Reviewed: July 4, 2006
Reviewed by: Mike Colgan

Publisher
Ubisoft

Developer
Nival Interactive

Released: May 23, 2006
Genre: Strategy
Players: 1-2
ESRB: Teen

10
8
8
10
9.0

System Requirements

Now, I confess that this is my first time playing a Heroes of Might & Magic game. I remember the original Might & Magic series from my nerdy youth as a collection of solid, traditional dungeon-crawling RPGs, but I never got around to playing the Heroes series until now. I knew that it had its own rabid following, but hey, so does Pokemon. Supposedly I looked at the box of one of the early games and just wasn’t compelled to buy it with my hard-earned teenage dollars.

Well, I was wrong. Heroes of Might & Magic V is a highly addictive and entertaining strategy RPG, and if you are like me, previous ignorant of the series’ strengths, there’s no time like the present to get hooked.

Unlike Warcraft III and other real-time strategy games, Heroes of Might & Magic is turn-based, with each hero allotted a given number of movement points per turn. You can have multiple heroes on the battlefield at once, allowing you to cover more ground that you could with a single hero (which is useful, since many maps are huge). The landscape is dotted with special buildings and resources, which allow you to recruit new soldiers and creatures, fund your campaign, or even give you special strategic advantages. While visiting these buildings and capturing them in the name of your army is crucial to winning your missions, the center of economic and military advancement is your city.

Unlike typical real-time strategy games, where you must use peasants or constructors to build useful structures and go into harm’s way to mine resources, almost all of the game’s economic and technological advancement takes place in your cities. You can build one new structure in your city per game day, provided that you have the necessary resources. As you build more structures, your city’s level will increase, allowing you to build more advanced structures and build better armies.

Cities provide not just a steady source of tax revenue, but also fresh supplies of troops for hire once a week, siege weapons, magic spells, intelligence, and even new heroes to commission for your campaign. You can bring your heroes to town periodically to restock on weapons, troops and supplies, but make sure to keep enough troops stationed in the town garrison, or your city may fall to enemy heroes.

The field is covered with small armies, some of which roam with enemy heroes, and some of which stand guarding roads or caches of gold and gems. Sometimes you will be able to convince these armies to join your cause; otherwise, you are forced to fight on the field of battle. Battles take place on a grid with a turn queue; your soldiers and enemy fighters will take turns moving based on their speed.

Might and Magic provides a wide range of fighters, with numerous special abilities. For instance, peasants provide cheap fodder for the frontlines, squires can mow down resistance with powerful sword attacks, archers can pick off enemy forces before they can get within melee range, and griffons can fly and cross walls to decimate foes.

Heroes themselves play an integral role in combat. While they mostly direct the action from the back of the field, they can jump in to attack, or cast powerful spells to turn the tide of battle. Heroes level up from experience obtained from fallen foes; when your hero levels up, a random stat will improve, and you will be given the choice of upgrading your hero’s skills and abilities, allowing him or her to unleash even more powerful tactics.

All of these elements make for an addictive mix of strategy and planning, which you can make as simple or challenging as you want it to be. If you don’t want to focus too much on battle, you can set the game to automatically conduct your battles for you, which will provide your army with intelligent strategies for tackling the enemy. You have a staggering array of options available to adapt to your own playing style, but the interface is simple enough that it can be learned in minutes, and there’s no unnecessary micromanagement.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention another excellent element of Heroes of Might & Magic V, which might be overlooked by single players. The multiplayer game, which can be played directly over the Internet with friends, or for free on the ubi.com server, adds hours of unique fun and challenge. You can play games just for fun, “ladder” games, which rank you against other players, or even “ghost” games.

Ghost games are an innovative twist on the strategy genre; in these games, some players play a regular campaign, while others exist as poltergeists in the spirit world. Ghosts cannot engage in combat in the real world, but can influence the world in a number of ways, such as haunting players’ mines and disrupting their efforts. In addition, ghost players will face other ghosts in battle in the spirit world, so that ghosts can team up with mortal players in a supernatural alliance.

Monsters come in many shapes and sizes, including massive minotaurs and mischievous little imps. All of the graphics are in beautiful, vibrant colors, and the simple polygons of the characters allow for smooth animation even on my two-year-old video card. Cities are rendered beautifully, and in city mode you can view your entire city with improvements. The cities look an awful lot like the tower city of Minas Tirith in the films based on the Lord of the Rings series, but this adds to the fantasy flavor of the game. While the game breaks no technological barriers, it looks good and conveys the flavor that the developers intended.

The multiplayer component is weak and the lack of any sandbox editor to create new levels and campaigns hurts the longevity of this title. The solo campaign is still quite large and will take nearly a month to complete.