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BattleForge is a fantasy online real-time strategy game where you assemble your own army with collectible trading cards. Win, trade and buy your cards online to create your ultimate deck. Mix and match the elements of your cards to play with your friends online and conquer massive online battlegrounds. For mortals caught in a clash between insane gods and ancient giants, standing together is the only option. Using the forces of Fire, Frost, Nature and Shadow a mysterious Forge which makes legends come to life, is their single hope to create armies powerful enough to overcome these impossible odds. It is now time to set out and reclaim an epic fantasy world which has been overthrown by sinister powers in the twilight of a dying sun.

Review by 'Total PC Gaming' (9 / 10):

"We blame the rise and domination of the Pokémon era for making trading card games childish and uncool. Well, maybe trading card games were always a bit uncool – most of us above the age of 14 won’t be caught bragging to the local hoodies about the stats of our recently acquired, ultra-rare Twilight Wrathgazer after all. But they don’t need to be a glorified game of Top Trumps and they don’t have to come in shiny foil wrappers and enough non-recyclable packaging to swamp a landfill. We’re sure EA has pushed the point that BattleForge is a significant cut, even above Magic: The Gathering, but in case you were in any doubt then no, just because it involves swapping virtual pieces of printed card with other players it doesn’t mean that Phenomic has conceived of a cunning new way to scam pocket money from ten-year-olds.

BattleForge hinges on a card system, but at its heart is an accessible yet extremely sophisticated RTS game. You begin with a starter pool of several dozen cards, some mandatory and some randomly selected. Each of these will represent a different spell, building or unit that you can summon onto the map in-game, but you will be limited to a 20-card deck threshold so you’ll have to balance any deck play carefully. To kick-start your game, a tutorial deck is built for you that’s suited to the single-player campaign games you begin with, and it’s here you’ll get a taste for the diversity in deck and strategy combinations that are available from mission to mission. Player cards are divided in four elemental powers: Fire for an attack focus, Frost for defence, Nature for healing and buffs, and the Shadow faction, which specialises in huge damage to the enemy at considerable risk to your own army. You can mix and match factions as much as you like, but there’s more to the reasoning behind the construction of each deck than tailoring a complementary balance of spells, units and buildings to the trials of a map.

Playing a card requires a certain amount of power, the basic resource of BF and space inside the unit limit for each map. This is the easy part, especially at the start of each map, as you’ll start with a small reserve of power and often a power generator that will drip-feed you the resource until it runs dry. But you also need at least one monument associated with the faction of the card you want to play, and this is where hindsight will prove useful because though you can convert captured monuments to any faction type for a 250 power fee, there usually aren’t more than half a dozen or so monuments on each map. Bottom-level cards, such as archers or skeletons, only have a single monument requirement. But more powerful units such as Frost’s Tremor will need a single monument of its own type, plus several others. Some of the more difficult summons, such as Nature’s Forestkin Dominator, need three monuments (two of which have to be aligned to nature). This is fine if the deck that you’re using is exclusively nature-oriented, but if you’re adding it to decks that include two or more different factions then you might want to consider replacing a card that could limit your high-level summoning potential.

Mixing all four factions isn’t recommended for anyone except experienced players with a very specific game plan in mind; it usually limits your deck to a select few high-level cards, and unless you can capture and hold one monument of each type then you might not even be able to summon them. However, an effective faction mix can prove as potent as a Bombay cocktail.

Faction strengths complement each other in the same way a mixed MMO group does, so if you construct your deck with front-line Fire type offensive in mind, supported by defensive Frost, buffed and healed by Nature and a choice Shadow spell or two, you’ll potentially be able to create a well-rounded army capable of handling the average enemy incursion. But BF is anything if not unpredictable, and both the terrain and different enemy units you face from map to map – especially those controlled by human opponents – can all change the dynamic of the game in a single throw of the dice. This is why BF allows you to create many different decks and tailor them for specific scenarios, and it’s also the prime reason for its eponymous hub: the BattleForge.

The BattleForge Arena is simply a place to play and experiment deck and card combinations. There’s absolutely no power, monument or cooldown restrictions on your cards so you can summon whatever you like whenever you like, and throw as many or as few Twilight enemies at them. Think of it as the BattleForge holodeck suite: you can try anything here with no consequences whatsoever, leaving you free to replicate certain scenarios and battles then practice until you’re happy with the outcome. There are several different types of terrain around the outskirts of the arena, plus two opposing forts in the bottom corners, so you can also practice your siegecraft and fort defense. If you want the automated enemy to perform certain manoeuvres then you can switch between sides for any length of time to position them. The only thing you can’t do is play against a friend in the BattleForge, but given that the AI is unpredictable and fairly devious, you’re not going to miss playing against a human opponent. And as we’ve said before, the number of playable card strategies would make a quantum physicist’s mind reel, so even highly experienced players can be caught on the hop.

The BF trading system branches out of this hub and you can chat and trade with hundreds of other players that aren’t currently playing in a scenario, even while you’re trying a deck out in the arena. BattleForge Points can be bought from the shop and used to purchase Booster decks, which work like virtual versions of tangible trading card games and add eight randomly selected cards to your pool. These can include upgrade cards, which directly improve the stats of specifi c units – but buying lots of boosters won’t necessarily give you any advantage in-game and a carefully selected deck coupled with a canny strategy will always beat a gung-ho player playing a deck rammed with rare cards. Doubles can be traded or placed into the auction house and sold for BattleForge Points, though the BF market has far from stabilised. Brown common cards naturally sell for next to nothing, but silver uncommon and gold rares are by far the most profi table, while powerful ultra-rare cards don’t appear to command nearly as high a price as they should. While we’re taking it for granted that, just like an MMO auction house, BF players are still getting used to the strategic value of each summon, Phenomic is continuously balancing stats and summoning pre-requisites of the 200 cards available as well as the frequency of their appearance in purchased packs, which is obviously having a variable effect on the market.

The BF hub is just a means to an end of course, the end being the actual strategy game. There will be a glut of players who revel in trading in particular, but short of savvy trades and pouring money into buying more BF Points, there’s no progression without putting your deck of choice into play. Extra cards are rewarded to players that complete scenarios and there are other benefi ts too, including PvP and PvE experiences that can improve your player ranking and gold rewards – a resource apparently implemented by EA to stop profi teers from farming the game, as a certain amount is needed to sell any card. This should slow the productivity of any potential farmer to the point that it becomes unprofi table, but for genuine players this resource should practically be transparent.

BattleForge is split into single player, team co-op and multiplayer scenarios that unlock as you complete campaign missions. The story has it that the powers of Twilight threaten the world and it’s only through an alliance of Fire, Frost, Nature and Shadow factions, plus the power of the BattleForge, that you will prevail. If it sounds generic, that’s because it is. But in a rare stroke of insight that sees the German developer recognise the fact that players will prioritise the keenly realised plot a distant second to playtime, Phenomic has made the story a completely optional experience. There are no lengthy cut scenes, large blocks of text appear only on loading screens, in-game narration is brief and functional, and any additional information is unlocked and placed in your tome on the BattleForge hub for you to read at your leisure. Purists might want to immerse themselves – after all, as PC gamers we do tend to love getting involved in every modicum of detail our games throw at us – but you don’t have to wade through pages of relatively superfl uous information. And if you do cut straight to the action, you won’t be penalised for the novella you skipped prior to the scenario.

And the action comes thicker and faster than a McDonald’s milkshake, primarily because base building has been cut from BattleForge, at least in the traditional sense. Fortifi ed walls can be erected by either side in fi xed positions on each map, and their walls and turrets can be manned by small ranged units who gain strong defensive bonuses as a result. But the tech tree and any fantasy equivalent of a construction yard has been completely done away with. Instead, available units can only be summoned within a short radius of monuments or generators, while spells can only be activated within a certain distance of your units. Holding on to monuments becomes vitally important and it’s usually prudent to stick a few Frost towers or similar fortifi ed structures, or at least some defensive units, around a monument if it’s liable to attack. You might not be able fend the enemy off with these alone, but it should buy you some time before you can summon enough troops to defend it properly.

It’s often easy to gain monuments and power nodes even in the early stages of a map, so we found we could summon a respectable-looking force right into the upper tiers of our bespoke deck within minutes of play. The enemy can be equally as formidable, resulting in sprawling battles and often huge losses on both sides. But because unit caps and power availability are set so high, almost any army created is expendable and can be replaced within minutes if necessary. Singleplayer scenarios can be made up of objectives that include killing bosses and seizing control of fortifi cations, but the rules change for PvP action. It quickly becomes apparent that a battle of attrition is completely pointless and that your best bet is to target a monument and go all-out to gain control of it. The desperate scrabble to attack or defend these strategic points is excruciatingly tense, especially when a single monument can mean the difference between either you or your enemy having the ability to summon a powerful four-monument unit, and they’re always exhilarating to watch. The four factions are each distinctive in shape and colour – their units range in size from the Shadow’s tiny Forsaken to Nature’s gigantic Colossus – and if you throw in a few spells to help swing things your way (like the impressive Frost Maelstrom), you get a spectacle that competes and trumps any top-tier Red Alert 3 battle on a regular basis.

It’s frenetic, gorgeous to watch, even better to play and goes some way to buttoning the holy grail of games development; being easy to learn and infi nitely diffi cult to master. But what’s impressed us most is the seamless way Phenomic has grafted card trading, realm of the uber-geek, onto an original RTS game with a highly original MMO-style hub underpinning the entire experience. You might not be forced to buy any more cards than those that came with your BattleForge purchase, but we’d be very surprised if the booster decks alone don’t pay EA huge dividends. After 27 March there will be a glut of traditional RTS gamers wondering why and at what point they became obsessed with the number of ultra-rare cards in their deck."

Ben Biggs