Spellforce: Conquest of EO is a turn-based strategy game, or, as they’re more commonly referred to, a 4X strategy. Developed by Owned by Gravity, and published by THQ Nordic, Spellforce: Conquest of Eo is only available on PC and released on 4th February 2023. Conquest of Eo is the newest release in the SpellForce library, which has had a massive genre change over its time, starting from a humble RTS like Age of Empires and Warcraft, and slowly implementing different features over the years to turn it into the 4X strategy game it is today.

You play as a mage who discovers their master has been murdered and his tower ransacked. An order of mages, known as The Circle, essentially rules over the land of Eo, but they do so behind the scenes, much like the Illuminati. The only issue with trying to take The Circle head-on is that they have melded with the power of the Allfire. The Allfire is a powerful and mysterious natural magic that runs through the land, and only a select few have the knowledge and power to meld with it. You must discover the secrets of the Allfire and attempt to meld for power and glory, all while keeping enemies away from your precious lands and manipulating the general populace to do thy bidding.

As stated earlier, SpellForce: Conquest of Eo is a 4x strategy game, which for those who aren’t familiar with the term is the abbreviation for explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. The main point of these games is to build an empire. 4x strategy is very common to standard strategy games like Age of Empires but on a much larger scale. SpellForce: Conquest of Eo plays much like a tabletop RPG where you explore the lands of Eo with multiple stacks of units so you can rule the land. You can play as three archetypes of mage, or, homebrew your own where you can change their primary schooling, secondary schooling, and crafting.

Crafting comes in three categories which are essentially your mages archetype; Alchemist, Necromancer, or Artificer. The alchemist brews potions to support their troops in battle, and they can summon magical creatures and control nature. The necromancer should be relatively easy to understand. They raise the dead to flood the land with living corpses. The artificer creates magical items to upgrade their troops and force secrets out of the earth itself.

With schooling, you can pick from six paths; Death, Earth Master, Enchantment, Guardian, Mentalism, and Nature. With death, you create and maintain undead units and corrupt and enslave the living. Earth mastery allows you to earn more from earthly resources and enhance your troops with crafting. Enchantment allows you to research spells faster, summon and improve magical monsters, and allow your troops to reach remote places. Guardian essentially allows you to protect and strengthen troops and apply light elemental damage to defend against darkness and death. With mentalism, one can easily play with the minds of enemy troops and manipulate local populations to do your bidding, and with nature, you can bolster and improve your ranks, bend flora and fauna to your will, and search primordial places to harness nature’s wrath.

Once your mage is set up, you are thrown into Eo to start your legacy. The game plays a lot like Total War: Warhammer titles, where you have a main tower where you build rooms to generate resources or allow you to hire different troops. The game features the same overworld style and play as other 4x games but has turn-based combat. I am personally always a massive fan of turn-based strategy combat and have always loved it since playing early Final Fantasy titles. The ability to slow everything down and think about a solid strategy to overcome any hurdles thrown my way has been, and always will be, the best form of strategy in a game.

During play, you will be thrown a metric f***tonne of quests and sidequests to accomplish. You can turn them down or help out and reap the rewards through the narrative text boxes that outline the quest. These quests pop up almost every other turn. I think at one point I had 10 different quests spanning the entire region of Eo. These can quickly distract you from your main goals of discovering the truth about the Allfire and dominating the land, but will, in turn, keep you hooked for hours on end.

The game looks great, and I found no performance issues. Running the game at 1440P with an Asus STRIX 3070TI, AMD Ryzen 5800X, and 32GB RAM I noticed no stutters, frame loss, or performance clashes. I did, however, notice that initial loading into a new campaign can take a long time, and the loading symbol does freeze and stutter which made me think the game had frozen. If it weren’t for the continuous audio playing in the background, I would have hit Alt-f4 in a heartbeat. Every loading screen and menu background are hand-drawn and look amazing. The game’s textures aren’t up to Total War: Warhammer 3 level but are adequate. Background music is very folky and fantasy based, adding to the immersion I felt within the game and had me hooked for hours. I did find that some voice lines from some troops didn’t match their aura, like when I was using a brute/slaver. They sounded more like a court guard and not some small-brained axe-swinging barbarian, which threw me off a bit, but it was easy enough to overcome.

SpellForce: Conquest of Eo is an amazing 4x strategy game. The quests and side quests thrown your way will keep you enveloped within the game for hours on end. Any strategy player will love this and it isn’t too difficult to pick up and enjoy, regardless of whether you are new to the 4x strategy genre or SpellForce in general.

Written by: Bigfoot