The first Spellforce game was released in 2003, and it was a weird hybrid of Diablo and Warcraft (the RTS, not the MMO). The sequel came out in 2006 and enhanced these mechanics a little further. After two expansions to the sequel, the series came to end, but THQ purchased the franchise and published Spellforce 3 in 2017. It was quite a good game and loved both by the critics and the players. And now, Spellforce makes its debut on mobile gaming with Heroes & Magic, as a pay to play the game. That’s right, you need to actually purchase this game to play it, but this is not a bad thing at all: Since it is not “freemium”, Spellforce Heroes & Magic does not contain any loot boxes or pay to win mechanics – it just offers pure strategy gaming and has the potential to take you back to the good old HOMM (Heroes Of Might & Magic) days. Well, let’s take a look at it and find out if it is worth our hard-earned money, shall we?

Conquering A World Turn-By-Turn

Unlike its PC cousins, Spellforce Heroes & Magic does not use action role-play and RTS features. Instead, it is played just like the HOMM series and uses turn-based strategy mechanics. If you ever played HOMM before, it will feel like home. When you start the game, you are asked to choose between “adventure” and “battle” modes. The first one starts the “normal” game, which you roam around the world map, assault resources, and try to build your kingdom. The second one puts you directly to the battlefield. We will cover the battle system in another guide, so let’s continue with the adventure mode for now.

Adventure mode starts exactly like this: You, a lone hero, in a dangerous world with a small army.

We can roam the world map freely, but only in turns. In each world, we have two rival factions and they also move in turns – our goal is to clear the map from enemies, gather resources, build up our kingdom, and create a big army.

The world map – it is filled with resources but each one is guarded by a powerful enemy. In order to capture those resources, we must beat them first. For example, the marked enemy in this screenshot is guarding wheat, an important resource for our kingdom.

And this is our army at the beginning. It is not impressive, but it is ours.

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In each turn, we can move one square/grid on the world. If we click on an enemy, for example, our hero will move onto its grid and the battle will start automatically. This is a dangerous world and Spellforce Heroes & Magic does not hold your hand – if you attack an enemy that is way stronger than you, you will simply die and start the game from the beginning. That’s right: You can even die right after starting the game if you don’t pick your targets wisely. And the new game starts you from scratch, nothing is transferred from your previous sessions. Most of the “modern” players will hate this system, but we loved it: This is how games were played back in the day.

This seems to be a challenging battle.

Yep, we died. It is time to start from the beginning. Well, if you use BlueStacks Farm Mode, you can simply continue from another instance too, of course.

Building Our Kingdom

Roaming the world map like a madman and attacking everything we see is not the only thing we need to do: We also have a kingdom to take care of. With each mine, farm, and quarry captured, resources start to flow to our city and allow us to grow our kingdom. We need to construct buildings, train troops, and make sure our citizens are happy.

We can construct seven buildings in our kingdom. Some of these allow us to train new types of troops, and some of us give us advantages, like removing the battle fog from the map.

We can train more troops in our city and garrison them against attacks. Or, the troops can join to your hero’s army –the decision is yours.

Conclusion

Spellforce Heroes & Magic is a hard game: We are used to getting instant gratification in modern games, which give us an “achievement” even for logging in every day. Spellforce is nothing like that: It is an old-school turn-based strategy game where you need to consider every step you take and actually work towards a goal. And even then, you can still “lose” the game and all of your precious “achievements”, which won’t be charming for most of today’s player base. However, if you are tired of seeing the same mobile games which are just carbon copies of each other and looking for an alternative that can offer you the glorious days of HOMM; you are at the right place. Continue with reading our other Spellforce Heroes & Magic guides and let’s fight together on BlueStacks!

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