For those not in the know, the Seven Kingdoms series actually has quite a history. Starting in the late 1990’s as a simplistic-looking RTS title, these games were immediately noticed for their innovative approach to conflict and for offering a wide range of gameplay options. The ability to use crazy things like “diplomacy” and “trade” to gain an advantage was a pretty rare thing to see in the real-time strategy market back in those days (as opposed to throwing a few dozen Mammoth Tanks or Spearmen at a given problem), and the game made quite an impact for its novel gameplay features. But something went awry on the way to making this latest installment.
Probably the first sign something is amiss upon first loading the game up is finding that it actually won’t run under Windows Vista (despite claiming to be Vista-compatible) unless you go the “Run As Administrator” route – any other approach results in a generic, unexplained crash. Once you finally do get the game running, a very brief, action-packed intro movie plays portraying the battle between “some guys” and “some other guys”. The opening movie is almost completely useless as a formal introduction to the game and just shows some random pre-rendered clips of combat between the game’s various units, then suddenly cuts to the main menu.
Typically a brief or vague opening splash screen serves as a minor, and sometimes expected fault for a lot of games these days – the trailers seen before the main menu loads usually serve to give props to the companies that put the game together (“…Challenge everything…”) and provide relevant footage to help draw players into the game. Conquest deviates from this however by setting the tone for what is ultimately a very lackluster and under-developed singleplayer experience.
Plot-wise, the game apparently revolves around the millennial wars between the righteous humans, and a horde of demonic forces bent on bringing one of their great leaders back into power. At least, this is the impression I get from reading the manual; the campaign itself actually yields a series of disjointed missions that provide only a quick opening briefing, and then plunge you right into the game world with the goal of “annihilate everyone”. Not once have I witnessed any scripted events or forms of advanced storytelling from the campaign missions, making it obvious that the developers built up the core gameplay first, and then suddenly realized they forgot to include any kind of plot and tried to slap a story on at the last second. The only missions which actually do show some form of scripting are the tutorials, and even these are very easy to break; expect to get stuck trying to learn the game when a given event doesn’t fire correctly. Beyond this, the entire singleplayer “experience” revolves around little more than an array of skirmish maps.
In the average session, you start with a central city. From here, you recruit troops, build add-ons, and research upgrades. The real kicker is the resourcing; you only have a limited amount of income to start with (be it gold and food for the Humans, or stone and blood for the Demons) and can only build a limited number of structures per city. The only way to expand is to take over other cities on the map (most maps have an array of neutral cities to conquer, on top of those controlled by your opponents), which is done either by marching your army over and defeating the local garrison force, or by sending ambassadors and sinking money into the place until they concede to your capitalistic might.
This can lead to a very interesting drive for domination, because maintaining control of the cities and villages set up around a given map is absolutely key to gaining the upper hand in the game, and eventually summoning powerful heroes and gods to form the backbone of your armies. I really like a lot of things the game does in this regard, with one of my favorites being the “Respect / Fear” system. This serves as a central pool of points that grows when you complete certain events (like capturing a village), which can then be spent to “promote” a given unit. Promoted units gain extra attack styles and become more powerful in general, but the limited nature of these points means you need to spend them carefully.
The real issue with the game is just that it feels unfinished. The game is good for a few romps around the skirmish maps, but it quickly leaves me wanting for more – and I’ll freely admit that this is due to my preference as a singleplayer-oriented gamer. Regardless, I did give the game’s multiplayer features a good work-out, and was having a blast trying out all of the different Human and Demon technologies (the fact that there are several distinct Human and Demon factions to choose from really adds to the variety) …when suddenly the game crashed.
