Spellforce III is a game that combines role-play and real-time strategy elements into one, well-balanced experience between an RPG and an RTS game. It was released in 2017., for PC and later, after all expansions were released (Soul Harvest, Fallen God and Versus (free multiplayer-only version)), Spellforce III, got its upgraded version called Spellforce III Reforced in 2021. for PCs and consoles.

*Note: I will not be able to compare this game to the previous titles, because, even though I played both Spellforce I and II, it has passed too much time to be able to give a valid comparison

At the beginning, after you enter the game, in the main menu, you will be greeted with a music track as powerful as the one found in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The good thing is that you will also hear that track several times through the campaign in the most critical parts of the game.
Even though this is the third full release in the Spellforce series, the story takes us back even before the events of Spellforce I. You play as a mage called Tahar, the child of Isamo Tahar, the powerful mage who started the rebellion of mages against the Crown, the Mage Wars. Since you were against your father's beliefs and betrayed him, you almost faced death if the Wolf Guard didn't arrive on time. Your father escaped but died years later after the Mage Wars had finished. Now a part of the Wolf Guard led by General Sentenza Noria (you will soon realise that the voice is from no other than Doug Cockle, known in the videogame world as Geralt of Rivia in all The Witcher games) you help the Crown to stop the Bloodburn, a plague whose nature is still unknown and where you character, Tahar, plays a major role in it.
Your journey starts after you uncover that the Bloodburne is not a plague, but more of a dark magic, and only certain people have an impact from it. Trying to stop Sentenza from burning the whole village you kill Anselm in self-defence. Sentenced to death you wait for your time to come, where Rondar Lacaine (the Purity of Light leader) helps you escape and asks you to help him in return.
After the prologue, the story can be divided into two chapters, the first is where you try to uncover the truth of the Bloodburne and find the source of it. The second part is where you try to stop a certain someone from using the power of the source of the Bloodburne to summon Aonir (god of gods), who will return when the use of magic is forbidden. Along the way, you will meet different companions (where only three of them can be chosen to be in your party simultaneously) and build an army including three races (Humans, Elves and Orcs). The more side quests you complete for a race, the more powerful it will become, making your final battles easier to win. Every race favors offence and defence differently, elves being the most defensive-oriented, orcs being offensive, and humans favor defence and offence equally.
Your Tahar character can be given a name and customised according to your liking, while there aren't many customisation options, there are just enough to make him/her more personalised. After that, as in any RPG, you will be given the possibility to decide two ability trees that will determine what role your character will take in the battles to come. The companions you meet along the way (you will meet quite a number of them) already have decided what they are specialised for and your job is to equip them with better weapons and to level them up as your party level increases. Having a party levelling up system instead of a character levelling system is better since you don't have to change characters all the time to have them somewhat levelled up to the same level. As your party level goes up, all character levels rise the same.
The gameplay is divided into RTS and RPG gameplay, according to the map you're in, since not everywhere you will need your army to be able to complete a quest. While exploring the map, you will be able to find more loot, gear and blueprints that will enhance your troops/building and reduce their upgrade/training/building cost. Many blueprints can be bought from merchants but they cost much, so this way the game wants you to be more thorough while exploring.
The game looks and runs beautifully, you can increase the graphics options as much as possible since you don't need more than 60 fps to enjoy this game.
Since you're building an army and the greater your army is, so is the enemy's army meaning that the difficulty scales a little bit from mission to mission. But the only thing that I found irritating was that at the final battle or two you choose one race to fight with (you can train units from other races, but you still mainly lead one race at the end), instead of having something similar to a majestic and memorable skirmish battle. You have three races at your disposal and so does the enemy, they could have at least given me the option to coordinate with them, to give them orders like occupy this, defend this or something similar. In the „An Uneasy Alliance“ quest I had two other armies (according to the decisions you made in that quest you will either get none, one or two new smaller armies and allies), but I couldn't order them anything, they just rushed through the enemy's land one time and that's it, no coordination at all.

All in all, I loved the story, the gameplay and the soundtrack, but I just hoped the ending battles were more memorable, at the end of the day, this is a great combination of RPG and RTS elements into one almost perfect game.