I had enjoyed
Heroes of Might and Magic III but had heard the fourth game in the series wasn’t very good. During my period of indecision about whether to try it anyway, the fifth game came out (developed by Ubisoft not 3DO as the previous games had been). This received good reviews and looked pretty impressive, so I thought I’d give it a go. As it turns out, this was a good move - though a bad one for all those boring but important jobs around that house that I might have done if I hadn’t been playing it!!
The first thing to say about
Heroes of Might and Magic V is that it comes on DVD-ROM only. It’s a massive game with very impressive visuals, so that’s no surprise - but a bit of a blow for those who don’t have a DVD drive, of course. It’s still set in the same empire as all the other Might and Magic games, with the introduction featuring the marriage of Emperor Nicolai and Lady Isabel. But of course, those pesky demons in the land are always up to something, and sure enough along comes an evil beast to break up the happy couple. With Nicolai taking the battle to the demons at the border, Isabel is far from content to sit at home reading Good Housekeeping and wait for him to return, if he does, and sets off on a journey to gather an army and rush to his side.
In the Single Player mode (I haven’t tried the Multi-Player Mode to be honest - if I did, it might take over my entire life!) you start the first of 5 scenarios, each spilt into 5 missions, as Isabel at the start of her quest. If you think that 25 missions in total doesn’t sound like there’s much longevity to the game, you’d be very wrong - each scenario is likely to take you several hours to complete, and while I’m perhaps a rather cautious player (I like to build up an unbeatable army and then use it to blat everything in sight), it would take either a great deal of skill or good fortune to complete the whole thing in under a hundred hours.
The game is mainly turn-based strategy, though on occasion there are elements that run in real-time. Basically though it’s a game you can leave for hours and come back to without having to pause it, as it won’t do anything until you’ve finished your turn. You start off with one hero, Isabel, and later in the game you will come to control more or can hire extra heroes in taverns. You capture towns and develop them by building extra structures, each of which can benefit you in different ways. As you battle or visit particular areas you can gain experience and level up, with your hero learning new abilities and improving stats. On the main game map there are various places to visit both above and below ground. There are also a lot of helpful things to find including spells to learn, treasures, resources that can be used in trading or building, artifacts (and over-priced artifact dealers!) - these can give you permanent stat-boosts or other benefits, though you don’t carry them from one scenario / mission to the next. In fact I would have preferred it if you didn’t start every mission from a preset point - it would have been nice to carry over some of the success / troops amassed from one to the next as a kind of reward for your genius and / or persistence in the previous mission. However I think the designers felt that this would have made the game too easy, which is probably a fair enough point. There are three difficulty levels, and while on some levels the game is easy (with patience!), on others even the lowest (normal) difficulty level is a good challenge.
Each mission starts with one or more objectives, and as you reach some of the objectives, you are given more. When you have completed all of them, the mission ends. When you have infinite time and no specific enemies apart from those stationed on the map to contend with, there really isn’t much challenge, but when you have to complete something in a set time period or have a competing hero vying with you, the stakes increase significantly. When you have both, things get much more interesting - and challenging. You can save the game at any point as long as a turn is not in process.
The turns seem quite short at first as your character isn’t able to do very much in terms of travelling or abilities, but before long the turns seem quite long as you are put in a position where several tactical decisions have to be made every turn. I must mention that this is a game for those who like thoughtful strategy rather than action-packed games. During battle the game switches to another view where you can see the battlefield and your units. Before each battle you can select the starting positions of each unit, then onto the battle itself and you can see where the enemy is positioned. The units taking a turn rotate (not always sequentially but depending on stats and status etc) and the opposing commanders also are in the rotation. When taking your hero’s turn you can choose special abilities or spells that you have gained along the way - these may be of various orders light, dark, destructive, summoning, combat etc) and can either affect one or more enemy units, or positively affect one of more of your own units. The battles are pretty well balanced, and you don’t normally lose a battle you’d expect to win unless you do something really stupid. If everything’s suddenly gone against you then fleeing or surrendering may be an option, but depending on the hero controlled at the time and the scenario, this may actually result in losing the game because you’ve me a lose condition - so be careful and save if an opposing army is on the horizon and looks tricky to defeat! There is also an auto combat mode if you’re feeling lazy, which isn’t too shoddy though sometimes makes odd decisions. In general if you want to use the automatic mode for your battles, be sure to have a good army with plenty of ranged firepower as well as strong melee units! Actually you need that even if you control the battle yourself…
The units can be made up of a myriad different creatures, from gremlins and gargoyles to archers and cavaliers. Every unit has their own base stats, to which are added modifiers depending on the commander’s stats. The units don’t garner experience in themselves, but this is just as well since the game is detailed enough already! Some units have the ability to cast spells, heal other units, or perform special attack moves. The base unit types can by upgraded as well - for instance archers can become marksmen, footmen can become squires, cavaliers can become paladins, etc. Compared to the third game the battles seem much more balanced - the outcomes depend more on the strengths and weakness of the units as a whole rather than seeming to be more a rock-paper-scissors method of finding out what type of creature is most effective against a particular creature. The battles can be quite epic in themselves, and with the auto combat and the fact that you can gain experience points from letter much weaker opposing armies flee from your mighty forces instead of having a pointless one-sided contest, they don’t really get boring even after a long playing session.
Though the long playing time of the game is a plus point, the necessity of very long playing sessions in order to feel that you’ve actually got somewhere in the game is a bit of a minus point. Most of us, even if we’re avid games players, have too much going on in our lives to spend many hours at a time playing a game. This is one of my two main reservations about the game that stop it from getting 5 stars. (The storyline is, on this occasion, actually a strong point of the game - it doesn’t exactly avoid cliche but holds the different missions together very nicely.)
The other reservation is about the cut scenes. It is very odd that in a game that has such impressive graphics, the cut scenes are weak, but they definitely are. They mainly consist of one character talking then another, with the camera switching between them. Considering how much use is made of cinematic effects in the game itself, there are precious few in the cut scenes. The character’s gestures and movements often look unrealistic, but the worst of it is the lips - they don’t move. With good (if very cheesy!) voice-acting it really could have been good, but with not even very basic lip-synching, it just seems silly. It's very odd... it's almost as if the game was made to look spectacular with great attention to detail, and then someone said "oh look, we don't have any cut scenes!" and asked the young lad on work experience to cobble some together on his last day with the company. Very odd...
[UPDATE] Well, it would seem that at the very end of the first scenario, the cut scenes get a lot more impressive. And the lips move... the synching is really not very good, but it's a lot better than before! Possibly the strangest review update I've ever done...[/UPDATE]
However other than that the graphics are extremely impressive. The landscape (which you can zoom in and out of as well as change perspective) looks fantastic and is rich in detail. The various creatures look brilliant and some of the effects are quite spectacular. A lot of the creatures are also quite amusing - the imps and gremlins are my favourites in that regard, they always make me laugh. The sound too is very good with high quality effects and atmospheric music.
Apart from the already mentioned single-player campaign and multiplayer mode, there is also a custom map mode if you want to add yet more longevity to the game.
Overall
Heroes of Might and Magic V has just about everything you could ever want from a turn-based strategy game. The tactics are simple to implement yet have a great deal of depth, and you could play the game in several different ways - concentrating on building your armies quickly, making your character as skilled in magic as possible, having only the strongest tier of creature in your army, leaving garrisons at every captured resource as a safeguard, have a number of different heroes roaming the landscape… You can very much tailor your game plan to suit your own style , but one thing is for certain - winning the game will not come easily (and most certainly not quickly!)
Minimum System Requirements
CPU: 1GHz (2GHz recommended)
OS: 2000/XP/Vista
RAM: 512Mb
Graphics card:64Mb (128Mb recommended)
Supported cards
NVidiea GeForce 3/4/FX/6 (apart from 4MC) - the packaging doesn’t specifically mention the 7 series, but that’s what I ran it on at nearly the highest quality mode with no problems (very occasionally it has some slowdown in-game, but that‘s all)
ATI Radeon 8500/9000/X families
Any later model cards, such as the nVidia 8 series, should be fine.
Laptop cards not supported.
DirectX: 9.0C
DVD-ROM Drive: 4x speed
Free HDD space: 2GHz
Internet connection needed for multiplayer (and it goes without saying that a high-speed connection is recommended)
Tested on:
Packard Bell iMedia J2489 (Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 processor, 1Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce 7500LE graphics card)
The PEGI rating is 12+ (I’m guess the US rating would be “Teen”), probably for the warfare element. There’s not much gore. Another thing might be that the female characters (and, more often, female
creatures) tend to be outfitted as fantasy artwork has long dictated they should be - in… not much.
Patches
The most up to date patches I could find at the time of writing are here - http://www.worthdownloading.com/game.php?gid=1278
I have to admit though that I haven’t downloaded the patch - I’ve had absolutely no problems with the game, so I’m not going to tempt the gremlins… If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!
Other Games in the Might and Magic Series
Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - nowhere near as aesthetically pleasing as V, and certainly a little unbalanced in places, but still a very solid strategy game.
Might and Magic VI: For Blood and Honour - a good game but unfortunately too buggy on modern PCs.
Might and Magic VII: The Day of the Destroyer - a massive game that is a little repetitive but still very enjoyable for RPG fans.
Might and Magic IX - an impressive attempt but, unless it’s been patched recently to solve its many problems, sadly this one also is far too buggy.
More Turn-Based Strategy:
Civilisation 3: Call To Power - Sid Meier's masterpiece isn't as graphically impressive as Heroes of Might and Magic V, but it boasts even more detailed gampeplay. A fantastic game, just make sure you have a couple of decades free!!
