Finally, the return of the video game franchise that lets "real men" beget armies of unicorns and angels and fairies and still feel oh-so-manly doing it. Likewise treants, dragons, vampires, pit fiends, liches, minotaurs and more—the latest game in the Heroes of Might and Magic saga by Russian developer and series newcomer Nival Interactive might as well be a who's-who of fantasy-horror's greatest hits, trotted out chessboard style for your turn-based tactical delight. If only it wasn't also a gangly mess of a game, goobered with bugs, crippled by cruddy AI, and wrapped in the world's homeliest interface. Don't you hate when that happens?
Kiss Me, I'm Irish
As the distinguished Dr. Seuss might say, oh the places you'll go in Heroes of Might and Magic V. In fact they're essentially the same whole heap 'o trippy places you've been skipping off to since the series launched in 1995, here at last rendered in 3D. If you thought the series looked good before, try peeping the new engine's gi-normous fantasy landscapes swarming with all the series' trademark goofery, from luck-lending leprechauns and morale-pimping rally flags to resource-rich peasant huts (with dueling chickens!) and rotating 3D towns sporting posh add-ons. And talk about kaleidoscopic—it's like someone poured a bag of Skittles into your monitor.
Saddle that engine to HoMM5's six races and you get a dazzling parade of mythical and legendary creatures you can string together in hero-chummy stacks of a dozen to a thousand or more spawned from a few region-specific cities per map, i.e. human cities in forests, demonic cities in blasted terrain or the underworld, and so on. Of course everything's still turn-based, and the bulk of each map consists of shuffling heroes (typically less than a handful) around contoured turf grabbing stuff, buffing up, and bumping into rivals or random creature armies for brief tactical contests—lose your hero during one of these and it's game over.
Giddy Up Horsey!
Each of HoMM5's six campaigns play a different faction angle, so for instance you'll start scooping your way up from dirt in the initial Queen campaign with a single hero wielding a goody-goody army of creatures like griffins and footmen and cavaliers, but hit the Necromancer campaign and its say hello specters, wraiths, and spectral dragons, though you can also mix armies when opportunity knocks. Heroes level like RPG characters with attributes, skills, and inventories that support magic-imbued bonus items such as rings, necklaces, swords, etc. Because the maps aren't random and tend to be linear, most have "optimal" play styles that reward gobbling guarded resources (in a particular order) and snagging military bases for weekly squads of free troops.
But where HoMM in 2D made spotting resources a snap, super-chromatic 3D HoMM5 makes it a pain in the horse's rump. You're duly warned that much of HoMM5's gameplay hinges on endlessly pivoting the camera to spot all the precious pickings. Is that a wood pile or a tree stump? A rock or a pile of gems? Since money's resource based, you have to secure and protect weekly resource centers to keep goods like gems and sulfur and wood flowing. And it's easy to miss a lot of that stuff altogether as you wend your way along paths with easy-to-overlook treasure pockets, especially since your lumbering 2D horse-cursor (awwww…cute!) makes precision clicking about as easy as using a sledgehammer to flip a light switch. Get ready to do a lot of backtracking as you tussle with the interface, study each map, and train your eye to unscramble the frequent muss and muddle.
Smart as a Brick
But say you're a patient soul with plenty of time on your hands. HoMM5 has six linked and respectable solo campaigns, each quite challenging, if not always for the right reasons. Here's how they work. A campaign's early missions tend toward static challenges: level your hero enough to defeat the I'm-not-budging-until-you-attack-me big bad guarding the Doodad of Enlightenment or Floss of Halitosis Quashing. In later missions, your opponents pop in as active players, counter-gobbling resources and actively probing your defenses for poorly defended towns or hapless low-rank heroes. Unfortunately the strategic AI's completely bipolar, brilliant as often as inept in its decision-making, and as quick, for instance, to stupidly ignore your nearby undefended town to pursue you, as take it over and scare up extra troops for the cause.
On the other hand, the tactical battles that erupt when heroes clash are probably HoMM5's high points. Bump horses and the interface switches to a grid with heroes and armies at opposing ends. Also played in turns, the challenge lies in using random terrain bits like rocks or fissures for advantage while plying your hero's magic powers and sicking stacks of creatures at your enemy: send Griffins battle-diving, Arch Liches firing death clouds, magic-immune Black Dragons to tango with lightning-flinging Titans, and so on.
Incapacitated but not Inoperable
Good looks and tactical high jinks aside, it's tough to recommend HoMM5 with a mere ten skirmish maps, no map editor (for shame!), and a barrel of bugs, e.g. random desktop crashes, missions that "break" if you perform certain tasks out of order, heroes that attack through castle walls, incorrect initiative bar tallies in battle, etc. Yes, there's online multiplayer, but forget it—that's a wobbly fickle mess all its own you don't want a piece of, as in lots of thanks-but-no-thanks connection de-syncing (though possibly due to Gamespy itself and not HoMM5). If you're new to the series or get weak-kneed when a game does something it shouldn't, best wait a month or two to see if the developer can patch things up to par. Franchise fanatics? You might enjoy the solo game…if you don't mind holding your nose to block that funky "released too soon" smell.
Review By: Matt Peckham
Video Produced By: Mike Benson
