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Seven Kingdoms: Conquest Review for PC

Seven Kingdoms: Conquest Review for PC

When Humans and Demons Collide

It’s been a long time since a new entry in the Seven Kingdoms series last saw the light of day. Approximately eight years ago the series wooed gamers and critics by providing a pseudo real-time strategy experience that balanced the traditional emphasis on resource gathering and combat with economic, diplomatic, and civilization building options that were a welcome breath of fresh air at the time.

Seven Kingdoms: Conquest screenshot

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After a rather lengthy development cycle, Seven Kingdoms: Conquest has finally arrived. It’s a strong title in some regards, but fans of the first two games may find much of what they loved about the series – features that set it apart from other titles in the oversaturated genre – have either been cut away or molded to fit into a more straightforward real-time strategy system that favors brawn over brains.

The game’s story is a watery mishmash of a conflict between humans and demons with cultists and ancient gods thrown into the mix for good measure. Separate single-player campaigns let you play as either the human or demonic factions. Each side offers plenty of interesting powers, units, and abilities to obtain, but the campaigns themselves lack many of the typical bells and whistles that tend to separate an above average RTS PC game from the rest of the pack. Without any form of cinematics in between missions and only a few disjointed narratives to explain the plot, the campaigns lack cohesiveness. The stories for each are unremarkably standard. The human conflict revolves around holding off the increasingly devastating onslaught of the demon horde. The demon storyline focuses on an unholy quest to remake the world as you see fit while crushing the human resistance. Neither is particularly engrossing in terms of plot, but the gameplay makes up for it slightly.

The human and demonic races play quite differently from one another, and it’s where much of the ingenuity comes to the forefront. Human civilizations are powered by your typical gold mines and farms, but at higher ages they can summon heroes and even gods to rain down destruction on the demon hordes. Their expansion relies heavily on taking over neutral and enemy cities to gain strength. Defeating foes and taking over cities also accrues reputation points which can be utilized to train powerful units or level-up existing armies to make them stronger. It’s an important resource that can quickly turn the tide of battle.

Seven Kingdoms: Conquest screenshot

In a slightly sinister twist, demonic forces require blood to create and maintain units and corrupted stone to forge structures. Blood totems keep a steady supply of blood flowing, but demons can harvest additional blood on the battlefield, allowing their armies to grow quickly in power. They also have access to a variety of supernatural abilities to aid in their pillaging. Instead of reputation points, demons generate fear as a resource from destroying opposing armies and cities. Fear points can also be used to level-up units and summon powerful beasts.

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Each side has quite a few interesting units available, ranging from fairly generic grunts and ranged units at the lower levels on up to massive beasts and gods as the game progresses. The demons have a few more tiers of units available, mainly due to the fact the developers left out the modern and future age units originally planned for the game. Though it has little bearing on the game, not being able to pilot tanks and robotic mechs into battle against demons is a pretty big disappointment. It certainly wouldn’t have hurt the game any.

Seven Kingdoms: Conquest screenshot

In addition to the vast array of units and abilities available to the human and demon armies, both sides have access to several other resources located at random on the map. Once bested through combat or coercion, colonies of Demon Hunters and Tanebrae Cultists can be hired to do your bidding. Though costly to train, they provide some hefty backup and a necessary addition to your forces. Another powerful resource, called Demonstones, are scattered throughout the realm. Using priests or succubus, you can harvest the stones and use them to instantly summon fierce units in battle, boost lacking resources or cast magic to aid in your conquest.

Seven Kingdoms: Conquest screenshot

The 3D visuals are a major step up from the past two games – rightly so considering the length of time since the last installment. The units, animations, buildings, and landscape are adequately designed, and they look good in most cases. Despite the improvements, the game is a little rough around the edges in some graphical areas. Units don’t always look quite so hot when you zoom in for a closer look, but they’re more than adequate.

The good aspects of Conquest are somewhat overshadowed by a few bugs that become serious irritants. First and foremost, the human tutorial stalls out early-on when a gate leading the way to a nearby kingdom you’re meant to destroy in order to advance the tutorial simply does not open. It’s frustrating being thrown a curveball of that magnitude when trying to learn the ropes. Figuring out some of the more involved aspects of the game is a pain without the tutorial, although you’ll eventually pick up the rest through trial and error.

Once you get into the meat of the game, the next issue crops up when loading save files. Any hotkey group unit assignments will be lost each time you re-load your save. This seems like a minor oversight, but it can wreak havoc if you happen to save at a crucial point in a chaotic battle only to find all of your grouped armies running around every which way on a path to their own impending slaughter. Also, the general path-finding abilities of units isn’t particularly sharp, and rather than moving in a relatively straight line, they’ll occasionally find some pretty unique routes to get from point A to point B.

When you get down to it, Conquest feels more like a cousin to the series than a true follow-up. It certainly leans towards the traditional side of the genre with more of an emphasis on battle than on construction and micromanagement. This may be a put off for series fans who are expecting the same level of civilization building that gave the first two games feel a turn-based strategy vibe. If you prefer a more straight-forward RTS game, then the heavy Seven Kingdoms flavor might be less disappointing.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 3.6 Graphics
Everything looks pretty good, but nothing really makes you go “wow.” 3.3 Control
Otherwise decent controls suffer from a bug which erases assigned groupings and ability hotkeys after loading saved games. 3.7 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
Nice orchestral audio and combat sounds. 3.3 Play Value
A reasonably entertaining RTS title that might have longer play appeal had it kept a few more elements from past entries in the series. 3.4 Overall Rating – Fair
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.

Game Features:

  • Five human civilizations to choose from with each one containing 3 different nations.
  • Eight demon races to choose from, each with unique units and buildings.
  • A Campaign spanning 4,000 years, playable as either humans or demons.
  • Many different unit special abilities, including the features unique to previous 7K games such as diplomacy and espionage.
  • Automated resource gathering with unique resources for humans and demons.
  • A troop promotion system where individual warriors can eventually rise to be kings and demon lords.
  • Elemental forces that can be unleashed upon the world by demons and magic that can be used by all sides.

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