Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes (PC) Review

Well, here’s another game from the backlog. Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes has been out for a few months now and it finally receives some review love.

Made by Stardock Studios, who has certainly had a varied track record these past few years, Fallen Enchantress is an interesting game for several reasons. Primarily because those who bought the last entry in the Elemental series (early on) actually received this edition of the game for free, as an apology for past issues. Well, if anything can be said about Stardock as a development studio, they at least admit to their past mistakes and recompense those who suffer from them. That’s something you done see much of in the self-indulged game industry at any level.

Fallen Enchantress is pretty much best summed up as a turn base strategy game with some very interesting city building aspects. Think of something like the Civilization series, but on a much smaller scale. Stardock also added a ‘hero’ system for Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes. This represents a character you play in the map who is also a fighting unit. You also receive special abilities depending on which of the 10 you pick. Some provide you with bigger towns, or more experienced units. So playing a game with a different hero certainly makes for a different experience.

The games themselves take place on a semi randomly generated landscape which is completely blocked off until you send some units to explore. Somewhat like the fog in Paradox games making exploration very necessary and enjoyable experience. Of course it’s also needed to build more cities around the over world. Each of these cities must be built by a pioneer unit and will provide different attributes depending on where you put it. Placement next to a mine means you get more recourses, but also limits your population.

Combat between units is still just based on a matter of who has the larger army and better troops. Depending on whether you choose to be a bad or good hero, you also have certain abilities when fighting against an opposing hero, thus playing much more hero selection.

The rest of the game is based on discovering ruins and claiming their knowledge for your own society before anyone else gets to it. This gives buffs to either your hero or city, making for more interesting battles. Tech trees also give you different skills and choosing between the 3 different kinds makes for some critical moments where you must decide whether to get better units or to build defenses.

The game is also pretty detailed with large expansive environments which get even larger as you explore more and more. The game has a decent soundtrack as well, but some of the repetitive fighting sounds might make you turn them off. The cities also grow as you progress so that you feel you really are making headway when a town hall or gardens are built in your main settlement.

Final Thoughts

All in all this is a great ‘apology’ and shows that Stardock still has what it takes to make a good game.

Even though it remedies past mistakes though, Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes still isn’t a completely blown out of the water experience. The game still does make for some enjoyable hours as your city grows and goes to war. At this point it’s gone down enough in price to make it worth a recommendation too.

If you have any interest at all then pick this game up right now.