Eternal Forces is a
licensed game taking place in the world of the popular Left
Behind novel series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
It is a real-time strategy game much like Warcraft 2, but placed
in an eschatological setting.

What is eschatology and what are these novels talking about? If
you taught Sunday School and know the answer to these questions,
then skip ahead to the Game Play section. For the rest of us, here
is a quick look into a world which most people have never heard about.

Eschatology is the branch of theology which concerns itself with
the end of the world or of mankind. In this case, we are talking
about Christian theology. The Christian religion is splintered into
many denominations (sects) and each one has its own opinion of the
End Times. All of them share the following major events, although
they disagree over the order and just how literally they believe
the scriptures will be fulfilled.

1. All the Christians
   get their act together. (Ep 5:27) In what can only be defined
   as a Divine miracle, Christians all over the
   world start behaving as if they were disciples of Christ. In
   the past, when this has happened locally on a small scale, many
   unbelieving
   people would decide this was a pretty good thing and would become
   Christians. These were called “Revivals.”
2. The “Rapture” (I
   Th.4:16-17) The Church, having finally become what God intended
   all along, is transported straight up into
   Heaven. This causes
   great chaos on earth as economies collapse from the lack of workers and
   managers.
3. The (Great) Tribulation.
   (Mt.24:21) With the Church safely out of the way, God is finally
   able to vent His anger which has been building
   up all these
   millennium. His wrath is poured out for seven years through a series
   of natural and supernatural disasters which destroys much of the life
   on earth. Through
   out this time many people still come to Christ, but Satan himself comes
   to earth and possesses a world leader who fights and persecutes these
   young believers.
   This person is known as The Beast and The Anti-Christ.
4. The Second Coming.
   (Mt.25:31-32) Jesus comes back to earth with all of Heaven. He
   gets rid of all unbelievers and all the demonic,
   chaining
   them in The Pit
   for a thousand years.
5. The Millennial
   Kingdom. (Da.2:44) Christ sets up the perfect kingdom on earth
   which lasts for one thousand years. No more sickness, no
   more war, no
   more aging. At the end of that time, Satan is released to allow
   for one last temptation. Hey, everyone has to get tempted and
   it isn’t
   fair that
   those who
   were born after the Kingdom was established should miss out.
6. Armageddon. (Re20:7-9)
   Satan recruits everyone he can and marches on Jerusalem. God
   causes fire to come down from Heaven and destroys
   them all before the first
   shot is fired. Enough is enough and God passes final judgment
   on everyone – humans,
   angels and demons alike.
7. New Heaven and
   Earth (Re.21:1) God, having accomplished everything He intended
   with heaven and earth, melts them both down and creates
   new ones which are
   perfect and in which is no evil. We are not told anything about
   what happens after this.

Eternal
Forces takes place
during Part 3, just after the rapture when the earth is in a state
of chaos and newly converted believers
must fight for their lives against “The Beast.”

The whole point of this is that there is a spiritual reality behind
all the stuff that is going on. The Leader isn’t just out to get
rid of annoying religious people, he is waring against God and His
purposes. And believers aren’t just resisting against religious intolerance,
but are fighting against evil spirits and the prince of evil himself.
One must conquer in the spirit world first because the earthly world
is just a refection of that deeper reality.

OK, now you have a vague idea of where the game is coming from.
How well does it play?

Game Play

Eternal Forces is a Real-Time Strategy/Resource Management game.
Classic examples would include Populous and Warcraft
2.

You start out with a few people. You send them out to gather supplies.
The supplies help you get more people and to build infrastructure.
The infrastructure helps your people become more powerful. You continue
gathering and building until you are strong enough to defeat the
enemy. Of course, the enemy is doing the same thing at the same time.

To play these types of games well, you must know your strengths
and weaknesses as well as those of your opponent and leverage your
resources so as to tip the advantage in your direction. This usually
means keeping track of lots of things at the same time. How are the
resources coming? Am I spending them on the most useful stuff? Is
everyone where I need them to be? What is the enemy doing? Have I
protected myself adequately? What is my best strategy? Is everyone
busy doing something? It is easy to get overwhelmed.

For me, it has always boiled down to how quickly and efficiently
you can control your units. I loved Populous, but could only get
through half of the levels before the computer got faster than me.
At that point there was no way I could win. I loved Warcraft
2, but
could never finish the final levels because I couldn’t jump around
the screen and control things as quickly as the computer. So one
of my first questions about Eternal Forces was how efficiently could
I control my units.

Unfortunately, the answer
for me was, “Not well.”

The first problem I ran into was the buildings. They were always
in the way. It was nice that LB Games decided to make a realistic
3D setting, but it did nothing for the game play. As you can see
from the screen shots, sometimes the buildings were translucent,
sometimes they were opaque. Sometimes you could see your units as
green shadows through the buildings. Most of the time I was just
wondering what was on the other side where I couldn’t see.

You can raise and lower the camera, but by the time it is high enough
for the buildings not not be a problem, your units are too small
to see or control. Can you see my Disciple in the aerial Shot? Or
is that my Medic? So I found that I was spending much too much time
struggling with the camera angle when I should have been directing
my units.

Which leads me to the
next frustration – Everything looks
alike. You must take over abandoned buildings and convert them to
your needs. But only certain buildings are available and they can
only be converted into one or two choices. To me, they all looked
the same and I found myself wandering around the city trying to find
the right one. Time wasted when I should have been building or upgrading.

Ditto for your units. They are small at the best of times and I
found I had to get right up on them to be able to tell them apart.
More camera angle misery.

And speaking of moving around, don’t even think about playing this
game unless you have a very powerful gaming system. I tried playing
it on a system with the minimum requirements and I could not get
through the tutorial. Whenever I got close to the side of the screen
everything would slow down and I could never crawl over to the edge.
Which meant that I couldn’t get to the building which the tutorial
wanted me to get to.

So I moved over to an AMD 2600+ with GForce 6600. I could now get
to the edge, but it was still slow. Heaven help you if you need to
take action anywhere other than the center of the playing field.

Now, if all that wasn’t
bad enough, just when you think you might have things under control – you
have everyone busy doing what they need to be doing. Then you notice
that you are losing units
all across the board. What’s happening?

It turns out that each unit has a Spirit level. Your units have
a high level. The enemy has a very low level. Innocent passers by
are in the middle. But your units don’t stay there. Your high Spirit
will slowly drop with time until the unit becomes neutral and you
have to recruit and train them all over again. To prevent this from
happening, you can order a unit to pray. This raises the meter by
3%. You can’t order units to automatically pray and they can’t do
anything else while they are praying.

So much of your precious time must be spent going around the board
and clicking on every unit to make sure they are prayed up. Over
and over again.

Now, to be fair, Eternal
Forces brings several interesting variations
to the game.

First is the concept of Spirit points. You must recruit all of your
units from the general population. This raises their points initially,
but you have to keep on them to keep the points up.

In the same way, you don’t
have to kill the enemy units to get rid of them. Your units have
powers which raise the spirit and if the
enemy gets too high, they break ranks and become neutral. This is
encouraged in the game as killing an enemy costs you a spirit point,
but “saving” them wins you two points.

Conclusion

Eternal Forces is an RTS with a couple of interesting variations.
It is written in a religious setting, but is not preachy nor does
it condone violence against the heathens. If anything, it discourages
violence and intolerance.

The game was just too complicated for me to enjoy. But, to be fair,
I am an Old Fart and the game was written for the young, gamers crowd.
It is entirely possible that a younger player with quicker reflexes
would love this game. But I doubt it.

You need hair reflexes
with manic speed and control to play the game, but the action does
not follow at the same pace. You are expending
much more effort than the action on the screen would seem to indicate – clicking
wildly around the screen just to make sure that your units stay put.
I have a hard time believing that this mix will work for anyone.

So, we have a professionally crafted game, but with significant
flaws. It comes close, but I just don’t think it’s going to make
it with either the Gamers, who will want more screen action, or the
Adventurers, who will want less adrenaline. That gives it a C+.

System Requirements:

• Windows® XP SP1¹,
• Pentium® IV 2.0GHz processor or faster,
• 512MB RAM,
• Minimum 1GB hard disk
  space,
• 8x CD/DVD-ROM drive
  or faster,
• 32MB DirectX9.0c compatible
  GeForce MX440 or ATI Radeon 8500 video card or higher,
• DirectX 9.0c compatible
  sound card,
• TCP/IP for LAN or
  56 Kbps modem (2 player games) or Cable/DSL modem (3-8 player
  games) and an
  Internet service provider account required for Internet
  multiplayer²,
• Microsoft compatible
  keyboard and mouse.

This may require
minor adjustments to the configuration of your system and/or updates
to the hardware component
drivers.
¹ Administrator
privileges are required.
² User is responsible for all Internet access fees and phone charges