Heroes of Might and Magic® 5 Bundle includes Heroes of Might and Magic® 5 and its two expansions: Tribes of the East and Hammers of Fate.
Heroes of Might and Magic® 5 is a turn-based strategy game in which you can build cities and besiege them, train troops and slaughter them, and explore new lands...
Heroes of Might and Magic® 5 Bundle includes Heroes of Might and Magic® 5 and its two expansions: Tribes of the East and Hammers of Fate.
Heroes of Might and Magic® 5 is a turn-based strategy game in which you can build cities and besiege them, train troops and slaughter them, and explore new lands – and crush them under your iron heel. You directly command your armies on the battlefield and aid them with your character’s abilities as well as your own strategy skills. With six unique factions to choose from, each with its own set of buildings and creatures, Heroes of Might and Magic® 5 provides gamers with the strategy and detailed graphics that the series has been known for. As you progress through the game your character gains levels of experience that allow him to learn new spells and abilities. All this is set in the magical and enchanting setting of the legendary Might and Magic® universe.
Been playing for a while now, it's great to play with friends over the internet or in the same room through Hot-seat. This way there's no tactical advantage and everyone is more involved. Game itself is a little dated but still looks pretty good. It could be overwhelming in the beginning, but at the end there aren't really many different approaches so it might become a tad boring :)
Wasn't a huge fan when it came out, but it has since grown on me enough to subplant HoMM2 from it's 2nd place into 3rd. So now it's HoMM3>HoMM5>HoMM2>The rest.
So to those who are familiar with HoMM 1-3 universe, this isn't it, like 4th, they decided to scrap everything and begin anew, although in this case there's no cool lore explanation like we had in 4, so you just have to roll with it. The Lore byitself is less of a mess than originals, but also more cliche.
The only bad thing was that it lacked those elaborate novels written in the game - I rather enjoyed them which was a bit of a bummer.
Anyway, so gameplay is changed in the regard to speed, because now speed isn't the only thing that decides who goes first because they have also introduced "Initiative". I'm not a huge fan to this day, but it does add an element of complexity that 3rd lacked - but overall it doesn't matter enough since fast units have usually good initiative - with notable exceptions.
The AI is retarded and on top of that takes forever with its turns, on top of that you can't "alt-tab" because the game freezes til you come back allowing you witness those extra seconds tick by as the meter fills up. This is a huge issue for me on custom maps, but in campaigh its tolerable since a lot of it is scripted to a point where it seems smart.
Campaign by itself is a bit of a hit or miss in terms of story/lore, but it does offer some interesting challenges down the line. Playing this on max difficulty heroic has been a trial which I enjoyed.
Hero & Hero skillwheel; so yeah first and foremost you can now attack units with hero. I think it's a bad change personally but yeah, it does grow on you. Skillwheel is more balanced than HoMM3 and 4, and there are more useful abilities. There are also ultimately abilities you can acquire once you unlock specific skills, but I usually skip them since most of them are not worth it - with notable exceptions.
Theres a mod that fixes most of the issues btw.
It's a very good design, reminescent of HOMM3 and it has all the good stuff you would expect. However, the technical implementation of the game is abysmal. And not even a modern PC is enough to brute force through that. A state of the art 2023 PC will still net you 3-5 frames per second when zooming out in certain areas, despite the GPU and CPU remaining almost unused. Frame rates in many parts are not only dropping but unplaybly low, going sub 10 fps. This was the case back at release and it's still the case now.
First of all, let me say i'm a huge fan of HoMM series. The second and third instalments are the best by far (and most people on the internet agrees with this).
But...this instalment is the worst in terms of the campaign. It's plagued with bugs that literally won't let you advance. Trigger events that don't happen it's the most frequent bug. You need to either restart the mission or use the console's cheat code to either trigger the event or just outright type @Win() and be done with that sucker !
In terms of AI the enemy lacks intelligence and strategy. I feel like playing a match of chess with my pet goldfish and I think that will squeeze more "smartness" than this game.
The graphics drips with colours and special effects just for the "eye candy" effect. But for the game play it only gets in the way, the camera is too clumsy and some objects are hidden behind trees and rocks. And at some point you have to reduce your setting because FPS goes down for no reason.
The spells are awful, they don't feel powerful at all. The fireball and meteor shower kills only a few enemies and ONLY if they are not immune to fire. The resurrections and blessing feel like a waste of mana too.
All the units feel weak, once i was fighting a bunch of peasants with some of my soldiers and it took me like 20 effing turns to kill them.
The skill tree progressing sucks, you never know the entire set of skills to plan your hero build ahead. And even after learning the entire skill tree on some fan-made web you still can't build your ideal hero because your hero will choose RANDOMLY a set of skills to advance for you. LAME !
There's plenty of other reasons to hate this game, but those were the main reasons (and they should be enough for you to STAY AWAY from this game). Buy Homm2 or 3 or buy this one and prepare yourself to use the cheat console A LOT !!!
This game has almost all the mechanics of the III instalment, but with updated graphics and sound. The original campaign is not very good, I didn't like the characters and the plot almost all the time, and the world the story takes place has changed to a generic and very shallow dragon gods stuff. But HMM, for me, was all about playing a single game at a time, learning the strategies with each different faction and conquering the map.
The GOG version gives you the basic game and two expansions, each adding a faction, maps and a extra campaign. There is a random map generator too, I use it a lot!
The factions are similar to what you may be used to, with some exceptions: dungeon is now a dark elf faction (ugh! :P), the barbarians now are an orc faction (but you still have goblins and the cyclops), the "nature" factions is now an elf faction (this one didn't changed very much) and there is no "swamp" fortress again (sad, I know). There is now a dwarf faction, that get the name "fortress", but it has nothing to do with with the first. The dwarves are my favourite faction in HMM5 (and Thanes ARE GIANTS! Giants don't need to look like humans in a dwarven faction, so give me a break!).
I think that if you like HMM3, there is no way you will dislike HMM5. If you are like me, for the price GOG is asking, you get almost infinite playing time! So buy it and be happy forever! Or... be happy until you die :D