Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

Heroes of Might and Magic 5 by FABIO 07/05/2006, 3:44am PDT Hey! Were you tired of large, attractive sprites that were easy to tell apart? .......no? Well, weren't you sick of the gorgeous town screens where you could see all the individual buildings appear as you built up your castle? .......no? How about the sideline or isometric camera angels that made it easy to see? ......not that either huh? Optional tutorials replaced with mandatory hand holding that goes on for HOURS? ................... Okay, then I just KNOW you were dying for another fantasy strategy game to reuse Warcraft 3's gay plot and in-game cutscenes! .........fuck I've only played it for an hour, but it seems like the designers have declared all out war on all the simplism that made the series so addictive. The adventure map and battle screen now give you a direct overhead bird's eye view so that you're staring at half a dozen similar looking units' baldspots. Is this a conscript, archer, or footman? Who knows because they're all the same color (I guess just having red or blue display numbers and facing to tell the sides apart was too simple). They've perfectly mastered Warcraft 3's two zoom levels of "so close it's useless" and "too far up and at a crappy angel to tell what's what". I want to grab my monitor and tilt it just so I can get a damn side view, but can't. Jesus, you guys don't have to make EVERYTHING 3D! They carried over the "extreme zoom levels" and awkward camera angles into the town screen. Like the units, they made all the buildings into indistinguishable blobs. You won't look at the town at all anymore or notice any new buildings. All building and recruiting is now down via an ugly as hell menu. Choose what to build from an EGA flowchart where blobby icons look nothing like the buildings they're supposed to represent. Go to an entirely seperate screen for recruiting! This is a BIG (3d!) improvement! Considering that the tutorial is MANDATORY and well over an HOUR long, you'd think that you'd at least walk away knowing how stuff works. Not so. The tutorial only covers the basic, most braindead intuitive aspects that anyone who's played a videogame in the past couple years will pick up on their own. How about explaining all these special abilities? Okay, my archer can use "spreadshot". Is it in tooltips? The manual? Nope. BRADY GAMES STRATEGY GUIDE $19.95 GO BUY ONE NOW So....uhhhh.....I guess they managed to fix the most glaring fuckups of the fourth game. Siege combat is now back to the way it was, and heroes are back as leaders instead of individual units (in HoMM4 creatures were useless and the best group by far was made up entirely of heroes). The one thing that I actually miss from HoMM4 is having defeated heroes thrown in dungeons where they had to be freed if you wanted to use them again. Now you can just rehire them at a tavern. Other than that all the basic HoMM stuff is there, just that they've tried to strip away as much of the simplistic charm as possible. I really, really hope this game gets better. So far the campaign is one boring tutorial that never gives you more than one city (of the same type).

Heroes of Might and Magic 5 by FABIO 07/05/2006, 3:44am PDT     and when I say they recycle Warcraft 3's horrible plot by FABIO 07/05/2006, 4:07am PDT     :( NT by THE HOLY CAMERA ANGEL OF POWER 07/05/2006, 6:29pm PDT     update: it's okay by FABIO 07/12/2006, 10:32pm PDT     multiplayer review! (it sucks) by FABIO 07/13/2006, 7:28pm PDT     Gfx by Mischief Maker 11/29/2006, 5:17pm PST         no by Flavio 11/30/2006, 10:49am PST