Review by Avery Abernethy, 31 August 2014

This review is split into 2 parts. Part 1 was last weekend.

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Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes incorporates many role playing game (RPG) conventions seamlessly . The RPG side of the game has a profound impact on winning or losing. RPG elements include the ability to equip individual pieces of armor, individual weapons, individual miscellaneous magic items, and cast tactical and strategic spells from a spell book. Only the faction leader and champions have access to these RPG elements. The faction leader is the player’s initial champion at the start of the game. New champions are acquired when fame garnered by completing quests, winning battles and cleaning out monster lairs hits specific levels. Once fame reaches a certain level, another champion is made available. The total number of champions available to a faction during a game is quite limited. Even in a long game played on a large map, I had only eight champions at the end.

At the start, your faction leader is often your strongest single melee combat unit. Both offensive and defensive skills of your faction leader and champions can be increased with magic items, weapons, and armor. These can be purchased at a ruinous cost in towns, or can be gained as loot from conquered monster lairs. Armor, weapons, and miscellaneous items can be traded between champions – but only if they are in the same hex or in the same town. There is no “universal vault” which enables you to drop off a magic sword in city A and have your champion in city D immediately gain the weapon. This makes movement of your limited number of champion units an additional strategic component.

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Review by Avery Abernethy, 24 August 2014

This review is split into 2 parts.  Part 2 is here.

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Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes released by Stardock, is a turn-based 4x strategy game. In 4x games the player controls an empire and eXplores, eXpands, eXploits and eXterminates the opponent. 4x games were made famous with Sid Meier’s Civilization series and have been translated into space (Master of Orion) and fantasy (Master of Magic).

This review is based on 70+ hours of gameplay on a 3 year old Falcon Northwest computer. I completed two games to victory and played several other games short of completion, and I also lost a couple of games.

Fallen Enchantress takes elements of traditional 4x games, role-playing games (RPGs) and simplified tactical combat games to build a challenging world environment. All three game structures are combined to build on the strength of each design element, yielding a whole that is superior to the individual sum of the parts. I will start by discussing each major game element in turn, and conclude with a discussion of how the various game elements combine into a deep, addictive, and amazingly fun whole.

I love 4x games. I have been playing 4x computer games since the 1980s and have purchased and played almost every major 4x game ever released. And I was very impressed with the execution of Fallen Enchantress’ 4x elements.

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