Heroes of Might and Magic V (PC)

...read my previous review on Heroes of Might and Magic (HOMM) IV, will know that I'm a big fan of the series and have been since I was introduced to HOMM 2 several years back. Well, some time after the release of HOMM IV I noticed that it was no longer on the shelves in shops (not too much of a problem as I already owned it by then), with the apparent reason being that the makers 3DO had gone bust. This left me to mourn the end of my favourite series ...
...to guide a hero or heroes around an adventure map, picking up resources and battling free-standing neutral armies of creatures and/or men of warrior or wizardly persuasions, and thus building up your hero(es), any settlements you control and ultimately your armies, so that you can vanquish all opponents on the map. There are variations on this theme, with the goal being to 'beat the map' as it were, and reach a certain point, obtain a certain artefact, ... more

Those who read my previous review on Heroes of Might and Magic (HOMM) IV, will know that I'm a big fan of the series and have been since I was introduced to HOMM 2 several years back. Well, some time after the release of HOMM IV I noticed that it was no longer on the shelves in shops (not too much of a problem as I already owned it by then), with the apparent reason being that the makers 3DO had gone bust. This left me to mourn the end of my favourite series of PC games, but, after all hope had long since vanished, Ubisoft picked up where 3DO left off and have now released HOMM V.

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT THEN?

HOMM is set in a world of swords and sorcery and fantastical creatures. Throughout the series the aim had been, essentially, to guide a hero or heroes around an adventure map, picking up resources and battling free-standing neutral armies of creatures and/or men of warrior or wizardly persuasions, and thus building up your hero(es), any settlements you control and ultimately your armies, so that you can vanquish all opponents on the map. There are variations on this theme, with the goal being to 'beat the map' as it were, and reach a certain point, obtain a certain artefact, or what not, without the additional hassle of enemy factions in your way, but in general you'll be looking at trouncing one or more computer controlled factions by putting their heroes and armies to the sword... or wand, or what have you, as appropriate.

SO WHAT'S NEW?

Actually, a lot is new. HOMM IV involved quite a serious revamp of the series and not everybody was happy with the changes... at all! It would appear that the makers have listened to their customers complaints and thus produced a game that seems more of a natural successor to HOMM III, since it sees the return of a number of features that were dropped for HOMM IV, whilst retaining the odd thing or two that was good about HOMM IV.

The first thing that strikes you as you fire up the game is the graphics. Of old, the graphics were fine and dandy, becoming gradually less cartoony throughout the series and, in HOMM IV, becoming slightly 3D. The graphics for HOMM V take it to a whole new level. Gone is the fixed 'high angle camera' perspective, as we now have the ability to zoom in and out and rotate the 'camera' 360 degrees so as to get the best viewpoint. This means that you can zoom way out to get a broad overview of the map, or alternatively zoom right in to see the wonderful detail in the characters and the environment and even have a low angle view giving, where the relief of the landscape allows it, sweeping vistas across the map. However, all this takes a lot of PC muscle to run, with recommended hardware to the tune of a gigabyte of RAM and a beefy graphics card to boot. Of course, you can reduce the graphical quality in the options menu, but you'll be far the richer, graphically speaking, if your PC can handle the higher quality settings. I have a gig of RAM in my PC and it still slowed down occasionally when my camera angle and position on the map exposed a particularly long stretch of the map. Similarly, in battle sequences you can zoom in and out and position the camera to your pleasing, although on some occasions, especially in siege situations where castle walls obscure some of the battlefield, it can still be awkward to get a good view of the action.

The sound seems better too, with a melodic and at times dramatic soundtrack that is typical of the HOMM series, but with, to my ear, more of the operatics that characterised HOMM II and III making a welcome return! The speech, during cut scenes and battles, is also nicely done.

In HOMM IV, we lost the ability to upgrade creatures, i.e. all creature dwellings produced one type of creature/troop, whereas this time we can build a creature dwelling on one turn and then, on a subsequent turn, upgrade the structure so that instead of peasant huts producing peasants, we now have peasant cabins producing conscripts. The removal of this aspect in HOMM IV made things simpler but also removed something from the game and as such wasn't to all tastes. This time, upgrading is back with a vengeance, with every creature (or at least, all those creatures that are native to one of the playable factions) having an upgraded version.

The factions themselves have had another shake up, with the barbarian forces being removed wholesale (so much for Might and Magic, now it's mostly just magic I suppose!) and the very logical splitting of the demon/undead army into two factions. We also still have the knight/priest or 'light magic' faction, the elven or rather 'nature magic' faction, the 'dark magic', formerly 'chaos magic' faction, and pseudo-Arabic mage faction, formerly known as 'order magic'. As well as a reshuffle of the factions, there has been some reshuffling of the creatures, with all the choices being pretty logical, although why the Death Knights are no longer classed as undead (despite being vampires) I don't quite know, although I suspect it was simply a case of having too many creatures for the one faction. As with all incarnations pre-HOMM IV, all creature dwellings in each settlement can be built, whereas in HOMM IV you had to choose only 5 of the 8 possibilities.

The skills your heroes gain have undergone yet another significant shake up. Heroes can now learn 6 Primary skills, each of which permit the acquisition of three secondary skills, much like the format in HOMM IV, but now we have the added complexity of there being more (I suspect many more) than three possibilities for those secondary skills. For example, the Primary skill Attack, allows the Secondary skills Battle Frenzy, Archery and something else (I forget, sorry), but, having also learned the Primary skill Destructive Magic and the related Secondary skill Master of Ice, I found my hero able to fill his spare Secondary skill slot for Attack with the alternate secondary skill Cold Blade (or something like that) allowing his creatures to deal additional cold damage when attacking. Even though Primary skills only have three levels of expertise compared to 5 in HOMM IV, and Secondary skills have only level of expertise, the complex system of interdependent Secondary skills allows enormous scope for hero personalisation. Furthermore, each faction now has a unique 'racial' skill, such as Necromancy for the undead faction (hardly surprisingly) and Counter Strike for the knight faction, thus also providing a number of unique alternate Secondary skills under other Primary skill sets.

Another feature making a welcome return is the use of war machines. Pre-HOMM IV, attacking settlements involved a catapult and in HOMM III we could also buy a ballista, healing tent and ammo cart for use in every battle. These are back, and bring with them much improved siege battles, which were reduced to battering down the drawbridge in HOMM IV, but once again involve archery towers inside the settlement and your catapult trying to knock them down, along with the walls and drawbridge.

MY OPINION

My first impression was awe at the graphics tinged with a feeling of being let down a little by the game features. This was partly because I'd been growing more excited about the game since pre-ordering it and had built it up in my mind to almost unmatchable levels. However, a larger part of my disappointment came from the removal of certain features from HOMM IV that I was rather partial too. For example, I quite liked not having to worry about getting my army of non-upgraded creatures back to base when the time came that I could upgrade them.

The feature that I felt made HOMM IV great, was the introduction of the heroes themselves into the fray, after watching them sit at the back of the battleground in a supervisory role in previous releases. Whilst we still have some involvement from the heroes, with them being able to attack physically as well as use magic, they can no longer be attacked - why? Any General worth their salt would want to take out the opposing General if possible, but for some reason (a kind of misguided chivalry?) even the evil factions cannot directly target the opponent hero - bah humbug! Linked to this is the ability to have armies move around without a hero to guide them, which meant that your army could wander out of your settlement to meet your hero and his existing troops and made troop movement much easier, but this has been removed with all creatures now unable to take a single step without a hero to hold their hand! To compound the problem, the caravan function, which allowed quick and easy collection and redistribution of units from creature dwellings scattered around the map and between settlements, has been removed too! Goodness knows why they had to do away with that!

A further gripe is that there doesn't seem to be enough explanation of the in game details, by which I mean that the many and varied special abilities of the creatures or other units in your army are listed, but not explained or quantified (e.g. the footmen and squires in the knight army have the skill 'shield bash' - great, but what does that actually mean?). Also, when you visit certain buildings on the adventure map you are told that it is guarded but given no idea of exactly it's guarded by, so you're forced to blunder blindly into what may well be a battle against impossible odds. OK, so you can just reload the auto-save from the previous turn, but it would still be nice to know what you're getting yourself into! A cynical person may suggest that the lack of quantification and clarification on such things as possible Secondary skills for heroes and the special skills of various creatures, is a calculated move on the part of the designers intended to drive up the sales of the official guide book, though of course, I'm not at all cynical and can see only innocent omission as the reason! *attempts to maintain an expression of wide-eyed innocence... and fails*

You begin to understand my initial disappointment...

That said, after playing on for a while, I discovered much that was to my liking. Whilst you can't move troops without a hero, you can 'harvest' the troops from your settlements remotely once your hero has gained the spell 'summon creature' which is handily provided by every magic guild of level 3 or above. This allows you to summon creatures, at a cost of 1 magic point per creature, from your nearest settlement, whatever the distance; not a perfect solution, but something of a help, to be sure.

Other than the points I made earlier, all the changes made from HOMM IV are for the better, even if they did take a bit of getting used to! I've not finished with the game yet, but I'm about half way through the campaigns, of which there are 6 (one focussing on each faction), and that's after putting in some serious hours during my week off! Once I'm done with the campaigns there's the numerous one off scenarios to go at, all of which adds up to a game of impressive longevity. I've not tried out the multiplayer features yet, but the manual leads me to believe that it can be played online, across a network or in 'hotseat' where players take turns on one PC. It claims that it's now possible to act during another player's turn, which I don't quite understand, but I assume that it can only happen in cross-network or online games; the mind boggles as to how it could be done in hotseat!

OVERALL

If you've played and enjoyed previous releases in the HOMM series then you'll love this, without fail. If you're an ardent advocate of HOMM IV then you may be in for some disappointment, as was I, but there's still plenty there to keep you happy and, if you're anything like me, the fact that it's a Heroes of Might and Magic fix after a fairly lengthy period of cold turkey will be more than enough to justify your purchase!

Even though I probably sounded very negative in much of what I said, it's still a good game, very good in fact, but not yet perfect. I've given it 5 stars, but I suppose it would get 9.5 out of 10, given the few negatives. Maybe HOMM VI will nail the ten...

PRICE

I bought my copy for a hefty £40, but that's because my addiction forced me to pre-order the limited edition (4000 copies worldwide) deluxe version. All of those have been sold already so you'd have to pick them up from ebay for goodness knows how much, but I don't recommend that at any rate as the extras, one or two minor additional in-game features, a booklet of artwork, a map and some other bits and pieces, just aren't worth it. The regular edition retails for £29.99, although you can get it from amazon for a reasonable £24.99. For newcomers to the series, I would recommend that instead of buying HOMM V, you go for the HOMM Series, which is, so they say, an item exclusive to amazon (why do I always hear a studio audience of some kind going "Woooooo!" when I say that?) and includes each of the 5 HOMM games for a mere £29.99, which is great value even if you only ever play HOMM IV and V (HOMM III would probably be worth a look too, but the earlier ones most likely won't appeal after playing the better later version unless you're hopelessly addicted).

If you're at all interested, then it's worth checking out www.mightandmagic.com/heroesV, for some cool screen shots and downloadable videos of the game.

UPDATE

Having played the game more thoroughly now than when I first reviewed it, it becomes apparent that there are a number of glitches in the game. These are mostly relating to creatures abilities not taking effect or other relatively small things that may not ruin your enjoyment but will possibly annoy somewhat. More irritating yet is the fact that the various patches available (I got mine free from gamershell.com) cause almost as many problems as they fix! I strongly reccommend that you don't install patch 1.4 because it causes the game to crash randomly when 'gated' creature stacks die, making it nigh on impossible to complete the last level! For these reasons I've docked the game a star. NB. If you are having any problems with the game, especially with crashing, the forum at www.mightandmagic.com is extremely useful. 

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