Warlords Battlecry III
Enlight’s new Real Time Strategy game, WARLORDS BATTLECRY III (WB3), is a solid upgrade to their popular WARLORD series, and provides many great enhancements over the previous versions. This is a fine game that will provide many hours of game play, and will allow both serious gamers and the weekend warrior plenty of action and adventures to enjoy the hunt! The only downside to the game is the graphics (no zoom and older-style animation graphics), but the play-ability of the game and the “adventure campaigns” make this a good investment of your gaming dollar.
Background
In WB3, you create a HERO to run your army and then set upon skirmishes and campaigns, following a fairly complex storyline about the arrival of a powerful Demon that must be stopped and your efforts to track down the Demon while helping various kingdoms and locations as you move around the world. Your HERO will command your army – you can select units from previous battles, which are stored as “retinue units”, and these accumulate experience and levels just as does your HERO. Your HERO will move over the board and capture supplies and engage in battle with the rest of your army.
The best aspect of WB3 is the especially-wide variety of characters you can choose to be your HERO. There are SIXTEEN (16) races to choose from and TWENTY-EIGHT (28) occupations to choose! Your character is therefore highly unique and the game provides significant additional value by allowing the gamer to choose different HEROS and totally enjoy playing under different circumstances and challenges! We really liked the customization for the game and kudos go to the Enlight development team.
The sixteen races are: Knights; Empire; Undead; Dwarves; Barbarians; Minotaurs; Orcs; High Elves; Wood Elves; Dark Elves; Deamons; Dark Dwarves; Fey; Plaguelords; The Swarm; and Ssrathi. New to WB3 are the Ssrathi, Empire, Knights, Swarm, and Plague Lords.
The twenty-eight occupations are: alchemist, archmage, assassin, bard, deamonslayer, chieftain, deathknight, defiler, dragonslayer, druid, elementalist, ice mage, healer, illusionist, lichlord, merchant, necromancer, paladin, priest, pyromancer, ranger, runemaster, sage, shaman, summoner, thief, tinker, warrior.
You can easily see that the game is very robust, and the additions of these occupations and races provides some 448 different options for your HERO! As if that wasn’t enough, you can also customize the voice of your hero! Enlight was certainly up late at night thinking of creative and novel ways to improve the game and they certainly get a 10 of 10 for ingenuity.
We selected the Daemon – Pyromancer and off we went… the campaigns are very well constructed and support the overall storyline of a super Demon from the underworld that gets loose in our world. You can follow the Demon and as you move around the map, you can choose at each location a number of optional quests – many of which will “buff up” your Hero and his retinue.
The retinue concept is very enjoyable, as the super-flying fortress demons that I was able to buff up over 48 battles, provide a powerful army to augment my pyromancer. I certainly believe that this is one of the best elements of the game, and allow you to continue from battle to battle with some semblance of continuity.
The game allows your HERO to start a scenario, after selecting which retinue elements will accompany him (you can “buy” the right to add additional units for a small amount of coin), receive instructions on what the game conditions and objectives are, and begin to explore the region and build support-base units. The support base can then create additional units. Your HERO can “convert” mines and lumber mills to generate revenues from which additional buildings and units can be created.
Pluses and Minuses
The WB3 is obviously very “playable” with a lot of options for characters, missions, and campaigns. As noted in the screen shots, you character can “level up” fairly rapidly and even advance in the middle of a particular scenario (versus waiting until the next round) – a nice feature since you can immediately add capabilities and spells and use them promptly on your enemies. The buffs (charisma, strength, skill, etc) that you acquire can be distributed as you see fit, so there is also a good deal of customization that you can do even within a particular race/class. Again, Enlight did a great job on the development and expansion of a solid game from Warlords II.
The graphics of the game are, unfortunately, dated… while it plays well enough, you can’t help wish for a more detailed 3D cinema quality to go with the excellent game story and wide range of characters.
Summary
We like this game! Notwithstanding that we had to penalize the game for the disappointing graphics, the development team did an excellent job on creating a game that you can literally play for the next 2 years and never play the same character twice!
That is a whole lot of entertainment for your gaming dollar.
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Greg Gibson
@gamingillustrat
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