[REVIEW] Spectromancer: League of Heroes
Title: Spectromancer: League of Heroes
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Description:Spectromancer is a computer duelling game between two wizards that has been around (in various forms) for several years. Duellists take turns summoning creatures or casting spells in an attempt to reduce their opponent to zero life. Very similar to Magic the Gathering, except mana is generated automatically, and there is a room for a maximum of six creatures on the battlefield at once (and how they are placed on the battlefield will affect game play). Spectromancer: League of Heroes is the first expansion.
Setting: There is a campaign included in the game which probably counts as a setting, and explains why each wizard has only a single specialty, but ends up allowing the wizard to become the titular spectromancer and wield all the magics. There are cards and settings not available in the straight duel (which shows the basic engine should be customizable). However the game is primarily a dueling game, either against the AI (which is rather good at Archmage level), or against another player (there is an online "arena" for duellists).
Character Generation: Players choose one of a number of wizardly specialists: Cleric, Necromancer, Mechanician, Dominater (aka Control Freak), Chaosmaster, Illusionist, Demonologist,* Beastmaster,* and Sorceror.* Or they can enter a duel as a random character. Each wizard knows a random four spells (out of eight or so) associated with the four elements (Fire, Water, Air, and Earth), and their specialty. Each spell has a different mana cost. The randomness of the spell lists makes the game play more interesting.
In the campaign game you learn new spells from the opponents you defeat, but your actual spell list is still generated randomly from your known spells.
[* These are introduced in the expansion.]
Mechanics: Each turn the player's mana pool in each catagoury that increases by one each turn. They and their opponent take turns either placing a creature in the battlefield, casting a spell, or occasionally sitting back and watching your army tromp your opponent into the dust (or desperately waiting for enough mana to do something about the creatures assualting you). Like Magic the Gathering, the summoned creatures may have abilities that affect the game and may not attack on the turn they are summoned.
Thoughts: The idea of duelling wizards is a popular one,* and this game scratches the itch quite well. It's a lot quicker and simpler than the Magic card game, and I tend to use it a lot to clear my head after doing serious work. After all there is something so innately satisfying watching your legions advance on your enemy's citadel (not that you actually get to watch this; I'm reviewing this as an RPG, so use your imagination), or watching the devastation as you release arcane magics against the enemy. <bwah hah hah ha ha ha ha ha>
That being said, they made the classic mistake with the expansion of uprating the power of the spells for the new specialty classes. This tends to be a natural mistake to make when designing expansions to games, especially computer games, because you become so used to people playing the old classes in an optimal manner that you create opponents that can face them, forgetting in turn that these new cards can then be played in an optimum manner. Rather disappointing in this regard.
They've also changed a lot of the original creatures attack and hit point values. Where before the numbers were rather finely balanced, and definitely showed the influence of a mathematician (aka Richard Garfield) in their selection, it appears that these changes were essentially generated by forum comments, and all sense of the subtlety and balance in the original mix has been lost. And then there is the basilisk, a new creature with this expansion, which is probably the ultimate creature in the game, which totally perverts the play balance of the original game with it's special ability.
The other thing is the game system is locked, with no potential for modding or creating your own campaigns, and this irritates the gamemaster/world-builder in me. I really do wish they would open their game engine so that people can create their own campaigns with exotic cards and challenges that could then be swapped.
Rating: Very Good in it's original form, dropping to merely Good with the addition of the expansion (the power-gamer in me likes the new creatures and spells; the rest of me feels they are very unbalanced, especially when used against me).
* One of my favourite old boardgames (City of Sorcerors) [so good someone actually stole my copy!] was based on this premise. Except first you spent 3 years at the University trying to learn the spells and forge the magic items you would need, and then you would hide your tower in a random terrain arena and summon creatures to search and kill your opponents. I miss that game. The best fun wasn't the arena, but scrambling around the school trying to learn stuff and forge runeswords in metalwork. I've used the graduating mage idea in a AD&D tournament before. The idea was to see how a party consisting of 5 specialist mages with restricted spell lists would work together (both in and out of game context). I must say that all the players (about 120 or so) were quite courteous about it and cooperated well. Lots of actual role-playing was involved, and the mages generally attempted to solve the problems set before them (social, combative and otherwise). [Most of my tournament games are rather antithetical to the standard idea that combat is central to D&D, in that if you think about what you are doing, and use your abilities creatively, you can succeed without the need to engage in overmuch of it. It's a character flaw, but it also means I definitely won't be writing any 4E tournaments for local gamers!] Still, it might be fun to run a magical university game, except for the fact that a certain icon with glasses and a scar has entered the collective cultural zeitgeist, and combating that inertia probably isn't worth it. <sigh> |