What could have been a great RPG/RTS hybrid is unfortunately rather broken...
The problems with Spellforce 2 are many. First of all, the UI is huge, it takes up over half the screen, which is a real pain in the a** when you try to select units.
Speaking of selecting units, unlike every other game where double clicking on a soldier takes you straight to that character on screen, Spellforce 2 does not do that. So say that I want to find my newly resurrected hero and go straight to him, shouldn't be a problem right? WRONG! You are forced to either locate that one guy on the mini map which is absolutely cluttered with icons, or search for him manually, or click somewhere on the map and politely wait until the guy shows up on your screen until you have any clue where he is. Very annoying.
Also, say you want to heal one of your characters? In any other RPG you would simply click the spell and press that character's portrait, but not in Spellforce 2! No, no, that would be far too convenient. Instead, you must locate said character (which is a pain in the a**, as earlier mentioned), and select their tiny, tiny character model on the battlefield, which in the case of a moving target feels like playing miniature whack-a-mole. Very annoying.
The RTS parts get more intrusive the further you play as well, and on the later levels, they are nothing short of tedious and frustrating. Your enemy can summon tons of troops out of their a** at will, while you must contend with the meager resources available to you. And more often than not, a lot of these resources are placed directly in the enemy camp. Very annoying.
On top of that, the AI is mostly retarded and will attack buildings like farms rather than kill enemy towers and villagers that are repairing them. And the game doesn't even pause when you are in a cutscene, so your army can be completely decimated while you are stuck watching your characters talk. Heck, at some times I skipped over the entire dialogue just to save time, but hen the game still decided it would be fun to travel through time and place a whole enemy army inside your camp even though you were holding them off just fine 10 seconds ago. Very annoying.
Then we have some of the quest lines, which just goes on and on and on and on and... you get the picture. I think I had over 5 of them where you just had to run around over 7 freaking maps gathering items, and when you think you are done, you get tasked to go fetch EVEN MORE items. At that point, I gave the side quests a royal middle finger and continued through the tedium that is the main quest. Oh, and very annoying, lest we forget.
The plot itself isn't exactly great either. You are a shaikan, your lands are under attack, you must gather some allies to defend them, oh no, plot twist! You must now gather new allies that were previously your enemies, and your old friends are now your new enemies on top of the first enemy! Oh, now you must go into a side trail to pad the story and game even longer by finding a magic ring so you can see some sh*t that doesn't really matter because they become you allies too and blaargh...! F*ck it, I am not cleaning that up...
Oh, and the dialogue and voice acting mostly sucks as well.
On to the really broken stuff: There are glitches everywhere, like models clipping through and the usual stuff, quests not updating properly, some crashes, and the most fun one of all: a frozen camera bug that completely ruins your way to finish the game! Yippie! I've had it happen several times now, one time it made all characters invisible, another all AI died, and some maps become completely frozen so you can't do sh*t other than teleporting away to a new island, some dialogues make the game freeze so you can't go on, and just recently, a puzzle on the second last map became unsolvable due to the f*cking camera freezing up you every time you do anything. Incredibly f*cking annoying!
So why even a 5.5? I don't know, I guess I really enjoyed the first half of it before it became a tedious, boring, buggy piece of sh*t!
Okay, enough venting, I'm gonna make me a sandwich and find something else to complain about...