A Classic Series Reborn, Albeit with some Technical Issues

Heroes of Might & Magic is one of a few series that are the foundations of PC gaming. It comes from a long list of PC exclusive or nearly PC exclusive franchise strategy series such as Warcraft, Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, Civilization, and many others. However, with a new developer at the helm after the original developer New World Computing closed its doors, Heroes V was viewed by many in the time leading up to its release as a make-or-break moment in the series; it would either redeem the series or destroy it. Interestingly, though, it does neither; rather, it stays in the grey area between greatness and failure and simply refuses to go anywhere.

The core gameplay of the Heroes titles really hasn’t changed much since the original game: build a town, recruit stacks of troops, put these troops on a hero, and travel the map collecting resources and fighting neutral mobs, and, eventually, enemy heroes who are doing the same thing. This basic gameplay mechanic is still just as fun as it was in the original game all those years back, and the updated graphics and sound really add to the game. While it would have been nice to see full-fledged CG cutscenes in the game, the in-game cutscenes that provide the vehicle for moving the plot along are quite excellent, even though the developer forgot to remove some of the idle animations for the characters during the cutscenes. It’s kind of hard to focus on an important conversation when the character all of the sudden gathers and releases some magical energy with a resounding bang  for no good reason.

There are a few major problems with this title, however. First of all, many of the units in this game are exactly the same as they’ve been since Heroes II. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, how about the ability to have more than eight stacks in an army? This is something that has not changed since the original in the series, and as a long-time player of Heroes titles, this is a problem I’ve always had with the series. Also, the AI ranges from painfully ignorant in some levels to chair-throwingly frustrating in others. This is a problem that seems totally independent of the difficulty setting, which, as far as I can tell, makes no difference on the AI. Lastly, the game contains a large number of serious bugs which, at least on my machine, were not fixed, some of which made a few of the story missions literally impossible to finish.

Many were worried that a new company was taking up the Heroes franchise, and I for one am happy to see that those fears were ungrounded. The game simply constitutes more of the same, for good or ill, with better graphics and sound.  I think that something new would have been nice, but that’s a minor quibble at best.

	System:	PC
	Genre:	Turn-Based Strategy
	Experience:	Completed game through the first mission of the elven campaign, where technical issues made it impossible to continue.

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