captaind's Full Review: Heroes of Might and Magic III
Heroes of Might and Magic III is a turn-based strategy war game set in the land of Erathia, one of the stable locations of the Might and Magic series. This once peaceful land has recently been ravaged by attacks from other empires and all sorts of undead types, so as a general of Queen Catherine, you have to find out why – and, of course, stop the multiple invasions and bring peace and unity back to the land.
To do this you utilise the skills of several heroes – you can recruit them at the town taverns. Once you have a hero you can start to build a little army around them, perhaps several raiding parties controlled by different heroes or two large armies, one to go out a-conquering and one defending your city. When you meet with opposing armies you will be taken to the battle screen, where you must control your forces to win the battle. All sorts of different unit types will become available to you throughout the game – from fairly normal pikemen and archers right through to medusas, minotaurs, troglodytes, and other strange creatures you wouldn’t like to meet in a dark alley (or even a light one). Moving them, attacking, defending, or using spells you’ve picked up along the way, you must out-manoeuvre the foul foe before you. Aiding you in this will be the experience you earn as you win battles, which will enable your heroes to enhance their skills or perhaps even learn new ones. There are also many artefacts scattered throughout the land that can aid your quest by giving you additional abilities or powers. Teachers there are also if you can find them.
While you keep your armies busy and roving about the land, you must also take care of what’s happening in your cities. You will need to build these up economically, add fortifications, and build barracks and sometimes even breeding grounds so that you can create more troops. There is an overall mission objective for each scenario, each getting progressively more difficult, and each scenario builds towards the overall campaign goal. There are three different campaigns to choose from each with its own set of unique scenarios, which you can play individually or as part of the campaign. Whichever way you decide to do it, or whether you want to play a multiplayer game (which can be done over a modem or network), you can save your progress at each point.
Aesthetically, Heroes of Might and Magic III delivers some very clear and nice graphics, which do create a real atmosphere of the fantasy land it’s set in, and the music is excellent (if a little over-repetitive). There are some suitable sound effects and good animation, though sometimes the characters fire upwards when the animation is for them to fire forwards, which looks a bit odd! Each city type has a very distinctive style, and the many different creature types are easily identifiable. The difficulty level is set pretty well, from the beginning it’s challenging without appearing impossible. There is a tutorial level which is basically a small-scale map to get you into the swing of things. It’s not a “tell you what to do each step of the way” type tutorial, but it accomplishes what it needs to do, which is get you familiar with the basic commends. There is an on-disc manual which it recommends you print out, but personally I didn’t bother and the excellent interface (an explanation of any function is only a mouse-over or right-click away) makes this a game you can easily learn as you play, which is always the best way.
Though the setting is the same as 3DO’s other Might and Magic games, the style is nothing remotely similar except that there is a certain RPG element in building up your heroes statistics. Personally I found this to be a somewhat more enjoyable but less immersive game experience to the real-time RPGs of the series. It’s certainly a game that will keep you playing for a long time if you like turn-based strategy games.
The video clips that explain the storyline are high quality if somewhat cheesy, with the voice-acting particularly reeking of gorgonzola at times. This is a game that would probably appeal to the slightly less series end of the real-time strategy fan base, as to experienced gamers it may appear a tad over-simplistic. For instance, though your heroes can gain experience, the individual army units don’t. On the other hand they are affected by things such as morale and the hero’s base luck score, so it’s not completely mundane experience. The battle maps are rather small but in a way I liked that, because even with units that don’t move very fast the battles don’t take forever before opposing units actually meet each other.
After the problems I had with Might & Magic VII (which I think must be set almost directly after this game in the series, because in that game Queen Catherine rules over Erathia), it was a joy to find that this one installed and ran with no problems whatsoever, apart from the usual problem 3DO games have with identifying recent DirectX versions. The system specs aren’t very high (listed below) so if you like this sort of game, at £4.99 (or one of 3 for £10), there isn’t much to stop you getting this game!
Overall I really enjoyed this game though in some ways it’s a little repetitive and the computer-controlled players’ AI is definitely a bit iffy at times (at least it doesn’t cheat though!). If you’re really into turn-based strategy then you may find it slightly too simplistic for your tastes, but for beginners and those who like to dabble in this style of game, I’ve played few better.
Minimum System Specs
CPU: Pentium 133
OS: Windows 95/98/Me (doesn’t say it runs on XP but it ran fine for me with XP Home Service Pack 2)
RAM: 32Mb
Graphics card: DirectX6 (it didn’t recognise mine which is 9.0b, but had no problems running.) The game only uses 16-bit colour and 800x600 resolution, so even old cards should be fine with it. As it’s not real-time there’s no intense use on the card.
Originally released: 1999 by 3DO / New World Computing
This release: budget re-release by Sold Out Software
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