Disciples III: Resurrection
Review
Better left alone
by Derk Bil
reviewed on PC
Die hard
Disciples III: Resurrection’s overall campaign is riddled with quests, some great, some a little awkward to complete. Most of the time a star on the mini-map marks the location where you need to go for a task or item. Occasionally it does not, leading to confusion and ultimately to just forfeiting any side quests and heading straight for the final confrontation to be able to finish the current map and continue onwards to the next. In two cases I was unable to complete a quest because of a broken trigger but as I was eventually able to work around them, they weren’t showstoppers.
In general, map and quest design is competent but every now and then pacing and balance are an issue, causing me to pull my hair out. On one map, it took ages to find any secondary quest at all. Just as I marched to the very ending of the map, someone blocked my path and sent me off to the far corners of the map to resolve a matter with an Elven lady who had given birth to a vampire’s son, to get rid of some humans and to dispose of an Orc camp. He didn’t give me these quests all at once and running back and forth on an otherwise empty map is nothing short of boring.
Balance is also an issue in the ‘difficulty settings’ department. I initially played the game on normal difficulty but all my experience in Heroes of Might and Magic, King’s Bounty and Disciples proved to be not enough to succeed here. No matter how hard I tried, the AI would destroy me before seeing the end of the map. That is unless I would cheese it by damaging the opposition somewhat, escape, heal, and finish the job every single fight. This way, the game actually might take 70 hours to complete, if not more, but it would be 70 soul-destroying hard hours. In easy mode, however, the game feels way too easy.
Risking a small spoiler, it should be mentioned that the final map was a tremendous letdown for me and will likely be so for you as well. Whatever I had invested, both emotionally and time wise, was discarded when all my characters were wiped off the playing field. I was given a completely command, robbing me of a satisfying ending with the team I had spent so much time with leading up to the ending.
D.O.A.
Where the story in Disciples III: Renaissance was brought quite well, if perhaps a bit cheesy, Resurrection fails to make the same impact. Especially the first three to four acts felt like they were dragging and while it improves somewhat later on, I only marginally cared for the characters. The appalling, droning voice of the storyteller didn’t help any; he made me in click away the synopsis each and every time, as fast as I could.
The music in the game is good. It’s original and fits the setting very well, though not quite as perfectly as it did in Renaissance. And it’s a shame that for part of the new units, old sounds have been re-used. There’s something harrying about a skeleton sounding like a living, healthy person…
Solid gameplay and excellent graphics can’t mask a weak campaign, making this installment of Disciples hard to recommend. The ability to play multiplayer games over the internet might have done the trick but unfortunately Disciples still lives in the past offering only a hot-seat mode which I doubt is used at all. This is one game that doesn’t need Resurrection, it is better left alone.
5.5
fun score
Pros
The good old gameplay of Disciples III is back.
Cons
The gameplay is buggy and the storyline fails to hold your attention.
