Heroes of Might and Magic V Review
Played on:
Windows
I’ve never been too good at real-time strategy games. While I definitely enjoyed the battles, I was never good at the base-building stuff and deciding what units to build when. Playing Warcraft 3 online was a test to see how long it took my opponents to beat me – I could rarely win.
However, turn-based strategy games were always of interest to me. I didn’t have to rush to build 24 zerglings to charge into my opponent 30 seconds after the game started – I could take my time to think out my decisions. For that reason, I started in with the Heroes of Might and Magic series around the third installment. I really enjoyed it. Sure, I had to keep up with building a base, but it wasn’t really the same as it is in a game like Starcraft – I just built one building per turn. Battles were also fun as I had more time to plan just how I wanted to let the battle play out.
However, the Heroes of Might and Magic series almost died a horrible death when 3D0 and developer New World Interactive went under. The series, based in the world of the Might and Magic RPG games, had picked up massive popularity and was up to the fourth installment in the series. Many fans of the series rejoiced when they heard that the series was then picked up by Ubisoft and the next one would be developed by Nival Interactive.
Nival, well-known for their Etherlords series, has been making fantasy-type games for awhile. Nival has also put out some other good games -- Evil Islands was an RPG while Silent Storm was a tactical strategy type game where you commanded a small squad of guys in a World War II setting. Nival's history made Ubisoft's decision to pass the series to them even easier.
Heroes of Might and Magic V is an enjoyable game. It has been awhile since I played a Heroes game – I hardly played IV, though I did play III more than that. From everything I’ve read and been told, the game is like a ‘best-of’, combining the good parts of III and IV. Well, Nival did a good job of picking what to bring over and wrapped it all up in a gorgeous 3D engine. They’ve made some new introductions to the series, namely the initiative system. Heroes, while not jumping out into unfamiliar territory, is still a good game.
The first thing that will jump out at anyone that has played previous Heroes games is the fully 3D world. On the world map and in battles, everything is done in 3D. While the default view of a battle is very similar to that of previous games in the series, you can rotate the camera around. This can be particularly helpful in castle sieges as units may be blocked from view by the walls. Also, you can get a nice view of your cities with camera rotation – you’ll actually be able to see all the little buildings you’ve put up.
Staying with the graphics, the animations and unit models are incredible. Each unit will animate differently. The imps were particularly funny when they’d steal my heroes mana at the start of a fight by ‘grabbing’ it from thin air then seemingly eating it. They’d then move towards me by sidestepping their way across the battlefield. Then their succubus friend would get a closeup and hurl a gigantic fireball at my army – all animated nicely with pretty particle effects – and decimate a large chunk of my troops. That’s when I’d send the griffin flying in to destroy the fireball-spewing succubi. All the different animations and looks for units make them each feel unique and fun to use, if only to see how they’ll animate in a fight.
One major issue with the 3D graphics in the overworld and underworld is that things are sometimes blocked from view. You might miss an artifact on the map, for example, if you don’t rotate your view around constantly. Rotating the map isn’t difficult, but it can get irritating to have moved three or four turns worth of movement past a nice item and realize you missed it. It won’t take too terribly long to get used to this, though – the camera doesn’t really kill the game.
Also, the 3D engine isn’t put to full use in battles. Before, the game was pretty limited in what it could do for terrain on the battlefield – logs and other such stuff on the ground could be used strategically to block off enemies from getting to your archers or other fragile units. The move to 3D had the potential to allow for walls for cover from archer-type units, for example. Walls of varying height could have provided more or less cover as could, say, moving into a small grove of trees. None of these ideas were added, though.
Each of the game’s six ‘factions’ are well-represented graphically, too. Elves (Sylvan faction) definitely have a very nature-type feel, while the human-type faction (Haven) are the knights in shining armor ones. Demons naturally are big on that whole fire deal (and are called ‘Inferno’) while the Undead (Necropolis faction) are all about plague and disease. The dark elves (Dungeon faction) are shrouded and have the evil feel about them while you can also definitely tell who the mages (Academy faction) are. I was really impressed by how each faction had a vastly different feel to it both in unit typoes and unit graphics.
The biggest change gameplay-wise comes in with the use of the initiative meter. Units with higher morale will get to go earlier in the combat and will also get to go more often. Scattered around maps are places to get morale increases – these will definitely be a help in some of the tougher battles. The initiative, though, adds another layer of strategy to the battle. When you try to attack a unit, you’ll get a tooltip that will tell you how much damage you could possibly do to the unit. It’ll generally be in a range, like 17-29 units killed. Now, you could try to kill that squad of 29 guys that goes next and may destroy your few archers that you have left…or you could try to charge in and take out the single big unit they have sitting on their back lines. That’s just one example of how the initiative serves to make battles deeper, more engaging and more strategic.
Composing your army is interesting. You’ll have seven ‘slots’ for units. For the unfamiliar with the series, like units are grouped up and the amount of members of a particular unit are represented by a number under them. They all act as one – when you attack, their damage is multiplied by the number of unit members and when they get attacked, a certain number of members will be lost dependent on the damage the enemy does and the hit points of the individual member. For example, if a unit member has 5 hit points and an enemy does 50 damage, you’ll lose 10 members of the unit. You can also split large units up – you can take a group of 500 archers and split them into two groups of 250 each. Doing this would give them the chance to attack individually – attacking different targets may prove to be beneficial in some fights. You’ll have to split them before you actually go to battle, though.
At the start of the battle, you’ll get a chance to place these units on a starting grid – placing them based on terrain is quite helpful since bigger units can help to block off other units from getting to your squishy guys. Some enemies can fly over your guys, however – taking them out can become a huge priority. Also, the heroes play into battle to a degree. They’re isolated from the fight and can’t be attacked, but they can get free swipes on an enemy unit when their turn comes up or they can cast a spell. Generally, I’d use my hero to finish off nearly dead units – their swings are pretty strong. In all, the fights are very strategic, though they aren’t horribly difficult.
Your hero also develops as they did in Heroes IV. You’ll find artifacts as you play and can equip them for new abilities or buffs to the stats of your hero or their army. Also, as you level up, you can get new abilities – you can choose to, say, take a defensive ability that reduces all damage done in melee to your units by 10%. Your hero will also have other interesting abilities, such as one that allows you to counter any attack thrown at one of your units until the hero goes again. There are a ton of these skills available and that really adds to the way you play the game – the abilities you take will generally fall in with the way you play the game. M ore aggressive heroes will likely take more offensive abilities, for example.
Another small issue with the game are some of the text descriptions. It seems much attention wasn’t paid to stuff here – there seems to have been next to no proofreading done before the game was released. It is a small issue, but the type of polish that makes a good game great.
After finishing the single-player campaign, you’ll likely want to go on to play multiplayer. However, I’ve found multiplayer to not be that great – waiting while staring at a game while my opponent takes his turn is not very interesting at all. I wonder how difficult it would be to implement a play-by-email version of the game?
The single player campaigns will last you for awhile, though – even though they aren’t too terribly difficult once you’ve built a sizable army, they are still fun. Sadly, there isn’t a map editor yet (though they are promised somewhere down the line. When they do release, there will definitely be more interesting content for players. Until then, though, the game is somewhat lacking in that department.
Overall, I could recommend this game to many types of gamers – series fans will no doubt enjoy it – it does a great job of emulating one of the better games of the series while adding in enough new stuff to make it feel like a different experience. RPG fans will also find it enjoyable as the battles are all turn-based. Strategy fans that have never touched a Heroes game will likely enjoy it too.
In the end, Heroes V is a good, fun game with a few problems. The graphics are some of the best I’ve ever seen in a strategy game while the sounds are pretty forgettable. The combat in the game is a blast but can be too easy. The single-player game is fun but manages to end sooner than it should with no possibility for player created campaigns (yet). Multiplayer is also lacking – a play-by-email system would have been a huge help to the game. Still, though, it is a good game despite these problems and well worth a pickup, especially with the promise of a map editor down the road.
