Songs of Conquest

Overall, I liked the game. You can clearly feel the influence of classic turn-based strategy games, but Songs of Conquest also has some interesting ideas of its own. The developers put much more emphasis on the hero — or the Wielder, as they're called here — than on developing your main town. I especially liked the addition of many smaller settlements and a special building for recruiting units from other towns without having to drag everything across the entire map from your main city. The battlefield, with its obstacles and elevation, gives you plenty of room for tactical play. Magic is also handled in an interesting way, although unfortunately without much sense of epic power. No matter how strong my Wielder became, I never reached the point where I could wipe out a large part of an enemy army with one or two destructive spells. On the other hand, magic here is much more practical and tactical, which fits the general design of the game and pushes you toward the style of play the developers clearly intended. So overall, I'd count that as a positive as well. Another big plus is being able to cast more than one spell per turn. The AI, however, leaves a lot to be desired. Bots below Worthy difficulty are basically no competition at all, even for a new player, and are generally very weak when it comes to strategy. Tactically, though, they perform surprisingly well in actual battles. Quick Battle is also pretty questionable. I have no idea what logic it uses to calculate casualties, but sometimes the results make absolutely no sense. The huge number of community-made maps is great, as is the built-in editor that lets people create their own maps and scenarios. The game also has an established community and multiplayer, where simultaneous turns for players operating in different parts of the map are implemented quite well. It cuts down waiting time considerably, which is obviously a huge plus. The campaigns, however, deserve a separate mention. In my opinion, the story campaign should be the face of the game for a new player. It should introduce the mechanics, gradually let you discover every faction and understand how each one is meant to be played, while also giving you an enjoyable story. Unfortunately, the campaigns in Songs of Conquest fail badly at this. The only campaign I would call reasonably good is the third one, for the Rana faction. It works mostly because the story is extremely basic and straightforward, and that's exactly why it succeeds. It has atmosphere, and the frog characters actually have some personality. The rest of the campaigns are very hard to defend. All four campaigns are tied into one larger story revolving around this world's version of necromancers. Considering how promising the setup for their campaign was, I expected something along the lines of Shadow of Death from HoMM III, or Arthas' Scourge campaign from Warcraft III — something with epic scale and drama you would expect from that setup. Unfortunately, despite a genuinely decent and promising setup, the Swedish developers completely dropped the ball. The story has very little depth, it is full of holes, the characters’ motivations are vague and flat, and the scale of the events is laughably small. The dialogue deserves special mention as well. It honestly feels like the writers leaned very heavily on AI, because the sheer amount of pointless back-and-forth is sometimes astonishing. Instead of an epic, large-scale conflict, we got three hobos fighting over a silver ashtray across couple of nearby villages and a swamp, until a bunch of angry frogs came along and kicked them out. And somehow, in all this mess, those frogs are the one genuinely bright spot. After this level of half-assed writing, I have absolutely no desire to buy DLC just to get new factions.