Heroes of Might and Magic V part 1

Yes, I do realize this game has been out for a few years. But I have never taken the time to try to beat the whole game before. But as I keep playing it more, and my old age reminded me that I had this blog, I decided that I would write a short review of each campaign.

For background I was hooked, really more like addicted to Heroes of Might and Magic (HoMM) 3 my freshman year of college thanks to Funiculus. That addiction lead to many many late nights and sometimes early mornings to beat on the AI. HoMM 4 had issues with my computer when it came out and so I never fully got into it. I however remember hating the idea of daily creature growth. It made for a more difficult planning of my armies.

Heroes of Might and Magic 5 has taken the game play of 3 and the beauty of 4 and combined them into a wonderfully aesthetic and challenging game. The game starts with a classic annoyance of not telling you that your user name can not have spaces in it. As expected I put in 'Absolut Lush' and the 'Okay' button greyed out. I finally figured out to get rid of the space and then I decided to just use 'Absolut.' The background scene is acceptable, I think the sequence is a little to jerky and does not make sense but it does show off some of the wonderful graphics.

Once I had my name setup I jumped in the first Campaign. I immediately jumped into the options menu. The default setting was 800x600 and I play on a 24" wide screen Acer so I decided that it needed to be cranked to highest resolution, highest detail, and to turn down the music a little while I was there.

The objectives for each scenario are well laid out to guide me through each mission. Whether it is to find the obelisks and the hidden artifact, to capture a certain town before a week is up, or if it's just to gather a specific number of troops the game gave a very simple but precise checklist of objectives. Even more importantly it rewarded me for the objectives with experience, as opposed to previous games where I only received battle experience points.

The cut scenes are beautiful if it were not for the characters in them. The backgrounds, the music and even the voice acting are all really well done. But the character movements often make no sense, are jerky and the few times they might be acting what they are saying it's poorly timed. The scenes advanced the story, gave it a little more depth, were not overly long and most importantly, the cut scenes had an easy to see 'Skip' button for when I had to reload a mission after failing.

Speaking of failing, the only time I had failed a mission in the first campaign was when I did not read the objective and did not capture a town within a week. The problem was my greed in terms of army strength. I knew I would need a few more archers and I was trying to get to another archer tower before I attacked the town. Eventually I had to give up after three failed attempts and this was the best thing that could have happened to me.

Fans of the previous games are more than likely used to the same tactics over and over. Get two columns of marksmen, huge stacks of arch angels, monks, and cavaliers. And then a respectful contingent of paladins. Stack up around the shooters and wait for the enemy to come to you. I still use this tactic as much as possible but the difficulty in getting archers has led me to actually cross the battlefield, think more about when to throw away the life of a stack just to waste an enemy retaliation, and to fully appreciate the beauty of the resurrect spell of the angels and healing tent. I also made a large change from previous titles in that I did not grab a second or third hero to run errands with one exception.

I did get a second hero to run some errands and bring me reinforcements on one level. I even managed to level that hero up 5 times while cleaning out the random creature stacks as my hero had already hit her level cap. When the mission was completed I thought hey this might be useful like it was in HoMM 3. They obviously are not letting me have an army of heroes like in HoMM 4 but a respectable hero to follow me on the campaign will be useful later especially when I remember the size of the end campaign maps for 3. Well turns out I was wrong. The hero did not carry through. In fact no where did I see mention that heroes would or would not carry between missions in the same campaign which is what disappointed me the most.

The towns are so much more beautiful than in previous versions. When you load into a town it goes into a controlled camera spin around the main tower of your town. Once you click any button or it reaches the top the camera becomes controllable so you can change the view and spin around the tower yourself. The buildings are still clickable, if you can find them. Buildings like the tavern and marketplace are integrated nicely with the city within the castle walls. Most of the unit buildings are built as additions to the main tower. It gives the town as a whole a wonderful scalability and just increases the overall aesthetics, instead of being block like in HoMM 3.

The mage guild is similar to previous games except that now instead of obvious, dark, light, earth etc magic (there was what 6 types in HoMM 3) it only contains Destructive, Light, Summon and Dark magic. Similar to previous versions there are 5 levels, allegedly. I had not actually built a mage guild that high because by the time I had reached a mission that removed the building level caps I did not need such magic as I was already an indestructible force that might lose a few peasants a battle... and it was the last mission for this character.

One thing that confused me for a bit was the new way they were doing skills and abilities. Each hero gets 6 skills and from there they can level those up 4 times. The abilities are predetermined based on the skills of the hero. For example the war machine skill allows for the abilities in the healing tent, catapult and ballista. The trick this time around comes with knowing which abilities also require other abilities. Continuing the above example the war machine abilities contributes to the Tremor ability. The Tremor ability however also needs Gating Mark of the Damned, which is an ability that is a result of the Gating skill. This intertwining I think adds to the whole process and makes planning more important, and the gamble of the Witch Hut even more risky. I received a logistics from a hut and was hoping for attack to come up. Totally changed how I was planning to play the level in that I could get there faster but now I could not get the archery ability. For a visual of the skills and abilities visit here: Knight Skills Note also that the skills and abilities also change for the type of hero, ie: knight, vs warlock vs death lord etc. A final note on the skills and abilities is that the heroes also come with specialties. These are inherent traits that are given to each hero as seen here: Special Abilities.

Overall I felt this campaign was a great starting point for this game, providing just enough easy to get me through the learning curve, adding a good story, and rekindling the love, and addiction, I had during HoMM 3. I will post again when I finish the next campaign, the Demon campaign.


~Because 3 stacks of Arch Angels is never enough...