Heroes of Might and Magic V

"Disappointing, but not all bad."

As a fan of Heroes II and III, I had high hopes for the fifth game in the series. Unfortunately, the reality of HoMM5 doesn't even meet medium hopes. Low hopes, however, are more or less satisfied.

Gameplay: 7/10

Let's start with the best aspect of the game: the actual mechanics of running around and defeating everything that crosses your path. The gameplay is largely the same as it was in the earlier installments: the goal is to collect resources, build a castle, and raise an army. The battles are also very similar, but rely on an initiative system instead of rounds. Your hero has a place in the line-up that can be used to attack or cast spells; this eliminates some of the cheap tricks, like hiring a string of baby heroes with one fast creature to cast spells against the opposing army, but it also means that the hero acts much less frequently, and usually much more slowly, than the rest of your troops.

The skill system has been revamped, and while you'll see some familiar skills in the mix, many of them do different things. For one thing, the elemental magic skills have been replaced by a schools system under which the hero must have the correct skill to learn higher than third level spells in that school. This means that a truly competent mage has to dedicate all six skill slots to the various types of magic. On the plus side, other skills have been grouped together under a larger heading; learning the major skill gives you access to three special abilities. For instance, diplomacy and estates are now associated with leadership. This aspect of the system seems to make a larger number of abilities available to heroes, if not a wider range.

Unfortunately, the system begins to break down when you consider the troop types themselves. Almost every creature type seems to have some sort of special ability, and casters in particular are both prevalent and overpowered. Some of the special abilities given to the troops can unbalance the game very quickly; it doesn't take long to figure out how to tweak the system to your advantage. On the up side, most of the castle types seem fairly balanced, especially at higher levels.

The single biggest gameplay related issue is the AI. The NPC heroes don't even rely on AI, really; they're just scripted to do certain things, and the script isn't very smart. You wind up with AIs who fail to be opportunistic, leaving resources and treasure just lying there or even walking around it instead of picking it up. This is a big change from the other games, where you could expect the computer to be a resource-hogging pain in the butt.

Graphics/Sound: 3/10

Here's a shocker: making things 3D doesn't always mean an improvement in the game. In addition to the problem of missing things because the foliage got in the way, the switch to 3D has resulted in a severe drop in the quality of the unit models. Gone are the lovely Medusae and fiery Phoenices; in their place are cartoonish Treants and oh-my-god-what-were-they-thinking Stone Gargoyles. The Elven creatures in particular all look alike, probably because most of the variety was removed in favor of increasing the variety of humanoid troop stacks. Creature animations are boring and repetitious; imps no longer scamper, and unicorns no longer rear, in quite the same way.

Instead of emphasizing landscape features like multi-colored gems (they're ugly blue blobs, now) or running water, hero trails and auras are expected to carry their scenic weight. Yes, your cool hero with a large enough army behind him will leave a colored trail as he runs around. It's not a bad effect, but it's actually billed as a special feature! The world map is actually good looking for the most part, but the switch to 3D required more than swaying trees and glowing (yes, glowing!) swamps.

The score really plummets when you watch your first cut scene. I still remember the opening scene from Heroes III; the battle showcasing various troop types was beautiful rendered, and the people looked good. By contrast, most of the people in this game look slightly inbred, and their actions in cut scenes consist of swaying slightly while not moving their lips to speak or in any way changing facial expressions, and raising their sword and casting a spell for no obvious reason. The cut-scene battles seem turn-based; one creature moves, there's a pause, and thenm another creature moves. Furthermore, the cut-scenes are slow and long, thanks to the inexplicable pauses between anyone moving and speaking; there's an option to skip, but that means you can't read the story. But, most of all, the graphics look bad--more like something you'd expect out of a PlayStation era game than a brand new title that has its contemporaries in games like TES4: Oblivion, especially when an earlier title in the series far outshines it.

The music is pretty; nothing special or memorable, but the same kind of background music that has been in every Heroes title. But the voice acting...oh, the voice acting. The over-dramatized line and fake British accents make Castlevania: Symphony of the Night sound like a masterpiece. I'd rather watched dubbed anime than listen to most of the campaign heroes speak. Thanks to the utter lack of acting ability on the part of anyone involved in this game, the sound score really plummets.

Story: 7/10

Even though the campaign mode returns to the Heroes III schtick of playing the story from all possible sides, which I never liked, it does have the benefit of introducing the player to each castle type. The story itself isn't that bad. I'm pretty sure we did it before in one of the Heroes III expansions, but no big deal. There's only so much you can do if you feel compelled to stick to the good-castle-and-wizards-hounded-by-evil-necromancers-and-infernals model. Maybe I'm the only one who sort of misses the Heroes II way of doing things.

There are two places where this category loses points: characters, and method of telling. The telling of the story takes a hit mostly from the cut-scenes, which, as described above, are long, ugly, slow, and boring, with no option to speed-read your way through the plot. The characters are a bit more problematic. Queen Isabel, the main character for the first campaign and leader of the castle troop types, is just irritating. Call me crazy, but it's a little hard to imagine an archangel serving a woman who slaughters a group of peasants for telling her they don't want to fight--or who actually invokes logic to the effect of "if they won't fight, I'll kill them and MAKE them fight" without being a necromancer.

Other than that, the story isn't too bad, and it's tied together well with the missions. As always, you carry over no troops or artifacts between missions, but this is never addressed in the story. It's frustrating to finish a mission with twelve super artifacts and an army that could take on God and start the next mission, two feet away from where you ended the last one, with a couple low-level troop stacks and naked as the day you were born. I understand why they have to limit the heroes in this manner for the sake of gameplay, but would it really be that hard to explain just what Agrael did with his 40 Arch Devils?

Miscellaneous: 1/10

Yes, you saw that right. One out of ten. What for?

Well, for one thing, no campaign editor. For another, lots of bugs--one of the missions can't be completed if you save and reload in the middle. And if you need a third, check out the incredible lack of interesting scenario maps or multiplayer maps with, oh yeah, no way of making your own.

Sure, they say these things will be fixed in the patch, but I'm not buying it. You don't fix not having a campaign editor in a patch; that's just lazy. The number of bugs present is too high to excuse, and the dearth of non-campaign things to do is just crazy. Maybe I'm just a spoiled console gamer, but I'm disgusted by gaming companies that release a half-finished product and figure they'll fix it in a patch later.

A lot of people have also had trouble with the copy protection software. SecuRom, while admittedly worlds better than StarForce, still has the effect of preventing game installation on some computers with DVD-RW drives (can you even get a new computer without one?). It also prevents loading the game "without the original disc" half the time (though this can be solved by opening and closing the disc drive and letting autoplay take over), and nothing I can do will convince it that I'm not running emulation software in order to let me install the patch. These issues are as much a part of the game as anything else; Ubisoft's greed and paranoia over copy protection issues is getting in the way of legitimate game owners playing the game they paid for.

Final Score: 5/10

If you add it up, the average just barely rounds up to a 5. But the game isn't really all that bad. It's still entertaining, at least for a while, and some of the bugs are sporadic and might not affect everybody. Crappy graphics don't make the game unplayable; they just make me wonder why software developers don't seem to put any effort into their titles. Overall, I wouldn't pay full price to get this; go back and replay Heroes III until one of your friends gets sick of their copy.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/20/06