Heroes of Might and Magic is a turned based strategy game in where we play as Lord Ironfist, a noble on the run from a usurper. After entering through a strange portal he finds himself trapped in a new fantastical world full of dragons, griffins, and other mythical creatures. He is not alone however, there are three other warring Lords who are less than happy about the sudden inclusion of more competition and it soon becomes a fight for his life. Most of this story is told through the manual, with one being able to easily believe there isn’t an actual plot if having not read it.
Starting off you are given the option to pick either a Standard or a Campaign game. Choosing standard allows you to choose from various scenarios to play through and more importantly, allows you to tweak various settings such as the amount of opponents, as well as their difficulty. Since there is no tutorial, I highly suggest starting in this mode and picking the first map known as Claw to get a grip on how the game functions. Heading over to Campaign, you can pick from one of the four factions to play as, each possessing different creatures under their command.
The four lords you can choose from are Ironfist, Lamanda, Alamar, and finally Slayer. None of them have their own unique sprites so are never shown in the actual game, don’t feature different missions, and are rarely ever mentioned outside of a bit of text before every mission. Every level starts you off with a random hero, making the whole thing feel more like a wide-scale war between different cultures than an organized campaign by any lords. These four cultures are Barbarian, Knight, Sorcerer, and Warlock. Picking one of them dictates which creatures will grow in your starting town and is the main factor in deciding which lord you may want to play as. Having a bit of knowledge on each is important, which is why I recommend firing up a Standard game before locking yourself into any faction beforehand.
There are eight missions that task you with a variety of things throughout. Some will have you digging for an ultimate artifact, others simply require you to take a town or capture another lord’s stronghold. Doing so will result in an instant victory for you, meaning you don’t have to wipe everyone out if you choose not to. Especially since that lord will still show up the next level as if nothing happened. In actuality, there are nine levels, with one being locked out to whatever faction you choose. They are not really anything worth replaying the game over, this level is just cut out since it would make no sense to capture your own stronghold, something you have to do in separate missions to every other lord. Aside from the creatures you breed in your starting town, the only other difference between the Lord you choose is their starting position on the maps which is a nice touch.
When beginning a level, you will be completely surrounded by a fog of war and have access to a single Hero. Heroes are the only way you can transport armies across the world. Without them, your units will be stuck defending whatever town they were made in. You can immediately send every unit that you are capable of mustering behind your starting hero to roam the lands, but that will leave your fort completely undefended. Whether it be human or magical beast, you will have to wait seven turns (a week) before more are born and are able to be hired into service. This makes emptying out all your reserves into a risky ordeal, since if your armies are far away or an enemy hero gets the jump on you, they can simply walk in and claim your fort without any resistance. It becomes even more important later on as you hold more than one town, with the AI knowing full well when you leave one undefended.
Playing the waiting game and hoping to raise a massive army to be able to easily accomplish both your offensive and defensive strategies is an ill-advised thing. You need to be proactive and explore, then conquer as quickly as possible. There are a ton of mines that will supply you with rare resources, towns to bring under your banner for more troops and gold each turn, and magical artifacts to find. It will be a rush to get what you can early on, and leaving it all to your foes will leave you lagging behind. Equally as important is that exploring as much as you can to remove that fog of war will allow you to see anything that happens in explored lands. This means that if you explored everything you can see an enemy army leave their fort from across the map, even if you don’t have troops nearby, giving ample time to prepare a preemptive strategy in case it heads your way.
Each faction has unique buildings they must construct before having access to their more powerful troops. The town management is very simple and building new structures is the extent of what you can do with them. There are only a few and carry a clear route to what needs to be built in order to construct the high-tier units. Once you pay for a unit, they will have no further upkeep, allowing you to raise mighty armies with no real reason not to do so, other than being short on cash. Its real focus are on the battles and exploration, any form of micromanagement is kept to the minimum. Perhaps your most important building will be your Mages guild. With them you will receive a couple of random spells for your heroes and upgrading them further allows for more powerful spells to be unlocked. You need to buy a 500 gold spellbook if your hero doesn’t already have one, but on the plus side, anyone can cast your known spells if you buy one.
Heroes proficient in magic will be able to carry around more spells and those that he casts will have a far stronger effect, though having a book on everyone possible is still incredibly useful. Blind a griffin before he flies over to chow on your archers, teleport short distances in the world map, and resurrect dead units are but a few of the possibilities magic allows. There are many unaffiliated foes to be found in any area of the game, though they keep to themselves, sticking to the same spot, and will never attack. The reason you’ll want to slay them anyways is that they could be in the way of a handy shortcut or simply guarding something that you want. Not the noblest of actions, yet it is better a recently discovered gold mine be in your hands than that of the enemies later on. They are mostly a risk early into a match as they can dwindle down some of your numbers in the ensuing brawl and leave you less equipped to handle the other Lords.
That brings me to how unit stacking functions. If you have multiple of the same unit type you can mash them all together and say, have a stack of five hundred peasants. They will have a far greater chance in battle as a hoard of hundreds of people, regardless of how poorly trained will be a dangerous threat should they get close enough, in comparison to a few useless blokes with a pitchfork. This adds an extra incentive to try and keep your men alive throughout the week in order to buy more of the same units, then add them into your hero’s ever-growing army, which only has room for five different unit types. Once you gain control of different factions town’s and are able to grow their unique creatures, that limit of five can have you mixing and matching quite a diverse army, all having no qualms fighting beside each other.
Whenever you actually engage in combat, be it with a faction or unaffiliated group, both sides will be facing each other on both the left and right side of the screen, respectively. Every unit only has a single attack, with the play area being so small that it doesn’t leave much in the room for tactics against overwhelming odds. You either walk forward to enemies, attack as ranged characters or skip your turn. This is not to say that it is devoid of all strategy. You still have to worry about flying enemies that can move anywhere in a single turn, everyone having one counterattack whenever a foe hits them but can’t defend themselves every consecutive hit after, and ranged units that will only able to use melee once an enemy is right next to them. Certain powerful creatures also have attacks that can hit both his enemy and whoever was behind him, be it friend or foe, making you think twice in how you position them before launching a mighty breath of fire or what have you.
Your heroes will stay in their tents all throughout and can not offer a helping hand unless they know some spells. They do offer extra points for attack, defense or whatever he happens to specialize in, to the troops under his command. It is not a game changer unless he is of a significantly high level. If you are facing another hero, hope he doesn’t know any good spells because there is very little in the way to defend against them. At most, you can cast anti-magic on a single unit if you have the fortune of possessing that spell, though that won’t stop his peers from suffering a nasty fate. You can only cast one spell for a turn with their duration depending on your heroes spell power stat. If you use them all up then you will have to travel back to a town with a mages guild and restock on whatever form of magics they have unlocked there.
Magic can no doubt feel incredibly cheap at times, in particular, those of the area of effect variety, since its essentially shooting fish in a barrel with how small the playfield during battles are. More often than not, your entire army will be caught up in a single area of effect spell, in which case you should hope that whoever is casting it has a low spell power stat, to suffer less devastating loses as the AI spams it multiple times in a row. It is particularly aggravating when you are forced to defend your walled cities. That is due to not being able to send your troops outside in order to quickly end the fight, you have to wait until they break down your wall in order to do so. And chances are that your mushy ranged fighters likely will survive nowhere near long enough to end the battle before they die, and you are forced to sit there taking needless damage since the architects of the castles have never heard of a gate.
As incredibly cheap as they are, they are not game-breaking, and if an AI should have the luck of randomly receiving one of the few area of effect spells like Storm, it’s best if you immediately concentrate all your efforts in wiping them out. Being the one attacking a walled city is not fun either, however. You will immediately receive a catapult once you attack it which is strange enough, but you have absolutely no control over it. You’ll just have to skip turn after turn and hope that it manages to knock a portion of a wall down. That can take either a very long time or happen immediately with the first boulder thrown, it is entirely down to RNG. It is a good thing that the defender has an advantage over the aggressor, but the way in which that’s done being the problem here. There are no random chances when it comes to attacking, if you can hit someone you will land that blow. In which case some kind of line of sight advantage where the defenders behind the wall being the only one able to attack via range would have served that purpose far better.
It is pretty silly offering advice on how to improve a feature from a game released in 1995, though in my opinion, this specific one would have been better off being cut than added its current form. All in all, Heroes of Might and Magic was a stunning spin-off that all but killed off the original dungeon-crawling main series. It had a ton of good ideas and executed most of them pretty well. From discovering obelisks all over the map as to reveal the location of a hidden powerful artifact, to not having a fail state when all your cities are captured then gathering all your scattered remaining forces to rise again like a phoenix, its all great fun. I had a whale of a time despite its flaws. The main thing to keep in mind here is that while I’m a fan of Might & Magic, I’ve never played any of the entries of this Heroes spin-off. This allows me to view it from a fresh unbiased perspective, but it is universally agreed that its sequels are far superior. It is currently priced at $9.99, same as its sequels, making it hard to recommend in good faith to those not already well-versed in this franchise and simply wanting to see where it all started.
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