICS: 6/10**
I will admit that I am probably spoiled by Shogun 2's setup, attention to detail, variety in armies, and graphics, so when I loaded up my first game in Fallen Enchantress, I was immediately disappointed by what I considered to be PS2-era character models and textures. The reason for this is that **** used the very same model for both the campaign map as well as close-up shots of characters and army units. Many other games will use models with varying numbers of polygons depending on how far out the "camera" is from the model, but they don't here, so we're stuck with the low resolution models and textures. Bleh. The strategic map was similar in detail to Civ V's, and the combat maps were about the same as well. Compared to Shogun 2's combat maps, Fallen Enchantress's lacked a lot of detail and options. I do like the dragon models though.
**SOUND: 9/10**
I had no problems with Fallen Enchantress's sound. What voice acting there was was quite reasonable, and the music was very good.
**DESIGN AND GAMEPLAY: 6/10**
I've already mentioned the standard 4X-setup. That works pretty well as long as you disable some options (such as allowing the game to go to the next turn without you telling it too... lost a lot of building/research turns till I found that option). And again, the wandering monsters and quest areas added a level of challenge I hadn't seen in other 4X/Turn-based strategy games (especially if you turn up the monster frequency... whew). I noticed an AI scripting problem though: if you change the number of opponents you have to below the recommended number for that map size, the AIs will often do nothing until you encounter them. That could be 30 turns... or 200 turns. Encountering an opponent when they have 1 city and you have 9 makes it kind of boring. Also, I feel like there's a huge flaw in the army creation system: when you start out, you can make army units with three men in them. By the end game, you can create army units with seven men in them. But, you can't convert a unit you made at the beginning, leveled up, and outfitted with new gear into a a 7-man unit. They're always stuck at the size you created them at. It makes no sense to me and is frustrating to deal with while playing. (Reason being, your early armies max out at 27 men. Late game armies max out at 63 men. So, why can't I just pay more resources to upgrade to 7 men????) Lastly, although there are a lot of combat spells available, I never used any, because frankly, an army with one champion buffing eight units of top-tier archers destroys anything, so why bother with wimpy spells?
**GAME LENGTH: 8/10**
Much to my surprise, Fallen Enchantress did have an actual campaign (they call it a scenario). I had originally thought it was just a Civ V style of game with only the conquest maps. The scenario's story is pretty good. Loss, tragedy, redemption, more tragedy... all good stuff. Unfortunately, it's only about six hours long. But, the regular maps can take a very, very, very long time. So, plenty of game length all around.
This is a slimmed down version of Heroes of Might and Magic combined with a slimmed down version of Civilisation. This idea is good but unfortunately it isn't good enough. The heroes part is a feeble caricature of the original (for example a high initiative can be to your disadvantage because there is no wait function; the character development doesn't quite work either), and the Civ part feels a little cartoony it is like playing Elder Scrolls and then switching to Torchlight. There are some clunky mechanics too, for example if your army travels through a city you have to take each member out individually in a complex click and slide action. Sometimes you click on a destination and before you can stop them, your troops have left the road and taken a vastly longer route, wasting 2-3 turns. The story game is particularly very weak. Feels like it was written by a GCSE student over a weekend. On top of that the scenario creator would crash the game consistently on certain settings. On the plus side, the menus are clear and you can work out how the Civ mechanics work more easily than in the original.
FE improves on the hideous, buggy mess that was the original Elemental, but it's still a hodge-podge of disassociated systems that don't quite blend together well. The graphics leave something to be desired and it's still not entirely stable, though it's not unplayable and it does a decent job at trying to fulfill the normal 4X TBS checklist. But with fantasy 4X TBS games like Warlock: Master of the Arcane available for a much lower price (and the far-superior non-fantasy Civ V available for the same price), it doesn't fill much of a niche in the gaming market today.
SummaryIn Fallen Enchantress players will be able to explore the world of Elemental and discover a wide range of unique locations, including dangerous wild lands that can't be settled until they are conquered.