Heroes of Might and Magic® 4: Complete

Overall a good experience, game runs well on win 11. Fresh new take on how heroes interact with battles, lots of new interesting skills. Dislike how a new week doesn't increase creature growth, it grows daily. Mobile guards are annoying but can be turned off. Imo the last good instalment of the series, every homm after this is pretty bad.

A review of at least 30 chars!

I enjoy every game being a bit different. At the core it's still the same, which is the most important part to me.

I've played a lot of HoMM back in ye olde days and bought this one during one of the sales. Installed and started playing again, and it's still a decent, if rather awkward looking game. The first problem most people might encounter is screen resolution. For some reason, it only stays windowed if you play under 800x600 or 1024x768. The largest available resolution forces fullscreen, possibly due to the engine. I saw a post elsewhere stating that you can make a shortcut and add "xres=1920 yres=1080" as parameters to alter the size of window. As for the game proper, the biggest difference between other heroes games is that the heroes actually fight and can be killed in combat. Personally, I really enjoy this as it gives a bigger RPG feel. Something of a cheat, if you walk around with an "army" of heroes, you can always retreat (white flag) without penalties. Your heroes will be teleported to the nearest town and any that was dead will be revived. Now, one of the changes that I didn't like is that there are no upgraded units. So no peasant-conscript, no squire-knight, no elf-high elf, etc. Another thing that wasn't well designed is the new combat map. The grid is a very large collection of little squares and every unit occupies between 4 to 20 of them. This creates a very large and, frankly, unnecessary angles that you can attack an enemy. It's very difficult to tell whether a unit can get past some parts of the map, since you can't tell from a glance how the obstacles are really laid out. I can't really talk much about balance as I've only finished the Haven scenario thus far and am still on mission 2 of Might. Enemies showing up out of nowhere with way more units than you could have hired is a real pain and seems frequent at Advanced (3/5) difficulty.

If you ask the same question, here are some hints. Graphics: HOMM4 follows a very different visual style. It fares poorly against such names as HOMM3, os Disciples 2, less characterful, and sometimes downright confusing. But you know what? After 2 hours of gameplay it didn't bother me the slightest. Heroes: They're no more bystanders, but ACTUAL heroes. If you liked the approach of Disciples 2, you'll like that one too. They can be goddamn powerful; properly upgraded they can wrestle with a dozen of black dragons, and emerge victorious. Sadly, combat-skills are almost mandratory, so it somehow limits your skill choices (try to go without that, and you'll be torn to pieces on level 2). Combat: the somewhat random and way too powerful combat bonuses were tamed in HOMM4, and sublte changes in fight will make you to plan every clash. Also, the mutally exclusive unit tree will prevent you from getting all the units from a single town, but there's a solution: conquer other cities, and you can build other structures there. Story: gripping - at least in the original campaign. Many has some sad twists in the end, so it worhts reading all those texts the game drops at you. Sometimes I willingly failed a mission to learn what happend in that scenario. I definitely suggest you to buy that one. Apart of the graphic I liked all the changes it brought after HOMM3, and I cannos say bigger praise than that.