Left Behind: Eternal Forces

Where Eternal Forces does a great job is in the loads of biographies for what would normally be throwaway units. Granted, some of the bio information is strangely comical, but you end up caring about each character under your command. Sadly, there are far too many other characters that might be seen by some as astonishing stereotypes.

Unfortunately, the inconsistent behavior of your recruits means you'll spend more time fighting the interface than the Antichrist.

An RTS with a couple of interesting variations. It is written in a religious setting, but is not preachy nor does it condone violence against the heathens. If anything, it discourages violence and intolerance. The game was just too complicated for me to enjoy. But, to be fair, I am an Old Fart and the game was written for the young, gamers crowd.

It’s overtones about religion and beliefs are something that some may be wary of and those people more than likely wouldn’t want to touch the game with a ten foot pole. Those that can look past that though, would have a pretty good time with the game despite its few flaws in gameplay.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces oscillates between the boring and the aggravating and is far from ever being a rapturous experience.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces just doesn't play very well. As exciting and even (for at lot of folks, at least) uplifting as some of the content could be, it just doesn't move quickly enough or play smoothly enough to compete with the other, more gameplay focused titles in the admittedly more worldly marketplace.

As representations of the End Times go, this one's about as scary as a Sunday school play (and not as well written).

The real problem is the bland graphics, micromanagement, and repetitive gameplay. Good RTS games know that and tend to create missions you can complete in a variety of ways. Not so here.

A waste of time. The gameplay is terrible and I saw better graphics on video games two years ago. I can’t understand all the uproar this game caused because the game in itself is not worth bothering with.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces misses on all cylinders. The game needs a serious tune-up on nearly every level.

The moral of the story is, if you're looking for a half-decent real-time strategy game, skip Left Behind. [Feb. 2007, p.66]

Smug, poorly made, and incredibly frustrating to play, they managed the fearfully but not the wonderfully made. [Apr 2007, p.86]

Nobody has enough faith to endure a game with such a hokey story, terrible mission design, serious problems with the interface and graphics, and loads of crippling bugs.

Avoid this title like the plague. Not only are you sparing yourself the discomfort of ham-fisted preaching and shoddy game mechanics, you’ll also be doing your part to ensure that this obscene mess of eschatological flotsam and apocryphal jetsam never sees a sequel.

On top of resources that can't act independently and controls that damn you for mistakes that aren't your fault, the game resets most of your progress between missions—giving you no incentive to pray the extra mile.

On top of it all, the game crashes so often it seems like a sign. Every load and option change is a risk that results in equal occurrences of the following: a complete crash, stuck on locked screen or more playtime of a terribly boring and frustrating game.

If you play games at all, you'll instantly see this game for the unbalanced, unfair and unattractive mess that it is. [May 2007, p.77]

It's hard to imagine for whom this game was made. It's certainly not for gamers. And it's even more certainly not for nongamers, who are going to be entirely confounded. [Feb. 2007, p.68]