The Heroes of Might & Magic series dates back to almost a decade ago, and the fundamentals that made the original such a success has followed on with every release thereafter. Heroes of Might & Magic is a turn-based strategy game set in a fantasy universe where there is only war amongst the earths inhabits. Gamers begin most scenarios with almost nothing besides a castle, a hero and a few dozen troops, and with this must survey the land for resource points (crystals, wood, ore), discover treasures, defeat hostile enemies and pillage castles. From there, gamers must then conserve their resources in buying new structures that allow gamers to hire new creatures for their army. Structures such as a town hall where you can buy additional heroes, talk to the barman for some helpful pointers or even payoff a spy to tell you information about your opponents. Other essential structures such as creature dwellings and magic towers are all the basic requirements in building the ultimate army.
So, basically, gamers must swiftly capture resource points, and build their army before their opponents make their move. It’s a gameplay style that always keeps you on the edge, unaware of what your opponent is preparing at his or her own castle. The world that you play in only makes this gameplay style even more enjoyable. Heroes V itself replicas a scene from a child’s storybook; the land is very rich in detail and colour and there’s all sorts of mythical creatures such as Dragons, Unicorns and Minotaurs inhabiting the land. And this is Heroes’ charm. Gamers are able to escape to a mystical world and indulge themselves is such fantasies.
Heroes of Might & Magic is known for its content, and Heroes V is no different. The game consists of a very beefy campaign mode that spans across six interconnected stories that follows the game’s story from the perspective of the different armies in the game, with each campaign consisting of five missions each. Heroes V’s campaign mode is a bit of a downer when compared to previous versions though. In keeping up with technology and spiffy graphics, Nival has stripped out the engaging novel-like introductions and story progressions and substituted them with average cut-scenes, while engaging, just lack that impact of a great story as witnessed in Heroes of Might & Magic IV – the king of campaign modes. What is there though, isn’t too bad. The story is a little clichéd, but there are several twists and interesting encounters that make it worth the trouble. The great thing about these missions is that you get to carryover your hero to each mission and help create the story yourself. It’s also a good change of pace to start some missions without anything at all and work your way up, as well as being given different objectives than simply slaughtering your enemy.
How's that for a flash? Get it? Because she's flashing her... uh forget it
In addition to this, Heroes V has a number of stand-alone scenarios and maps that gamers can play against the computer or against other players in hot seat, LAN and online modes. The single player maps tend to be seen as the core of the game, however, Heroes V doesn’t exactly excel in this area like previous installments did. Unfortunately, there is no random map generator, no map editor and there isn’t a great deal of maps on offer at this stage. There are six scenario maps to play, which play much like the maps from the campaign (play the role of someone and follow out a story), and there are only another nine single player maps where the objective is to either defeat the enemy, capture objective and a few maps where it’s a race to dig-up a hidden treasure. While this isn’t necessary a bad thing, since most maps will have gamers plowing away at the keyboard for a five hour minimum, we just hope that Nival Interactive are a company that delivers frequent updates through patches, much like New World Computing did in the past - and we loved them for it.
Multiplayer is never that exciting in turn-based games, and Heroes V is no different. A typical Heroes game can last anywhere over five hours, so having to wait between long turns can become a very tedious process. Nival have made an effort to sort out a few issues with the multiplayer experience, and has at least tried to make it a bit more tolerable to play. Gamers can now have time restrictions on their turns to fasten things up, and new modes such as Ghost and Duel offer a bit more flexibility in terms of time and gameplay style. In Ghost mode gamers can control a ghost unit during their opponent’s turn, allowing gamers to roam the land, plan out a few strategies whilst waiting as well as cause a little havoc here and there. Gamers can use these ghosts to meddle with your opponent’s units and resources, and this new option does make the wait between those long turns a bit more interesting. On the other hand, Duel mode offers a great quick pick-up-and-play option where you go face-to-face with two high-level heroes and their armies.
The combat is virtually unchanged from previous versions too, with the typical Heroes formula still in place. Each battle begins with your opponents units on one side as well as yours on the other side. The battle then trades turns between units, which allows gamers to strategically move their units across the battlefield in a chess-like fashion – just with a whole lot of special attacks and magic. Each of your units has a numeric value under them that represents how many of that unit you have, which moves and attacks as a single unit. Heroes V introduces a new feature to combat too. There is now a bar at the bottom of the screen during each battle, which monitors whose turn is next. This bar becomes an important aspect of battles now since when one of your troops receives moral they will no longer receive another attack straight after, but rather their next attack will be positioned ahead of where their next attack was planned to take place.
Would you believe me if I said that one unit was able to take out everything else?
Heroes are treated very similar as to how they were in Heroes III, in which they no longer play a demanding role as was shown in Heroes IV, with Heroes now once again restricted to only using magic attacks, as well as basic shooting and charging attacks. As your hero grows, his abilities grow also. Statistics such as attack power, defence and magic attack can be improved by winning battles and gaining experience points, or by touching certain objects on the map to boost certain stats. These stats are more-often-than-not very important in determining who can win. It isn’t necessary who has the largest number will always win, however if your hero has better statistics than your opponent it could mean that your one Black Dragon could easily annihilate five of your opponents Black Dragons depending on your skill points. With each level gained your hero will also be awarded with special abilities, with most abilities being unique from faction-to-faction. This is probably one of the better areas of Heroes V when compared to previous versions.
Every faction has certain abilities to correspond perfectly to their race. For instance the faction Academy (the team with Goblins and Titans and etc) are a team that comprises of creatures that use a lot of magic, and in previous versions they always had the upper hand in magic spells. This is no different in Heroes V. Instead of just having those bare minimums, your hero can also learn additional skills that boost their skills in using magic such as sorcery skills that are unique to that team. Each faction can also build unique structures that no other faction can also. The Academy team can build an Arcane Forge that allows heroes to make and equip special items to their creatures, while in addition other factions can sacrifice units for experience or to even boost their weekly creature growth. This isn’t all. Heroes IV incorporated a few new special abilities for faction units, such as the Griffins being able to have unlimited retaliation, vampires able to life drain and genjis to use various spells. While this remains mostly the same in Heroes V, the special abilities are a bit more rewarding and correspond perfectly with the creature type and their faction. For example units attacking the ghosts units from the undead faction can often miss since they’re actually… well, ghosts. Other cool new abilities include the inferno faction able to summon demons, phoenixes having a fire barrier around them – so when you attack them close range you lose health.
This is probably one of Heroes V’s strongest attributes, since there’s so much variety between each team that you’ll invest hours into learning one faction, only to spend equally as much time learning the basics and abilities of the other faction. Heroes V is probably one of deepest experiences out of the entire series, in terms of with so much at hand.
Dawn of a new era.
Heroes V is a presentation marvel. The game boasts some fantastic bright, colourful 3D graphics that bring the experience alive. It’s brilliant to see some of the old regular structures from previous Heroes games and recreated in 3D. The creature models are nicely detailed and animated during combat, and the magic spell effects look really superb. With the leap to a full 3D engine comes a few new techniques for the game also. Gamers can now rotate the camera around and scale the camera in or out during battles or on the regular map giving you a number of different perspectives of battles and your surrounding area. The only real downside to such a superb outing is that the campaign’s cut-scenes aren’t particularly up-to-date. While they don’t look terrible, they have a similar quality to the outstanding games from 2004 or early 2005. The soundtrack is pretty inspiring too, consisting of some well orchestral tracks that create a great atmosphere for the tone for the game and each faction’s areas. The dreadful voice acting is a different story, however. During the campaign missions the cut-scenes have some very uninspiring voice actors who read their lines without any emotion at all, which doesn’t help in making an engaging story.
Well that’s it. Heroes of Might & Magic is back and Heroes V is a fairly good attempt at resurrecting one of our favourite franchisers ever made. There a few very minor aspects that brings this game down from being the best in the series – voice acting, story depth is lacking (the novel-like stories were beautiful), some minor early retail bugs, some AI trouble, no random map generator and not many single player/multiplayer maps on hand. While these are subject to change from person to person, these were some of the errors that stood out and prevented Heroes V from being better than previously versions. Thankfully, the improvements made to the series really make this game worth a look, and hell, the gameplay is damn addictive.
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