Disciples: Sacred Lands

The Good
I think I'm right in say that the Heroes of Might and Magic series is the gold-standard of turned-based fantasy strategy, but in my view HMM is flawed, for a number of reasons. I think Disciples improves on HMM by being tighter and more compact, with smaller maps and better combat. This is partly because the combat graphics are better, so you feel more involved, and because there are RPG elements whereby following combat, units upgrade and become more powerful.

The Bad
There's some slightly dodgy voice-over acting in places, and I'm not clear why it was called Disciples. Its not exactly a descriptive title. In fact its complete red herring.

The Bottom Line
This game is not about how fast you can click your mouse. Its for the more discerning and thoughtful gamer. In fact I reckon its about the best turn-based fantasy strategy game, and its not too hard to get into if you're new to the genre.

The Good
Disciples has put off a lot of reviewers with its graphics, its combat system, and it's turn based format. However, once you get beyond this, there's a lot to like.

The premise of this game is that four races (the Humans, the Dwarves, the Demons and the Undead) are fighting over control of the world. Each race has a fairly similar unit selection, of fighters, wizards, archers, and other various monsters like Titans and Werewolves. However, while each race starts with a basic unit in each category, they all have a unique development path for their units. For example, the Empire (humans) can take either Witch Hunters (who can't be paralysed) or Knights (who can go on to develop to more powerful fighters) while the Demons have no choice but go straight from one unit to the next. However, the races are still balanced, with lack of choice in one category being made up for by more in others. Each race also has some big tough monster that they can create: the Humans have the big, tough Titans, the Dwarves have giants that can become more powerful and gain elemental powers, the Demons have huge devils that do immense ammounts of damage and the Undead have the deadly Werewolves that, while they don't do as much damage as some units and have very few hitpoints, are immune to all weapons and can only be hurt by magic.

The game begins with each race having a capital city and one leader, who can lead a party of 4-6 units around (it goes up as the leader gains levels) and fight various battles. The combat is fairly simple, but hampered by the lack of movement and small number of units. And when a party is defeated, as long as even one units survives, they can crawl back to the nearest city and all be revived, which is always preferable to buying a new inexperienced party.

The game may seem to get stale quickly, but it will always offer new surprises: interesting spells as you go to higher levels, poweful items to be bought at shops or stolen from enemies, and a wide variation in unit types. Playing as another of the four races will bring interesting experiences as you discover the various strengths and weaknesses of each race. You won't feel you've completed the game until you've fought battles with the most powerful units from each race. In addition, each unit's attack comes from one of the following groups: Weapons, Air, Fire, Earth, Water, Death, or Mind. Some units have immunites to some of these which can spice up the combat a lot. For example, I once led a party full of Werewolves into combat against some Dwarves thinking I would sweep the battle as they had no wizards, only to find that the Hill Giants did Earth Damage rather than weapon, and left my werewolves dead very fast.

The way land conquered is very unique. Most of the map starts out with a 'plain' land type covered in gold mines and spell crystals, and each race has their own type of land (the Empire has green grass, the Mountain Clans have snow, the Undead have dead trees and rotting ground, and the demons have scorched rocks and lava flows) which spreads from their cities and takes over the landscape gradually, rather like the Creep in Starcraft. If their land passes over a resource square, the race will get some of that resource each turn. In addition each race has a rod planter unit which can stick magical items in the ground that slowly transform the land. These do it much more slowly than cities, and are mainly good for claiming a resource in enemy territory. In addition, the units that do it are weak and have a high mortality rate, and you usually end up paying the price to recruit one only to have it die after performing one mission. However I really liked this system, especially since I get to see my land type crawling over that of the enemy I just conquered.

The Bad
First off, the graphics. Although the hand-drawn portraits of creature's faces were very well done, and the map and city pictures were too, the units on the map were somewhat blocky and badly animated, with the same condition for the units in battle. One point where the graphics did well, however were the spells, especially the Demons' 'Deus Talonis' spell. Whoa!

The combat system was far too simple. Although it was certainly not boring, I was irritated by the tiny number of units in each battle and the fact that you could not move units around at all. Rather, each side has a front row and a back row, the front rows whacking away at each other while the back row shoots arrows or spells, until one front row is gone, at which point the remaining one beats down the back row of the other side. This led to some rather uninteresting battles, but it was not the worst it could have been.

One problem with the game was the imbalance of power. The variety is very good, to be sure, but the Demons are easily more powerful than the other races, and the Dwarves are the weakest. They move more slowly, have no flying units (which helps when crossing rough terrain) and always move last in battle, with only slightly stronger fighters to make up for it. This lack of balance also tends to leave the Dwarves the first out in every scenario they are in.

Another thing that bugged me was that you cannot build anything. You simply conquer cities and let your land type spread around them, but you can't put up your own walls, watchtowers or fortresses. This would have added a lot to the gameplay, which tends to get boring near the end of a scenario, which sometimes consists of sitting and waiting for your land to cover enough of the map, having subdued all the other races and killed every neutral monster on the map, or waiting for near-dead races (it's impossible to wipe one out, since each capital is protected by a monster with a bazillion hit points and an attack that kills every unit in the attacking party in a maximum of two turns) to generate more parties so you can kill them for enough experience to level-up your party enough to attack that city with three huge demons or dragons in it.

The Bottom Line
Disciples, while not an RPG in any respect, (which it says on the box for some reason) and not graphically extraordinary, is still a lot of fun and will keep you at it for as long as you like. In case you get tired of the scenarios they provide, you can always download more, and there is a Scenario Editor to make your own. Disciples can run on an older computer as well, so a casual gamer can still play it. And of course you can challenge your friends in multiplayer battles as well. Disciples is well worth the money you'll pay for it (not much anymore) and I highly recommend it.