Birthright Review

Info about the game. Is it worth playing?

The Game World

Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance lets you take control of the regent of a realm of your choice in the fantasy land of Anuire, originally developed as a campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game, and thus populated by Tolkienesque beings like elves, goblins, dwarves and trolls. The main story concerns the regents vying for dominance over the land in an attempt to unite against the threat of the evil Gorgon. While this in itself is of course rather cliche, the game world has all the depth of a carefully developed tabletop roleplaying setting, and the manual lets the players lose themselves in the history of the land if they like to. Some of this depth was lost in the conversion to the play mechanics of a computer game, however; but it is still possible to achieve the feeling of immersing in a «real» made-up world here, rather than just the sketchy backdrop provided by most strategy games. Though fans of the tabletop game may complain that the PC game rendering isn’t faithful enough to the «real thing», the depth of the game world is one of the strengths of the game, in my view.

Genre

The computer game version of Birthright consisted of three sections: a board-like, turn-based strategy game, a section for commanding your armies in battle, and a «roleplaying» game (or rather: «Doom» clone) that didn’t quite integrate as well with the other two as it ought to. It therefore makes sense to review the sections separately.

The Strategy Game

Battles and Armies

Adventures/Roleplaying

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