Fallen Enchantress Review

When modder-turned-designer Derek Paxton took over Elemental: War of Magic's development, he was handed the keys to a real fixer-upper. Elemental never coalesced into the 4X strategy-RPG hybrid it was supposed to be. There were too many systems that didn't really work together, or barely worked at all. With Fallen Enchantress, which is effectively Elemental 2.0, Paxton and Stardock set out to find the game inside all those ideas. They largely succeeded: Fallen Enchantress is the rare 4X where playing gets more interesting as it continues, and the drama and excitement of its later stages compensate for a rough beginning and some of its lackluster features.


Enchantress' biggest problems come in the early phases. The fantasy world inherited from Elemental still doesn't have a lot of personality. It's disappointing that Paxton, who went so gloriously overboard in world-building in his Fall from Heaven mod for Civilization IV, has settled for the odd bit of sparse flavor text in a world that still feels like it springs from the dismal imagination of the random name generator that gives us cities like Aruuslf and the Empire of Resoln.

A World of Hurt

This is actually a post-apocalyptic fantasy game, where the world has already endured a major cataclysm and civilization has largely collapsed. Monsters rule the landscape, and each city is an island of tranquility. It makes for a dangerous world, and your Channeler character (a class of hero-kings who rule the world's nations and can use its magical energies) starts out so weak that it's almost impossible to walk five feet in any direction without getting mugged by an ogre or a bear. Fallen Enchantress turns that into a roguelike where death is waiting at every turn. While heroes won't die if they lose a battle, they do take permanent wounds if they go down. That's how I ended up being followed around by a mutilated, decaying halfwit named Ulfnir.


In our adventures through Fallen Enchantress, my fellow champion Ulfnir got pounded in almost every early-game battle. He acquired a rotting wound, a gangrenous hand, a lost ear, a broken leg, a lost eye, and one more thing I can't remember... amnesia! Each wound gave him a penalty, so halfway through the game he had a lower attack value, couldn't dodge, gained less experience from each battle, and he recovered hit points more slowly. Naturally, all of this meant Ulfnir was more likely to get taken down in his next battle.

'Tis But a Flesh Wound

Ulfnir's transformation into the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail illustrates the overall problem with Enchantress's early game: you have to go out and explore and gain experience, but you are too often punished for doing so. It's a total crapshoot if you can run the gauntlet of dragons, drakes, elementals, armies of golems, and assorted other NPC monsters. Don't look to the rough strength estimates for advice, either -- that dark wizard might be a "medium" threat, but his nuke spell can still bring down a whole army in a single turn.


Another hand-me-down is Elemental's deadly dull tactical battle system. Meat shields run at each other while support units fire spells and arrows until everyone on one side is dead. Terrain is irrelevant, and powerful magic is hamstrung by casting times that generally mean the battle is half over by the time a hero gets a spell off. The odds are good that the low-level instant-damage spells are the same ones you'll be using by the end.

Let The Game Begin

Grind out the early game, however, and Fallen Enchantress' hostile world becomes an interesting strategic obstacle. Distance rarely imposes anything beyond a delay in most strategy games: reinforcements have to march a long way over empty ground, but that ground itself is harmless. Not so in Fallen Enchantress. When war breaks out with another kingdom, the first order of business is often not to go conquer their nearest city, but to march into the wilderness to clear space for an outpost that you can use as a staging area for a successful attack. Or you might defeat a powerful enemy that guarded the entrance to an unexplored valley, only to discover it's packed with a trove of resources -- and even more powerful monsters.


Fighting those battles, blasting open new frontiers with the force of my armies while standing-off hostile neighbors, I had that moment where I glance at the clock and realize I've been playing for four hours and still don't want to stop. Fallen Enchantress' flaws may be in-your-face from the start, but its best qualities make a slow, stealthy approach.

War of Magic

I'd barely noticed as it was happening, but Fallen Enchantress's world had come alive. You send small expeditions out from the safety of your restored territory into the harsh wastes, dreading what might next emerge from the fog of war. Only territory inside the borders of your cities and fortresses is truly known, and the rest of the map is marked by outdated scouting information and what little trade caravans can observe on their journeys. I fought an entire war with another kingdom without ever really knowing where they were, trying to guess their cities' locations based on the directions of their attacks.


It's here, too, that all the different resources that can make economic management seem so redundant (for instance, you need food to grow your population, but then "growth" is a separate resource that determines the rate at which your population grows, which is odd) suddenly come into play. Depending on the resources I control, I end up pursuing very different strategies. Research isn't some panacea: I might know how to mass-produce enchanted weapons, but unless I've got access to crystal mines, it's nothing but old-fashioned steel for my troops. Unit customization ends up working well in Fallen Enchantress because it ties in so well with resources, which ties in with the strategy and exploration elements.

Late Bloomer

While the AI is better than Elemental's brain-dead debacle, it's still not quite good enough to be taken seriously. Sometimes it attacked with a huge army, but other times I'd find one of its heroes wandering my territory with nothing but a puny group of archers. Diplomacy is hamstrung by an AI that seems consistently overestimates its position and undervalues the players', which makes for a slightly annoying bidding game as you watch it ignore generous offers. Worse, hostility makes it increasingly irrational. A beaten enemy was, in my experience, less likely to accept a settlement than one with whom I'd only had a few skirmishes. Its suicidal logic seems to be, "Now that you've taken my capital and main fortress, you're in big trouble!"


Despite that, the middle and late game come together beautifully, but at the cost of a fair and entertaining beginning. Fortunately, Fallen Enchantress is not just a strategy game. It is a fantasy strategy RPG that, by its conclusion, does feel fantastical. Magic is devastating (where it was once puny), heroes are demigods, and your forces do battle across the blasted landscape with huge armies and towering dragons. The world doesn't feel tamed or conquered by the end, but more magical and more dangerous. It takes some getting used to, but in the end, Fallen Enchantress largely fulfills the promise of its genre-blending premise.