Heroes of Might & Magic V Demo

Okay, I just finished playing the included campaign and the scenario map, as well as a quick multiplayer duel

It is, more or less, the best of Heroes 3, with greatly upgraded visuals. They tried very hard to match the original style of NWC in all things, including city types, hero types, abilities, spells, creatures, map objects, and text in some cases (though this isn't perfect everywhere due to the translation, it did have a Heroes flair to it in most places).

There are some pretty intelligent additions and upgrades, and the vast majority of creature abilities, hero abilities, and spells that I saw were all quite useful. Additionally, they added hero abilities that aren't magic based, giving something for Might heroes to do in combat. High powered heroes in this game really make a stack strong, and high level creatures are extremely powerful.

The interface is well designed, spartan in a good way - it presents what it needs to, and no more. Indeed, the few elements that are visible can be minimized easily, though I was unable to locate any sort of kingdom overview screen - not a problem on the tiny included maps, but could be annoying on huge maps if it does not exist.

Enemy AI, unfortunately, seemed to be quite brain dead. In the included scenario map, I took the enemy AI's home city, and it made NO effort to retake it, in fact, it ran off to the opposite corner of the map to claim a woodmill while the timer counted down. I won the map by sitting in the city for six turns. This could be a big problem for single player longevity. I am uncertain if the AI is handicapped on Normal vs the two higher difficulty levels, but handicapped or not, that's not something the AI should be doing on any difficulty level, ever.

The tactical AI is decent, though unspectacular. I need to fight against the AI heroes in battle a bit more to see how they fare there. In most cases, against enemy stacks, they used their abilities appropriately, though I did see one instance where a group of ranged casters were obliterated because they spent the entire fight buffing each other and casting debuffs instead of doing any real damage - useful in concert with other units, not useful alone. The old standby of sit on your side of the map and fling ranged attacks and spells is alive and well, and allows you to easily decimate most monster stacks.

The 3d engine is gorgeous, though it has a few quirks. The cities are all huge, gorgeously rendered 3d objects, that grow as you add new parts. This is nice, but it doesn't work that well for functionality in accessing parts of the city. Fortunately, those parts are all accessible via ui elements, so the graphics-over-functionality aspect of the city really doesn't matter, and they DO look great. Plus, you get used to the position of recruit/upgrade structures fairly quickly.

The overworld map can occasionally be a bit busy, and zooming in cuts down on a lot of your vision, zooming out loses clarity - this results in necessary 3d zooming/panning. Thankfully, this is easily managed by holding the right mouse button to rotate the camera around. They have an option to invert/uninvert the camera, but I'd like full x/y axis control, the settings they have are flipped on one axis for me no matter which I select.

The multiplayer included is a quick duel style game, which is basically just one battle with two high powered armies. Not especially engaging, though it does give you a chance to quickly look over the various included army types, and check out some of the (frequently awesome looking) spell effects. The multiplayer is managed through ubi.com (NOT gamespy). While this may or may not have issues of other sorts, anything that isn't Gamespy makes me happy :P Have to wait and see how full multiplayer games go online.

If you were expecting a Heroes revolution, this is not it. It is a very positive evolution however - minus the jarring poorness of the AI. The tactical AI seems competent enough however, and Nival has quite a bit of experience with tactical AI from Etherlords. I have to say that the strategic AI is very worrying however. The strategic AI in Etherlords was also quite mediocre, and I'd hate to see a repeat here. That was one of the (many) factors that killed Heroes 4, but in this case, the rest of the game is far more solid than Heroes 4 was.

I'm going to make a few posts on the official forum and see if I can get a dev response about the AI, but odds are, it will either be drowned in fanboy responses, or recieve a generic PR response from ubi/nival. In any case, it's a little late to be fully retrofitting it, given that the game ships next month. Perhaps it is better when the AI has more heroes to work with on larger maps, I'll just have to wait and see.

I was nervous about this game from the getgo - Ubi acquired the rights to the heroes series from 3d0, after 3d0 ran it (and New World Computing) into the ground. As far as I know, this game has had no involvement from the previous Heroes team, and the last I know of Jon Van Caneghem was off at NCSoft doing an MMO that I believe was cancelled.

However, it seems that they made a very strong effort to be true to the Heroes feeling and formula, and Ubi is making a commitment to the franchise - the excellent looking Dark Crusaders of Might & Magic is being developed by Arx Fatalis developer Arkane Studios, and I saw mention that Heroes 5 is the first part of a new trilogy, with Dark Crusader, and then some third game as the last part of a story arc.

They've also been very connected to the Heroes community, with reps from the company posting at a variety of Heroes fansite forums, and listening to criticisms about the beta, and desires for the game. Hey, they even removed Starforce - lawsuit or no, that's a good thing.

At this point, I give it a buy. The core gameplay is very solid, and it's a game that looks to be enjoyable purely on a fluff level, even if the AI meat isn't there (which could be patched, if there is a strategic issue) - and there's always hotseat :)