It's been done before, this blending of RPG and strategy gaming, and until now it's always proven to be a bit distasteful - due mainly to some woefully unbalanced gameplay. Spellforce however could possibly be the first successful role playing strategy game, that is if this gold edition is anything to go by, a new release that takes advantage of the popularity of one of the year's surprise hits.

Unlike the majority of games that attempt to cross genres, Spellforce actually does manage to balance out both its strategic and role playing elements, rather than mistakenly making one stronger than the other. The RPG side of Spellforce fits in with the "go here, kill this" crowd, as you travel from point to point killing orcs and goblins, gaining experience and collecting valuables while chatting to a variety of characters to progress the story. A character creation tool allows you to build your own hero rather than rely on the game to provide one for you. Giving some individuality to your hero, you can choose from the usual options of skills, attributes and pick from a set of monstrous looking faces, all of which give you an avatar designed around your own specifications and needs rather than that of the game.

The more you progress the more experience points you can claim and then use to learn new abilities and skills. Weapons and armour can also be scavenged while other objects that are rendered useless or can't be used can be sold to the many traders you meet on your quest. The game resists the urge to pile on the RPG elements, giving fans of strategy enough room to fly past the hack and slash bits, while those who crave a bit more exploration and adventure can take part in a variety of optional side quests, often handed out by non playable characters.

The strategic elements are typical of any strategy game; you build a workforce to collect resources, construct specific structures to acquire bigger and stronger units, while setting up defensive perimeters to fend off attacks from enemy encampments. Much like the RPG bits of the game, the strategy side of Spellforce will keep fans of this particular genre happy while also being easy enough to grasp for those not keen on base building and resource gathering.

All the fiddly bits have been cut to make the strategy parts of the game easier to get to grips with; there are no endless upgrades to constantly drain resources, easy to manage structures and a simple population cap to prevent slipping into building huge armies. All units can also be trained from the same building, so less time is spent building unnecessary structures. Strategy gamers will breeze through these parts with ease, allowing the pace of the game to remain relatively fast.

As the game progresses further, more races come under your command, allowing a much more diverse selection of warriors to train up. While certain races require different resources to the normal human workers you command early in the game, this still doesn't cause the gameplay to drag. In fact, one of the benefits of this game is that base building doesn't become the overlong slog it does in so many strategy games. You can hop in, get a settlement up and running, build yourself a selection of troop types and away you go.

With the RPG sections of the game being primarily of the hack and slash variety, the strategic side allows those constant one on one hundred battles to go a little in your favour. No more running around pummelling waves of generic creatures with only one character; here you can create huge armies that can prevent the endless repetitive gameplay that hampers so many role-playing games. Other heroes also lend their hand from time to time, giving you not only the advantage of having a full party of fully trained warriors but also an army to back them up should things go sour.

This Gold Edition also comes fully loaded with the "more of the same" expansion pack, which presents itself as a whole new campaign on the menu screen, adding more to an already huge game. If you're getting this edition, chances are you'll have not have played the game before, so will forgive the expansion's lack of any real new features more easily than those who got the game the first time around.

Inevitably however, problems set in. The tutorial for one, rather than being a quick step-by-step guide giving you the basics of the game, instead crawls along at such a pace that all sense of time is lost as you meander through. It goes into extraordinary detail, describing every conceivable option available to you in the game. The trouble is that so much information is piled on that by the time you reach the end of the tutorial you'll have forgotten details given to you at the beginning. The voice acting is also quite amateurish, with nothing pulling you in to the already fairly dull story.

While not a perfect game, Spellforce Gold Edition manages to succeed where so many others have failed. This isn't just a role playing game with strategy bits tacked on; it's a perfectly balanced adventure strategy game. This gold edition is the perfect package for those who have yet to experience Spellforce or who missed it the first time around.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).