Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance

The Good
Birthright is a complex RPG strategy game with some real-time elements. I appreciated its attempt to capture the battles of armies in graphic, tactical fashion; its attempt to allow your heroes to go adventuring in 1st person; and its attempt to implement the delicate balancing act of conducting diplomacy and economic development. All of this set in the high fantasy world of Anuire. An ambitious effort.

The Bad
Birthright didn't deliver. The game suffers from a complicated and covoluted interface. The game play leaves you scratching your head - you always wondered if you were doing the right thing. Despite three earnest attempts I just could not enjoy it. The voice acting was noticably unprofessional - the most redeeming feature being that it made you chuckle. This is one of the few games I have stopped playing because the gameplay was so difficult and unrewarding.

The Bottom Line
Get this game if you are an AD&D Birthright addict and can put up with an unforgiving interface and painful gameplay. Otherwise get it for its terrible yet comical voice acting.

The Good
This game had it all. A fun strategy game where entering an RPG adventure was available as a strategic option, it combined the two genres as no other game has attempted to do. It even portrayed the adventuring in full first-person 3D. Even with all the bugs, I played the game for about 100 hours and enjoyed almost all of them.

The Bad
Unfortunately, there were no commercial 3D FP engines available at the time, and too much of the programming effort was absorbed by that work. Instead of a great strategy game with a great RPG wrapped inside, Birthright became a decent strategy game with a buggy and incomplete RPG wrapped inside.

The Bottom Line
I wish somebody today would try to remake this game for modern machines with an off-the-shelf 3D engine and a full development cycle for the actual game features. Imagine Deus Ex-like first-person roleplaying wrapped in a grand strategy game more sophisticated than the "Conquer the World Campaign" game in Rise of Nations. Perhaps it will happen someday...