Disciples: Sacred Lands Review

A lot of people may not be all that familiar with Canadian development house Strategy First. If their recent string of titles is any indication, that should be changing. With Man of War II and the enjoyable Clansalready released this year, they have turned their attention to the fantasy turn-based strategy genre withDisciples: Sacred Lands. And it may well be their best game yet.

Basics of Play

Disciples: Sacred Lands is a game that has obviously borrowed concepts from the genre’s top dogs,Warlords and Heroes of Might and Magic. But it also has a lot of new ideas to contribute.

Rather than controlling huge numbers of units and lots of armies, Disciples keeps things simple. Each army can have up to six units, including a leader. There are also garrison troops which can sit in a town but cannot move, that is unless a leader moves them. There are five different leader types: warriors, scouts (archers), and mages plus two special use leaders, the thief and the “claimer” which is used to claim land by planting rods, thus capturing important resources for the army.

There are five different resources in the game, gold which is used to purchase units, magical items and heal your forces and four different types of mana used to research and cast spells. You control the sources of these resources by capturing the land under them. This can be done by planting rods or capturing cities. As you capture cities they slowly convert territory around them to your side.

Each of the four sides has unique units with their own special attributes and attack types. As your armies kill things the units in them, including leaders, earn experience and can improve in their abilities. Leaders gain an extra skill every level which include the ability to use certain magic items, lead additional troops in battle, or improve their statistics like damage done or hit points. You get to choose the skill you want to learn each time a level is made. Units also improve, and the neat thing is that for many unit types you get to decide on a path that your units will take when they upgrade. By constructing buildings in your capital you choose the way all units of a type improve. It’s an interesting system.

The interface is very easy to use, there are really only a handful of command buttons. You can click to center on the next leader, open the screen for your capital to build upgrades or research spells, trade items between leaders, drop items or cast spells. Everything is handled with the mouse and it is entirely intuitive. My only complaint is that it would have been nice to see the amount of gold and mana of various types you have available from the main panel.

Speaking of mana, there are a large number of spells to play with in four different schools. Each race specializes in one school, but you can find or buy the ability to use other spells in some maps. Spells impact the main map, either by directly attacking an enemy stack, improving the attributes of one of your armies for a turn or revealing or covering the map in some way. I liked the variety and the use of spells is critical to success in many maps. Cool.

Combat itself does not use spells and has at most 12 units involved. Each army has two rows, you can only attack units in the front row unless your attacker has a ranged attack ability. So, despite the fact that there are only a few units and they don’t ever move in tactical combat, there is surprising depth to the tactical combat. This is accentuated by the use of different attack types. Some units are resistant or immune to certain types of attack. For example, werewolves can only be hurt by magic. This means you may need to bring different units into battle depending on what you are facing or use spells on the main map in cooperation with a direct assault. It’s an elegant, well thought out system that makes you think even though it looks trivial on the surface.

Most maps were challenging, even on the easy setting, at least at first. The difficulty level seems to impact only the costs of things for you rather than the way the enemy AI works. But that definitely does impact play. Overall the AI was competent but not as aggressive at times as I would have liked. Once you overcome the initial numerical advantage the computer player has on most maps, things were too easy at times.

But my main complaint with Disciples: Sacred Lands is the way the campaigns are structured. There are four campaigns, each of just four maps. And while the later maps are quite extensive and take a long time to complete I would have rather seen more smaller maps to keep up the variety. This is especially problematic because some of the maps are used in more than one campaign as you play the same battle from different perspectives. This tends to limit replay value. The other problem with the long missions is that if you do end up screwing up and losing your best leader you really have no choice but to start over more often than not. When you’ve spent 3 hours on a map this can be frustrating.

Despite this fault, I really like the elegant game design in Disciples. It doesn’t get bogged down in needlessly complex tactical combat and too many features. What it does it does eminently well and I found myself wanting to continue playing, a definite sign that the game has not only captured but held my interest. And with the included map editor and a solid multiplayer mode, long term play value may well improve… provided enough people take the time to discover this potential sleeper hit of a game.

Graphics, Sound, etc.

Disciples looks pretty good. While it can only be run at the default 640×480 resolution, a definite drawback, the maps are colorful and attractive. Especially fun is the way the map warps in look as the different factions gain control of new territory. Unit animations on the map look good, you can tell that units are flying, walking, etc. The only complaint I had about the units was that from behind many of the leader types look the same, so it is often hard to tell what sort of leader you are attacking until you join combat. Combat animation is limited to one for each unit type, but they all look good, and some are quite cool indeed.

Sound effects are adequate, though uninspired. One nice thing is that you hear spell effects and combat results on the main map even if you can’t see where they happened, letting you keep track of what your opponents are up to. In combat each unit also has death and attack sounds. I quite liked the background music, which had an operatic sort of flavor, and was definitely in keeping with the epic scope of the game.

For each mission in the campaigns a black and white animated briefing sets the stage, and a similar one is played when you win. Winning a campaign gives a full screen video segment. I thought the short briefing animations were excellent, reminiscent of the wonderful work in Thief: The Dark Project in feel. And while the other multimedia was fine, it didn’t have the same impact as the artistically rendered mission videos.

The attractively formatted game manual has everything you need to know included. Not only does it describe the already intuitive interface and game mechanics, but it includes detailed information on all the unit types you may face in the game. A nice addition that.

The Verdict

There isn’t any doubt that Disciples: Sacred Lands is a fun game that any fan of turn-based fantasy strategy games is going to enjoy. With a slightly different campaign structure featuring more, shorter missions this would have garnered the coveted Intelligamer Intelligent Choice Award, but even as it is it will keep you vastly entertained.