While HOMM1 picked up and greatly evolved from King's Bounty, HOMM2 completely surpassed HOMM1 in every aspect, finally turning this series a standard for decades and other games to come. So King's Bounty started it all... well, Heroes 2 started it all again. You start out with one of half a dozen factions, each with their own set of units (you can have units of other factions by conquering their towns). For example, barbarian faction has goblinoid units, warlock is focused on aberrating monsters, wizard has magical creatures and so on. Each army is commanded by a "hero", a character that you hire and will level from that point on, learn spells an skills, equip magic weapons. The graphics are very colorful and vibrant, although the combat animations might feel simplistic nowadays. Combat and probably most of gameplay feels a lot like a board game. I know this might scare some players off, but I must say it just FEELS right. Those looking for realistic combat will want to look elsewhere, but somehow having to count hexagons to maximize your spell effects or better evading your enemies is still great fun in Heroes 2, so much that the all-3D Heroes 5 still uses its tested and true formula (Heroes 4 departed from this model and was a much less successful game). Although simple, the fun factor of this game is impressive. Both the single player campaign and single/multiplayer maps work marvelously well. It's smooth and polished, and highly replayable. I think it's worth to say that all sequels after HOMM2, although great games in their own right, didn't innovate much on top of this gem. They improved graphics, added new missions, but the system was still there, most spells and heroes were still the same, skills, monsters, the map layout, the combat grid. Finally, what else is there to say? This game is pure gaming greatness history for just ten bucks.
This third installment is highly regarded as the best in the series, largely (in my opinion) due to the failure of Heroes 4 to stand to its predecessors (which I will comment further when that game comes to the catalogue). That more or less caused a seven years hiatus in Heroes fandom. When Heroes 5 came, it seemed too late for many fans -- some moved on to other games, others stuck with Heroes 3. To put it simply, Heroes 3 *is* a great game, probably for the same reasons of its predecessors. GAMEPLAY Heroes of Might and Magic, as always, is medieval-fantasy, turn-based, resource-management-driven, old-school, with a boardgame heart. Each player starts with one or more "towns" and "heroes". Towns have fixed positions on the map (you can't build new towns, only conquer existing ones), and in them you raise armies, hire new heroes, reseach spells and more. Heroes move your armies, conquer towns and mines, level-up, cast spells, learn skills, gather treasure and more. Mines yield resources to keep that engine running. When a hero finds an enemy on top-level map movement, you're taken to a strategic board where combat takes place. Top-level and combat-level maps are tiled, which brings this boardgame feel. Before picture the average lame boardgame in your mind, remember, Heroes *feels right* that way. It just works. That said, one must note Heroes never pretends to even resemble a realistic military strategy. In combat-level, your units are stacked in groups that always fill the same limited space (depending on unit type) no matter how many dragons or goblins you brought to the fight. That brings certain particularities -- at first it might look simplistic, but the sheer amount of units and heroes and their skills asures Heroes games do take a lot of strategic thinking, only in a different way from games like Lords of the Realm, Warcraft, Medieval: Total War and others. CAMPAIGN, SINGLE PLAYER AND MULTIPLAYER SCENARIOS Game comes in three flavors, equally fun to me. In campaign mode you follow the story of the restoration of Erathia by Catherine Ironfist, daughter of the late king, from the point of view of each and every faction involved. In scenarios, you can play alone or multiplayer (over the internets or hot-seat). The game comes with scenarios of all sizes and tastes, and the map editor makes this type of game nearly limitless, as further commented below. Ah, and me, not being a fan of multiplayer, let me add that playing Heroes hot-seat against friends is FUN, REAL FUN. EXPANSIONS They add great value to an already great game. Dozens of new missions, several new campaigns and units (some overpowered too, if that's your drill), hours and hours of added fun and replayability. QUALITIES Replayability is one of my favorite qualities in any game, and Heroes start a different trend in that department. The first replay booster is the number of different factions, which suggests at least half a dozen different styles of play, with their unique units, heroes, spells, powers etc. The designers made a great work here. Each single unit can be expected to have a different combination of powers, and there's about 80 different hireable unit types counting upgrades. The map editor works great too, meaning fans all over the world produce very fine new maps for your gaming greatness which can be downloaded freely from the internet. That's probably my main source of Heroes of Might and Magic fun ever. SHORTCOMINGS I can think of two. First, yeah, the campaign plot is pretty shallow, or at least its presentation is. The cutscenes don't play great thanks to poor 3D design, characters are forgettable, you might not feel pushed towards the end of the story. Many single-player scenarios have more unique and interesting plots and twists, including those designed by fans, which is both hard to explain and true in all installments of the series (in my opinion). Second, although the graphics were largely updated from Heroes 2, monster design relied on the same poor 3D skills of cutscenes, although it's not really 3D, it's still sprites on a tiled board. I wish they had stuck to the old style of before like they did with the rest of the game, or at least tried harder on that department. BOTTOMLINE Believe me, any shortcomings don't steal the charm of this game. Not this game. It might not be for those looking for "certain" types of strategies (ie. real-time, realistic), but it's still a tried and true five-star classic. It hardly aged at all, and now at 10 bucks a piece it's a package of immense value.
Republic is a rare modern political simulator, inspired in the russian communist revolution. A game of ups and downs really: it carries a great deal of personality and uniqueness, but suffers from a less-than-intuitive interface and perhaps a failure to fulfill their original vision of what the game would actually be. As the fictitious country of Novistrana sinks into a political crisis, you and other young faction leaders step in to try and take over. You arm-wrestle other factions in the fields of popular support, resource management, knowledge, muscle-recruiting and so on, all with a strrrrong rrrrussian accent. All "political" actions either use money, influence or violence, so yeah, it's a communist revolution alright. :) The point is, you can achieve the same using any of these three "resources", it depends on your people abilities. The game is quite hard to master. Controls are all over the place, it has too many help screens, and even the help is confusing to me. It begs for a proper tutorial... but it's far from unplayable, it just takes time. I think the main problem of the game is what it fails to fulfill. At first it feels like you'll be navigating through the great 3D town you're in, walking through its streets and living its life, but you and your comrades end up hostage of the boardgame-like map. You have little freedom of movement in 3D view, and it would be pointless anyway, because it's a bit hard to find your way around. Republic is turn based but with a timer, so you don't have much time for that, you mostly rush through action after action. Perhaps even more importantly, designing a town that looks like the Moscow of movies and adding the russian accent just isn't enough to make this a russian revolution game. This is disappointing because it's a fairly unique game already, and it could have been so much better. It ends up feeling like yet another strategy simulation, and a fairly simple one, the atmosphere falling short of realizing its expectations. Three stars still means it's very buyable and playable (I used to play it in a friend's computer back in the days and I'm really considering getting it here to play more), but it's certainly not for everyone like many other games -- getting a demo first might help you make up your mind.
Apparently, many people like to compare Lords of Magic to a number of games, particularly Master of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic and Lords of the Realm II. It depends strongly on individual opinion wether LoM actually compares to any of these, and I got my own opinion, which some might disagree. Lord of Magic probably compares best to Heroes of Might and Magic. In both games you move heroes around, who carry troops with them. You don't get to build new towns if I well remember, only conquer existing ones. Town development and resource gathering are VERY similar in both games, based on buildings that bring regional advantages and "mines" you capture. In choosing your faction you also determine your starting types of troops. Lords of Magic is much like Master of Magic in many aspects, although the games feel very different from each other. LoM has much improved graphics and somewhat more content to look for. MoM might be simpler and easier to pick up. Notable similarities are the research of spells that dictate your power in the game, heroes management and empowerment (yes, MoM had heroes too, remember?), and, in a lesser degree, troops management. Both games agree with the concept of mage-overlords (the players). I really don't see why everyone compares this to Lords of the Realm though: despite having real time tactical combat, LotR focuses on resources to build troops (ie. mining iron to build swords), while on LoM your resources go into town development; tactical combat in LotR is much more tactical and focused on fortifications types; LotR has no magic; LotR has no heroes; LotR generally can be beaten much faster and is basically much easier; and so on and on. The only similarity I can think of is that battles are real time, and towns are static (you can't build new ones). The original release of LoM came with lots of bugs and it played really slow, particularly due to long loading times, but also in between turns. The loading screen really got irritating over time. I'd definitely give this game 3 stars in its original release; fortunately Special Edition addressed most bugs. The expansion also adds some replay value, which is great. Otherwise is pretty much more of the same. Anyway, flaws notwithstanding, it's still a very good game, one that I'm willing to replay right away, being a strategy and fantasy fan myself.
