After looking for it for several months, I finally found and bought “Heroes of Might and Magic V“. I’ve played it for maybe 7-10 hours, in a hot-seat game where I control all the players, and I must say that me initial reactions are less than positive.

First of all, it’s buggy like hell. During the few hours I’ve played it, it’s crashed some 10-15 times, and once it even deleted my saves. Furthermore, the settings have to be reset the way I like them every time I start the game. The game’s fully playable, mostly, so long as I remember to save at least once or twice per turn, but it definitively reduces the enjoyment I get from the game.

But it’s sad that these kinds of things have to ruin an otherwise excellent game, and I shudder to think what would have become of it if the SaveHeroes.org petition to delay the release date (a petition I signed, of course) hadn’t succeeded. Because the creatures and alignements (the four I’ve played this far — Academy, Dungeon, Haven and Preserve — that is) are refreshing. The gameplay may be a little too similar to III (I’ve always prefered both II and IV to III; I don’t get the hype), which may indicate that Nival has chosen the safe path of following the voice of the loudest fans. Which would have been a larger point of criticism, had they not also introduced new features. Or “new” may not be the best way to describe them; mainly they’re blends of III and IV, such as the new style of combat and the skills/abilities system.

The things I miss in the game, from earlier games, is first and foremost the “split stack” function; it’s bloody annoying to have to do this manually when hiring creatures, when it could have been simplified into a five-second procedure by simply adding a simple function. I really can’t imagine it taking more than a day to program such a feature. Second, I miss the Caravans of IV. This function was brilliant, enabling you to send armies across vast distances in a matter of turns, without turing it into the unrealistic and outright stupid chaining system of III, which, by the way, I’ve heard rumours of them bringing back in V, although I haven’t tested this myself yet. Third, I miss more, bigger maps. There’s only one multiplayer map where all the players can be non-AI, and that one’s only “big”, and very resource-poor, at that. When one adds the lack of a map editor, the possible gaming fun of this game is dramatically reduced. It’s also ridiculous that only four players in a mp game can be non-AI; I seriously don’t see why Nival chose to implement this pole-up-the-ass rule. It serves no purpose as far as I can see, it only hurts playability. Finally, I’m somewhat annoyed with all the spelling-mistakes in the Hero, creature and town bios. Sure, I may not be the world’s best English user myself, but I can’t afford to pay a person to do spelling-checks for me, can I?

Aside from all this, though, I love it. The creatures — the relatively reduced number of which was my single major beef with IV — are diverse, interesting and fun to play. The most prominent example I can come up with at the moment is Dungeon’s Blood Furies, whose strike-and-return and no enemy retaliation abilities, combined with seemingly good attack stats make them excellent at the kind of defensive combat I prefer. Hit and run, plenty of shooters and limited melee in order to minimize casualties.

The adventure map is also well worked out. The 3D graphics and the possibility to zoom and change angles, in combination with beautiful adventure objects, make the map more than pleasing to the eye, even though it tends to get kinda much for the computer to handle when I zoom out and tilt the camera so that the visible area of the map is maximized. The music is also stunning. They follow the tradition of opera, and this time it seems as if they’ve borrowed heavily from the classical requiems as well; there’s plenty of latin I recognize from e.g. Mozart’s “Requiem”. Naturally, these are common in much Catholic music, but when seem together with the whole musical theme, I find it hard to believe that this is merely a conjecture from my part. Made me want to listen to the II soundtrack, the music did.

All in all a good game, but I would have liked Nival and Ubisoft to held onto the game for a few months more, polishing and perfectioning it. I’ve started to think of this patch-madness as a kind of insult to us gamers, as what they in general is saying is that, “You people look like you’re willing to buy an unfinished products, and you have in fact done so many times in the past. So here’s another one. We might be getting back to you with some patches in a couple of months.” Not a very sympathic (or clever, I might add) way to look at the people whose happiness your livelihood depends upon…