Heroes of Might and Magic

Hold onto your hats, folks, because it's time for me to post my first real review.

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Lets get one thing straight: I fnc&ing loved Heroes of Might and Magic 3.
I loved it as a child, and it's still on my top 5 games of all time list despite it's age. It was my first real exposure to turn based games, and I regret (ever so slightly) not being with the series from HOMAM 1. I loved every inch #3, from the various different towns to the combat to the map editor. And, as time went by, I lost the disk and haven't seen it since, which saddened me greatly. The graphics were (I think) cell-shaded, and the music, especially the combat music, was great. And the map editor was extremely easy to use, even the 'programming' for campaigns and missions were easy enough to understand.

So, after I lost the disk I sort of lost the Heroes series. 3DO and New World Computing kind of broke apart like a piece of soggy toast drifting on a river, and 3DO gave the rights to none other than Ubisoft. I didn't know at the time, but I saw HOMAM 4 on sale in a bargain bin sort of thing at, if memory serves me right, a Dick Smith Electronics store.

I was estatic. A new Heroes game. Ok, it was made by a different company, but it can't be that different to the original games. Surely. I mean, the core gameplay of HOMAM worked well, wo why fix what isn't broke, right?
I was naive and stupid back then. I was about... 10? 11?

So, I slammed it into the disk drive, installed the game (and the two expansion packs since it was the gold edition) and set down to feel a nice wave of nostalgia.
I can't decribe what I felt when I first played through one of the campaigns for it. It was like playing a game you love and then watching a movie about it (take Max Payne or Farcry[no jokes, Farcry the movie]) and thinking 'This is the biggest piece of $#!t I've ever seen. It does no justice to it's predecessors. I feel like vomiting blood.'

So, I still hold it today as one of the worst games to have ever been released, at least for PC. Lets go through the many, many reasons why.

1. The towns changed a lot. Instead of the normal 7 creatures a tow, it has 2 creature hovels to start with and three others, and you can only choose one of the two. This means you have a small army to begin with, and a patheticly small army further on in the game. The reason for this is...

2. ...The hero system drasticly changed. Instead of having one hero, you can now have multiple heroes which act a lot like the units themselves, except that the heroes can level up, use items, cast spells, etc. The more heroes you have the slower they get XP, so the whole 'just hire more heroes to fill the void of having flak-all creatures' argument is tragicly shot down like a WWII aircraft carrying brave soldiers into the thick of battle. It also means you can have an entire hero based army, but doing so will mean your heroes reach level 2 by the time the enemy has a level 7 hero and a full sized army, or you just screw the whole hero business and make a creature based army, although the creatures will find it difficult to stand against a hero'd army, and it just hangs a big fat question mark over whyy you would even bother to change the original concept. This also means your heroes are subject to die just like creatures, and you control them just like a normal creature too, adding to the question mark.

3. As I may have already mentioned, the whole creature system changed too. Instead of the usual 7 creature based army, you have 2 creatures to start with and you must choose your future creatures because you can't have both, it's one or the other, which means you have to put unnecessary thinking into how you go about making your force, and since you usually don't know what your opponent's going to use you have no idea what to get, and you can't take any choices back.

4. Another gripe with the heroes is they never truely die. Their 'tombstone' if you will is left on the ground where they died and you have to fetch it before the enemy does, becuase if the enemies get it they through them inside their town prison and you have to buy the hero back. I can't remember whether or not there is a 'You know what, hero? You cocked up and now I'm removing you from existance' button, because i really couldn't care less about the hero unless he was especially high level.

5. Assaulting an enemy castle was different, too. If I remember correctly, you attack the walls head on with your units or wait for the enemy to step out of their castle. Because of the terrible camera position all the enemies directly behind the wall are invisible, and you can't select them becuase they're behind a wall, which is bad for both you and the person defending. No problem for the computer player though, the bastard.

6. Yet another problem with the heroes is the fact that there are might oriented heroes and magic oriented heroes. It's a pretty petty complaint, but surely it can't be that hard to just have a universal hero like every other HOMAM game, but apparently for Ubisoft that would be too much to ask. (No need to point out that HOMAM games had Death Knights and Necromancers too, but at least there was only one of them as your primary hero.)

7. All the creatures are tossed about randomly and thrown into different towns whoch is especially annoying because it means getting used to a whole different unit set. Remember how the Griffin almost always used to belong with the humans? No longer, because the griffins in #4 belong with the nature guys, which wouldn't have been so bad if they had not totally screwed up the graphics on it which made it look like some four year old put it together in Spore. Speaking of which,

8. The graphics for HOMAM 3, while cell-shaded, looked pretty good. HOMAM 4 has shoddy graphics that some fresh-out-of-university 3D graphics design major built, and look like they were constructed using clay and jelly. I don't know why they made the graphics look so goddamn awful, maybe it was because their budget was spent on making the game a total failure with all the previous HOMAM fans. The dragon/s, the griffin, the archdevil, the centaur, the behemoth, the harpy, the archangel, every elemental, the satyr, the tiger, the unicorn (a rainbow mane for god sake?), the dwarves, the naga, and the orcs (I can forgive these guys) all looked like absolute $#!t, and this isn't including the terrain and towns that look like crap as well. (I suppose I shouldn't be too mean, the way they made the units look different in #3 was by altering the model of the original unit slightly. But remembering that that's the same way they handled the units in #5, by re-skinning them, I suppose I can't complain much.)

9. I'm running out of things to rag on, but there was one last complaint I was saving until now, and thats the- wait, damnit. Lost it.

I suppose #4 must have received some reviews that were less than kind, and so Ubisoft pulled their head out of their oversized ass and made Heroes 5, but that's another post.