Written by Brian Beck, 5/28/2006
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.
