An engaging mix between strategy, tactics, role playing and empire management

Oct 26, 2012 11:59 GMT  ·  By

Fallen Enchantress is a turn-based strategy game from Stardock, the company that also published Sins of a Solar Empire and developed Galactic Civilizations, and the main aim of the release is to wash away the bad feelings created by the launch of Elemental: War of Magic, the first game set in this universe.

Elemental arrived in 2010 and it was an ambitious project that failed to connect its many core mechanics in significant ways.

After a few hours of Fallen Enchantress, I must say that the complexity of Elemental is still present and might keep some players away.

But my overall feeling is that the development team, which includes Fall from Heaven creator Derek Paxton, has created a better experience that manages to combine complex city development with tactical battles, which have depth and an interesting universe filled with subversions of usual fantasy tropes.

Gamers start by designing their own hero or choosing from pre-existing ones before starting either a story-based set of scenarios or by creating their own sandbox, where they are able to create their own stories.

Elemental: Fallen Enchantress involves managing the growth of an empire, including the development of cities and trade routes, but also getting down and dirty by fighting both monsters and other organized empires in tactical battles.

There’s also research to manage, heroes to equip and progress and spells to cast, both during battles and in the strategic layer.

Fallen Enchantress is a deep experience and it takes time to learn both the concepts around which it is built and the quirks of the game world that Stardock has created.

The only problem so far is that Fallen Enchantress has stopped working two times after I ended a turn by moving a character, with no way of recovering other than quitting the game and reloading.

Worth a full Softpedia review? Yes.