Battle Forge, for those of you who don’t know, is a blend of RTS and TCG.  Think of it as Warcraft/Starcraft meets Magic the Gathering.    For me I got into RTS games back in the day of Warcraft 2 and C&C, so I’ve been playing them for a while and over the last few years have gotten pretty bored with the genre.   However Battle Forge has reignited my interest and I’m having a blast.

The big difference in Battle Forge compared to other RTS game is two fold.   The obvious main difference is you create your army using a deck of 20 cards.  Having 100’s of different cards to choose from there’s really endless combination that can be created.  The second difference is you can summon you army from anywhere on the map (as long as you have 1 ground troop already there) and there are no bases.

Resource Gathering

Like any RTS you need resources to create units or structures.  Battle Forge is no different where you have 2 resource types.

Power Pools - Power pools are your mana.  Normally you start a map with 2 and each slowly adds power to you so you can summon more units, building or spells.

Summoning Orbs - There are 4 orbs, 1 color for each race.  Red, Green, Blue, Purple.  The more orbs you control the more powerful units you can summon.

There is no resource management, you don’t need to stay in the area of your resources and you don’t have any peons that gather, it’s all automatic so you can concentrate on fighting.   If your opponent does decide to attack your power pools or orbs, you can summon new units directly there if your main force is too far away.

Combat PvP

Combat is a ton of fun.  You see so many different strategies and deck types that it’s really a challenge to build a deck that can hold up.  One thing I did notice is some units do need rebalancing.  I’ve faced a few people that use very low level units to great effect.  For instance Ice has a cheap low level unit that can knock your units down.  The problem is the cool down is way to short and the unit is cheap so the person can summon 3 of these fairly quickly and keep you units on their ass while their 1 attack unit kills you.   A longer cooldown for the spell or higher summoning cost would fix this right up.

Aside from the early balance issues, PvP is the best part of the game.  When doing a ranked PvP match, you are randomly matched up with someone of similar ranking.  The randomness helps prevend users from exploiting the PvP system to get high ranks.

Combat PvE

While PvE is also fun, it’s nothing really new.  It has all the similar senarios many other RTS games have.  Protect this unit on its travels, guard this town, go kill this boss, etc.   However it does have a co-op mode where in order to complete the story-line you need to complete senarios where you need 2 or 4 players.  I actually prefer the co-op maps to the single player ones, they seem more challenging.

Deck Building

As stated earlier you build your own army using a 20 card deck and there are 4 races to choose from, Ice, Fire, Undead and Nature.   Now because there are only a certain amount of orbs per each map, its best to build a deck with only 1 or 2 colors so you can summon the more powerful units later, since they need 3-4 orbs of the same color.  Deck building at first is a little overwhelming because there are so many cards, but it does get easier once you get familiar with the cards.

Tokens, Gold, and Points

As you play the game you receive gold and various tokens like Honor, Victory and Battle tokens.   Gold can be used to sell you cards in the ingame auction house, however I have no clue what the tokens are used for.  I have yet to find anything in the game that explains what they are or how to use them.  Then theirs BattleForge Points.  These are points that you have to purchase with real money and can be used to buy new card packs or to buy cards via the auction house.  You can get BF points without spending money by selling your cards via the auction house so you can still get new card packs without spending any real money.

Battle Forge is a great game, it’s fast paced, you don’t have to go crazy about resource gathering and it’s a whole new type of RTS game.  Aside from some early balance issues it’s a great game.

Grade: A-

One Response to “BattleForge Review”

1. Dice says:

   April 22, 2009 at 2:20 pm

   Great Review! Personally I like this game allot. Though it does have a couple of balancing issue like you stated I find it to be allot of fun.

   Currently I use a frost deck you can see it here

   Thanks for the great review.