SpellForce: The Order of Dawn

The Good
First off, the greatest thing in the game are the voiceovers. When you go through the prologue and hear Caele's voice... wow! Few games have as interesting voiceovers.

The story is interesting as you play the role of basically a freed slave (you are a summoned rune warrior). The story takes you on a journey in the aftermath of a great war that destroyed the world eight years earlier.

The character creation choices are interesting, though you are stuck to starting as a human. Why are they interesting? You can choose a fairly diverse character to begin the game with... for instance, you can't just choose to be an Elemental Mage... you must choose a sub category (Ice, Fire, Earth). And the nice part, is that as you progress in the game, you can add on all other classes if you want, or just keep improving a single class.

Another nice thing in the game is that you can get runes that allow you to create other races (basically, you can have your town with multiple races in it... thereby having multiple types of buildings in your town rather than only the buildings of a single race). This is something that may be unique to this game. Other games that had multiple races in the same town usually had the computer control one of them.

The Bad
The game gives you a very zoomable interface that takes you from isometric to 3rd-person... the problem is that the 3rd-person view makes it virtually impossible to do anything, so you are really stuck in isometric except in the plot videos.

It is fairly easy to miss a corpse that has an item (or items) as the graphics for it aren't very noticeable... and since few corpses have items, you aren't usually paying too much attention to corpses. So you can miss some good items if you're not careful.

The Bottom Line
If you like RTS and RPG games, this is a great game for you to try. The game is mostly RTS, so if you don't like that genre, you may want to pass up on this game. For everyone else, it's worth playing.