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I've been playing the Heroes of Might and Magic games (hereafter referred to as HOMM, because I am lazy) since the third one came out. For those who aren't familiar with the games, they're a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy setting. You build your city, recruit your army, and set forth to explore and kick much butt. The multiplayer hot-seat games made it an ideal way for my husband and I (not that we were married back then) to kill lots of time. I mean LOTS of time. There were days when people would only see us when we left the room to get food. The game was that addictive.
So we played HOMMIII for a while. Then eventually HOMMIV came out, so we played that, and then the expansion that came out for it. Somewhere in the midst of this we discovered MMOs, and that's where most of our video game time went, but the HOMM series still held a special place in our heart.
Naturally, when we were in the store the other day and saw HOMMV on display, we said something akin to "Sweet!" and into the shopping cart it went. It's been too hot here to do anything other than play games and watch movies anyway, so we were about due for a new game.
It was definitely not the best video game purchase we ever made.
Don't get me wrong; it's still fun and we've still spent way too many hours playing it. It's just not nearly as good as it should be. Disappointing would be a good word for it. Shoddy would be another.
The first problem that we ran into was that whoops, we'd forgotten to check the system requirements and it turns out the game doesn't support the video cards in either of our computers. Well, after patching the game and updating the drivers for my card, we were able to get it to work. But it ain't pretty. Graphics glitches are numerous. Ok, that's our fault for buying a game that doesn't play well with cheapish cards.
Unfortunately, more faults have been found within the game itself. First of all, there seem to be a lot less options than in previous games. There are only 6 different factions available to play. Very few heroes to choose from as your starting character (though luckily you seem to be able to get more in the game). And a lot less multi-player boards, too! Chris and I like to play the Extra Large boards so we have a very long game... HOMMV only came with 2 of those boards.
Now, it's been a long time since I played the earlier games, but I seem to recall having a few more factions to choose from, and a lot more boards. On top of that, I know that at least one version that I played had the option to make your own board, and/or just generate a random board. These features are absent from the new edition.
See, that's the biggest problem. When I get a new version of a game, I expect it to be bigger and better than before. I want new options, gameplay improvements, whatever. What I got was the same basic game with a few changes (mostly for the worse, IMHO), and fancier graphics... which I can't appreciate because with my un-supported video card, I have to keep the graphics settings at the bare minimum.
What are the changes for the worse? Well, besides the lack of options . . . heroes have had limitations set on them. I seem to recall that before, there was 1 skill which determined the level of spell you could learn. Now the spells are grouped into different schools, and you need to have the skills for the schools to get spells over level 2 in them. Oh, and on top of that? There's a limit to how many spells your hero can have in their book. But when they go to a city that has a mage guild, they automatically learn whatever spells they can. AGH! If you're going to limit the spells a person can have, you should let them pick and choose which spells they take!
On top of that, the general game quality has taken a steep nose-dive. If you're familiar with the HOMM games, you know that when you go to a mercenary camp or a witch's hut or whatever, you get a bit of text explaining what happened. Not anymore. Why not? Well, they don't know how to write anymore.
For Pete's sake, they misspelled resurrect!
The English on display in this game is horrible. On top of that, there are stupid little mistakes. Again, if you've played these games before, you're used to "Week of the..." well, not only have they omitted "the" from those titles, but half the time when it's a monster week, they get the monster name wrong. There was a week of nightmare. Double population growth for nightmares and fiendish nightmares or something like that. The problem? In-game, the monsters are actually hell chargers and nightmares. Same thing happened with a Sylvan monster type.
If you're an absolute HOMM addict, you might still want to pick the game up. I have been enjoying it, I just wish it was better. My advice is that if you are going to get it, wait for it to be on sale or to otherwise drop in price. If they're going to do a half-ass job of producing it, you shouldn't be expected to pay full price.
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