Heroes of Might and Magic® 3: Complete

Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is a game that caters to nearly any audience: I liked it as a middle-school student and I still like it after finishing graduate school. My girlfriend likes it. My dad likes it. Heck, even my mom likes it. It is extremely family-friendly and "casual gamer"-friendly as well. Why? Because the rules are simple, the game is turn-based (allowing players time to think), and with decent planning a victory is almost always possible (against a moderate computer opponent, at least). If you are totally unfamiliar with this game, here is a basic explanation: Players manage a kingdom (which may consist of many towns), including the construction of town structures and the movement of armies. Towns do not move, cannot be created nor destroyed (though they are developed over time and change ownership sometimes), and always occupy the same amount of space on the game map, unlike some other games. Towns are the primary source of troops for heroes. Armies are led by "heroes" who do not actually participate in battles, but enhance the martial capabilities of the troops they lead. Heroes are visible on the game map, but their armies are not. On the game map, the hero represents the entire army. In combat, the hero is visible on the fringe of the battlefield and can cast spells, but the individual troops are the components of interest. Heroes are the only agents of change in the game; they are the only ones who do things. Heroes are used to attack and defend towns, retrieve artifacts, slay monsters, explore unknown territory, complete quests, etc. By carefully developing his/her towns, a player supplies his/her heroes with the resources (especially troops) to defeat other heroes and conquer enemy towns. Heroes have primary skills (Attack, Defense, Spell Power, Knowledge) and secondary skills (too many to list) that develop over time. Each hero has a specialty that develops over time as well, in most cases. Heroes can learn many spells and equip several artifacts at once, which improve the effectiveness of that hero. The story is told through the many campaign missions. Each campaign consists of multiple games, played in order, that tell a story. When certain campaigns are completed, new campaigns are unlocked. There are also standalone scenarios. These are games that have self-contained stories. Some actually have a narrative, displaying text at certain points throughout the game, and some do not. Some have unusual victory conditions, such as "slay the specific beast," "capture the specific town," "find the specific artifact/Grail," or "accumulate X resources." These games sometimes have alternate victory conditions, allowing you to win by eliminating all competing forces. Games can also have unusual defeat conditions, such as running out of time or allowing a certain hero to be defeated. However, there are ways to cater to players of any skill level: -There are 5 difficulty levels: Easy, Medium (Normal), Hard, Expert, and Impossible. On Easy, losing is highly unlikely. On Normal, the human player(s) still have strong advantages, such as the ability to build town structures at a rate of 1 per town per day; the AI can only build every other day at this difficulty. On Hard, the human(s) and the AI start with equal resources and the AI plays "smarter." On Expert, the human(s) start with a resource handicap, and the AI plays as well as it can. Impossible is the same as Expert, except human(s) start with NO resources (unless they were selected as the Starting Bonus). -Combat can be streamlined or micro-managed: When entering the field of battle, a player can choose to select all the movements and attacks by hand or set combat to "Auto." If Auto is selected, the computer will fight to the best of its ability... But the computer is not as good as an experienced player! Combat is probably the area of the game that allows for the greatest development of skill. Also, there is a "Quick Combat" feature that allows for a player to initiate a fight and immediately see the outcome. In this case, I believe the results are actually better than those using Auto (for some unknown reason). Also, it saves time. The artwork and audio effects of the game are charming, engaging, and even enchanting at times. All of the game's artwork is hand-drawn, which has allowed it to age much better than the early 3D work of the same time period. The audio effects are dynamic, meaning they change based on what is near the player's active hero/town. Normally, I turn off my computer's volume at all times. For HoMM 3, I turn it on. I have never played the game online using a gaming service, though they do exist (for free). I have played the game from launch until now (late 2009) subsisting only on the single-player and hotseat multiplayer offerings (in which multiple human players use the same computer). When I play hotseat multiplayer, I am always allied with whoever is playing with me, which contributes to the fun of the game for each person. The single greatest contributor to the replayability of this title is the Random Map Generator, which was introduced with the expansion pack Armageddon's Blade. As its name implies, the Random Map Generator will create a unique map in only a few seconds, so that you never have to play the same map twice! When deciding to create a random map, the creator can choose the size of the map, the number of players, the strength of the monsters, and some other options. Unfortunately, unusual victory/defeat conditions cannot be applied to random maps (as far as I know). On the plus side, random maps that are particularly enjoyable can be saved and used again. This game has a large following of adoring fans. In fact, there are still websites dedicated to HoMM 3 tournaments and leaderboards. On the same note, there are websites that host custom player-made maps that have been thoroughly tested for fairness (I forgot to mention the map and campaign editors! You can guess what they do, and they are simultaneously awesome/time-consuming). If you enjoy strategy games of any sort, you should do yourself a favor and try this game. It is a true classic.

Whenever people talk about PC turn-based strategy games, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 always finds its way into the discussion. There's a miriad of reasons why this particular game from the whole series attracts so many players, making them remember this game above all others in this genre. As mentioned above, this game is a turn-based strategy game. You take turns to buy buildings or units for your castle, to explore the map, you get extra resources each turn depending on how upgraded your castle is or what outside buildings you've either conquered or visited. The right-hand side menu bar helps in keeping all the various things in order while outside, while the bottom bar menu is perfect in organizing your troops within the various castles you might own. The combat is also turn based, with you and your opponent's units sitting across the field from each other. Here, you can unleash spells each combat turn if you've already learned the spell and if you have the spell points for it. You can also arrange your units within a certain radius before starting combat depending on if you have a certain statistic higher than the other player. Combat is also how you gain experience for leveling up, thus allowing you to increase the previously mentioned statistics. The campaigns are immersive enough to keep you playing until the end with various objectives for each mission keeping you on your toes. The events are delivered through text boxes explaining the situation or delivering dialogue, but it never felt bothersome; in fact, with the calming sounds going on in the background, you almost lose yourself as you imagine the situations. Or maybe it's just me, but only a handful of games could pull this off as great as HOMM3 did. And if the campaign wasn't enough, you can play hot-seat games with friends on the same computer. Sure, you can spy on each other, but it's still immensely fun. The visuals in this game are remarkable, full of details and color, and at the same time are easily readable. You instantly know what the situation is even in the most crouded areas of the map. Each unit's art stands out on its own and the animations are fluid and pleasant as they are all rendered CGI. Each map you play on will feel magical, a feat rarely achieved by even the most pretentious games. The cinematics you can find within the game are also quite good for its time and deliver as an immersion point within the game's universe. While everything up to this point sounds like an incredible foundation for a game, the audio definitely does not take a backseat here. Just like the graphics help you determine what is going on visually, so do the sounds help you identify all the action and, in the case of the outside world, any nearby points of interest. You get close enough to a windmill, you will hear specific sounds that make you instantly recognize what's up ahead. World spells, combat spells and unit vocals are also very distinguishable. After finishing a moderate amount of matches, you can close your eyes and know exactly what is going on during a battle. The musical score is even better, if you can believe, making you dive head-on into any game you play. As a final word I'd have to say I don't regret any of the sleepless nigths I've spent playing this game with friends, alone, in the campaign or just skirmish matches. It's a great game, period.

I've only been fortunate enough to have a decent gaming PC in the past five or so years. My family, while not poor, weren't flush with cash. Spending money on things like computers, while fun, was also frivolous. So we were stuck with a couple of relics, the two candidates being a Cyrix CPU and an old 486DX/100 that had a Turbo button on the front. I was the younger brother, and definitely the weaker one, so most of the time I got stuck with the DX/100. Luckily, it got upgraded to a P133 so I was able to play a slightly larger range of games than the old DOS ones I’d been enjoying – honest – for most of my youth. But once I’d been “upgraded”, I only really played two extra games. One of those was Starcraft, and the other was Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Even to this day, I still haven’t found anything wrong with the whole package or the original game. Back when it was released, Heroes 3 represented a marked improvement over its predecessor with a massive graphical upheaval. Not all fans were pleased about this: with Heroes being a primarily fantasy game, a lot missed the more varied environments and colours that inhabited Restoration of Erathia and the expansions that followed. But the addition of adding more menacing details to the dragons and an expanded colour palette were soon ignored for the improvements 3DO reigned in. With the increased resolution, heroes were now able to expand their armies to include seven stacks instead of the previous five. This meant you no longer had to pick an army to leave at home, a chief source of frustration for many who enjoyed taking all their troops and going on a crusade across Erathia. Structural changes were also made en-masse across the battlefield, with flying units losing the ability to fly across the field in one turn. The introduction of more spells and schools of magic, coupled with the balancing out of the units across each town, added more depth to what was essentially one half of the game. The HoMM series was, and always will be, a primarily single-player game and while HoMM3 shipped with its customary set of entertaining campaigns, the story was never really prominent: Jon Van Caneghem, designer of the series, knew that the main selling point of Heroes was its addictiveness and thus resolved to make sure the player was never bogged down in dialogue and meaningless back-story. You’ll get smidgens of information every now and again; just enough to keep you playing, but not quite enough to bore you to death. As a package, Heroes 3 Complete is a perfect addition to your gaming collection. The expansions that followed – Armageddon’s Blade and Shadow of Death – didn’t offer quite the same value as the original. The series suffered from some balance issues as well, with the Fortress town being considered widely useless for its slow 7th level unit and pitifully weak 2nd level shooter. But on the whole, most of these issues have been ironed out. Shadow of Death brought deeper, more involving campaigns as well as critical balance changes. Armageddon’s Blade introduced the Conflux town (a slight disappointment from the futuristic race that 3DO had originally planned, which included one unit wielding a chainsaw) and the random map generator, all of which were essential improvements to the thoroughly addictive Heroes ensemble. I haven’t even touched on one of the best things about the HoMM series in general – the sound. Apart from the music being top-notch and perfectly in tune with the fantasy theme, the little sounds that trigger when you go past a fountain or hop onto a boat are a beautiful touch for a game that has aged as well as anything else in its time. If I were to name my top five favourite games of my short, twenty-two year old life, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 instantly tops the list. It might not be the best game of the lot – I know turn-based strategy isn’t for everyone or every mood – but it’s still my irrevocable favourite. I’ve never looked back on Heroes and disliked the time I spent playing this game. At $US 9.99, you won’t either.

HoMM3 is one of those games I'll still play when I'm 60 (I'm 25). I remember first seeing people play it, it was so strange and the characters seemed so out of place. There was no scale in this 2D world, where goblins are as tall as a mountain and where a mounted hero carrying armies in his pocket is as big as 1/8 of a big, heavily fortified city. It just didn't make sense, even if its setting is a fantasy world. But after playing a little bit I realized the game is not about graphics and accurate representations of reality or even fantastic realms. It's about making decisions and speculating what the future has in the box for you, the future being nicely laid out on the map as the well known shroud called "fog of war". And in time, the initially weird graphics grow on you. You begin to learn the various buildings on the map and what they do. You even learn to name the artifacts on the map and their abilities just after revealing them. If the campain scenarios are not enough, there's the killer feature of this game, able to provide years of entertainment: the random map generator. Choose your opponents, the size of the map, bonus start-up items and let the generator do its job. Everytime there will be a new map waiting for you and your friends to explore. Never-ending fun, I tell you. Buy this game and honour 3DO and New World Computing, for they have blessed us with a long lasting game. Your money will probably sink in Ubisoft's deep corporate pockets, but some of it will reach GOG.com, so they'll bring us even more fantastic old-school titles like this one.