Title: Heroes of Might and Magic V

Date: 06.16.2006

Genre: Strategy / RPG

Platform: PC

Developer: Nival Entertainment

Publisher: Ubisoft

This game builds off of Heroes 3, not 4, it seems like they threw out all the changes made in Heroes 4 and started fresh off of 3 again. I'd have to say, this game is EXACTLY Heroes 3, with some 3D graphics added (Which, IMO were more of a detriment to the game then a help). However, some of the more annoying aspects of Heroes 3 were also present in this game, which were actually removed in 4. For example, in campaign mode, your hero may NOT flee a battle (if it's a hero that "cannot be defeated"), otherwise you lose automatically.

Strategy Element

As I said before, this game plays almost exactly as Heroes 3, your hero is not an actual unit, and just stands on the side, although he can now directly attack enemies, but if you lose all your troops, your hero "abandons your cause," which I feel is kind of ridiculous. The prison system of Heroes 4 was actually something I liked, because it gives you a chance to get a hero back, and also increases the importance of closely guarding cities with valuable prisoners inside (since you can't destroy buildings in a city or raze a city when you capture it, as long as you can quickly retake a city after you lose it, it really doesn't hurt you to lose one for a short time).

I also thought that the hero being a normal playable unit, killable and fully playable in battle as a regular unit was a good thing, since it allowed you to fight off weak neutral parties with just the hero, and you could flee a battle without losing in campaign mode. The fact that you now also HAVE to have a hero in order to have an army makes it difficult to keep tabs on all the structures that produce units & give resources once a week (since caravans were removed and the structures don't have ownership to them anymore). Armies without heroes were a great aspect in Heroes 4, since it allowed you to use a single weak unit to do menial tasks without wasting movement points of your main army.

The battle system in Heroes 5 is mixed. The new system showing exactly where your units can move, as well as enemy units can move, and the initiative bar allows you to plan out your battle to incur as few losses as possible. Of course, there's still some randomness with how much damage is done (although now it gives you a range of kills when you hover over an enemy unit), as well as the lucky critical hits and morale/spell changes that may affect initiative. One thing I disagree with is the spread of damage, critical hits, and some of the undead units' ability to dodge a shot.

The reason for this is even if a stack has say, 150 archers, even though the graphic shows 1 archer, that's 150 archers shooting 150 different arrows. The damage on each arrow shot isn't going to be the same, if 1 arrow hits on the lower end of damage range, the other 149 might not. The same goes for missing a shot and getting a critical hit. This has been (IMO), a flaw in the Heroes battle system since the start. It puts a LOT of luck into battles, which really shouldn't be there in strategy games. As far as the grids being shown, along with the kill range for the shot being shown and the initiative bar, this might make the game more strategically involved, but it also makes it more taxing to play the game. I find myself looking at the initiative bar more then the actual fighting field, and hovering over the different enemy units to see how many kills I can get much more then I did in previous Heroes games (where I would just pick a unit and hit it).

Role Playing Element

Heroes 5 does have a slight role playing element to it because of building and carrying heroes from 1 scenario to the next. This is done fairly well, though I think that items should carry from 1 scenario to the next (NOT troops though, because otherwise someone could sit on the first scenario for 8 hours building up an army, making the rest of that campaign pointless to play). Some of the items in this game don't make sense though, such as a 4 leaf clover taking up your shield slot, or a bag of gold taking up the head spot. What happened to the 4 "use" item slots? This makes a lot of the simple items that used to add up, such as the +1 luck items, completely useless now that it takes up a shield or head spot.

Graphics

The graphics in this game were beautiful, although some of the battle animations are annoying and slow down the game. The 3D graphics looked great, but did cause some difficulty on the adventure map with clicking on the right square. I'm still not sure what part of the horse determines where the tip of your "pointer" is. It's something that takes time to get used to.

Performance/User Friendliness

Game runs slower then previous Heroes, which gets kind of annoying, also takes a long time to launch. The Tutorial built into the campaign is good and informative, and this is a very easy game to learn (although it's difficult to get good at). Once you get used to some of the irritating things in this game, it plays just as well as previous heroes games, and you can easily play for hours on end.

There's really not all that much NEW in Heroes 5 when you compare it to Heroes 3, which is the main problem. If you want to play a 3D version of Heroes 3, go for it, but I would wait until the price drops, since it's probably not worth $50.

Game Score

8.0

Reviewed By: Contributed