Might and Magic Heroes 6 (since when is this series not called Heroes of Might and Magic?) was released last Thursday, and over the weekend I spent a good deal of time with it, including a multi-player game along with a bunch of campaign maps. I’ve written about the beta before, but I want to put together a more complete piece now, especially given the changes between the full release and the beta.
Heroes 6 is, by far, the most polished game at release the series has ever seen. To say that everything (so far) works might not sound like a huge compliment, but if you have ever played a Heroes game before, you know what I’m talking about. The decision to push the release back, along with holding an extensive beta, worked out great. It runs without a hitch at the highest settings, so far I’ve not heard anything weird or off with the sound or voice work, and multiplayer connected and was smooth from start to finish. Hell the game even reloads quickly.
The graphics and sound are AAA caliber. The game maps look amazing, the units have great animations, and even the voice work is above average overall. There are also nice options to speed things up, such as fast battle animations, no zoom-in camera, or just letting the game auto-battle combat for you, with the option to replay the battle if you don’t like the results.
The game also has a lot of other ‘stuff’ going on outside of any one map/game. First you have your dynasty rank, which is an account-level… account that has its own XP bar. As you go up in ranks, you open up more stuff at the in-game store. In this store you can buy fluff stuff like titles, character portraits, and dynasty traits. You get store points by completing achievements, which for the most part is the usual “kill 1000 monsters”, “finish combat in one round” stuff. It’s cute, and just more things to unlock as you play. If you are someone who loves the gotta-catch-em-all aspect, Heroes does a nice job here.
Similar to your dynasty rank, but with more in-game impact, are the new dynasty weapons. These are artifacts that can also level up (think LotRO), and with each level more stats/abilities become available. The weapons are tied to your account, so you can give them to any hero (there are some requirements for using them) in any game. You can disable dynasty weapons in multiplayer. They are found while you play the campaign, which is pretty interesting. Also during the campaign, your main hero keeps artifacts that are part of a set from one map to the other, giving the campaign a little more ‘carry-over’ and gives you incentive to fully explore each map. IMO these are all nice additions to the Heroes formula. They don’t dominate the game, or completely change the feel, but rather bring the series into 2011. Best of all they don’t feel out of place or forced, nor do they imbalance the game.
Gameplay is both classic Heroes while also feeling fresh thanks to some of the changes. While not all of the units are totally new, they all play a little differently and have their own unique aspects. For instance, all factions have a low-tier archer unit that you have to protect and that does decent damage at range. But the Orc faction’s unit, the goblin, has a trap ability that can be placed and stops movement if it’s crossed, while the Undead skeleton has an AoE slow. Add in the racial ability of the undead (raise units back up), or the Orc’s (hit harder/move faster), and the two units, while similar, do indeed play differently. Multiply this by the total number of units, the different hero abilities/items/spells, and the strategy aspect of Heroes 6 is pretty deep. There is also plenty of room for expansion in terms of new factions, which I’m sure Ubisoft and the devs will take advantage of in the future.
The campaign, from what I’ve seen so far, is solid. The two intro missions set the stage for each factions 4-mission/map story, and there is a final (locked) campaign that I’m guessing concludes the whole thing. I’ve beaten three of the four undead maps so far, and each one has been entertaining and progressed the story nicely. The pacing is very noticeable, with a good blend of “just playing Heroes” and story/movie breaks at key moments. There are also interesting ‘one off’ battles, which can feature special conditions or units, and require you to change up your strategy.
As has always been the case, Heroes is certainly not a casual game in many ways. The campaign maps take hours to complete (you can of course save along the way), as do multiplayer games. The one multiplayer map I’ve played so far, a three-way game with a buddy and comp AI, took us about 4 hours start-to-finish, and that’s with most battles being resolved with the auto-calc feature. We had a great time, but this is not a pickup-and-play type of game.
If you have played and enjoyed pervious Heroes games, I can’t imagine you will be disappointed with Heroes 6. I’d also recommend the game to anyone looking for a strategy fix that has some time/patience. While the game has 2011-era features, at its core it’s an old-school game. It’s deep, it takes time, and (for me) its ultimately very rewarding.
Hardcore Casual 
I saw this up on Steam this weekend (and even I though it was supposed to be Heroes of Might and Magic), and while it looks interesting, I couldn’t actually tell what kind of game it was or what the game play was like. I think Steam categorized it as Strategy and RPG, while the videos with it didn’t tell me much.
What is game play like? To what other game is it most akin? What are you doing at, say, any given 5 minute stretch of the mid-game?
On the world map, you are moving around as your hero+units, collecting resources, flagging/using buildings, fighting stationary monster groups or other heroes. In town, you build it up to get new units or upgrade current ones to the higher level, or upgrading defenses or utility buildings. In combat, it’s turn based on a grid map.
It honestly is almost it’s own genre. I mean games like Kings Bounty play like it, but those are direct clones (or the original design, depending on which Kings Bounty we are talking about).
Edit: About the mid-game, 5min thing – At the start of the game you have fewer and more basic units, as you progress you get more or upgrade them, and at end-game you have all you units/upgrades, and ultimately are focused on fighting enemy heroes and capturing their town(s).
In my mind, that sounds vaguely RTS-like in nature. Is that accurate? Is it real-time or turn-based?
100% turn based. On the world map, each side has a turn, and in combat, each unit has a turn.
And this is what I mean, a total of 4 posts to find out what you’d learn in 10 seconds taking a tiny bit of initiative ;p
Literally there is a “Gameplay” section in the table of contents for its wiki page (like every game) the first line of which tells you it’s TBS and then precisely answers the rest of or questions as well as going into detail about all the gameplay elements.
And this is just the lightning fast answer. From google you’d find this info from tons of sources, most notably the games website and reviews.
Although wiki leads to these places anyways, essentially summarizing the info and providing a gateway to Everything you could possibly want to know about this or any game.
I hate to be this person, but wouldn’t it be more efficient and a better use of yours and syncaines time to put in 5 min to find this out yourself? Especially as it’s a long standing series with oodles written about it online, it’s not like Steam has a monopoly on game info and gameplay description.
And by 5 min I mean 15 seconds to google it, which unsurprisingly and quite usefully brings up the HoMaM wiki article first.
For future reference, the wiki for any game (well, maybe not every game but any with a decent following I’d say and of course any series as old as this one) will answer your exact questions.
A lot easier to bookmark Wikipedia or even google then wait for a reply on a blog.
Would it have been a lot easier to just let this pass than type not one but TWO responses to this?
At least now, with my questions asked and answered, which took like two minutes, if somebody else comes along and has the same question, hey presto, there is the answer. After all, here is a review of the game, a couple additional details couldn’t hurt anybody, including you.
I mean God forbid we try to have a friendly discussion and exchange of ideas in a blog comment thread. Glad you brought us back to reality with your flame.
Good work Torcano. The world is a better place now.
Ha ha zing.
Lucky for Torcano there’s no permadeath in comment pvp :)
I love the HoMM games (Might and magic was the prefix for the RPG’s damnit!) and 6 is a great improvement over 5. While the unit graphics are still very dated, they’re at least not terrible. More importantly, the gameplay is surprisingly solid.
I like how creature recruitment works – instead of having to buy troops in towns then manually ferry them about (or use cumbersome “caravans”) being able to simply recruit everything in whichever town/fort you want is awesome.
Also, each town having its own area of control for mines etc. is wonderful – you can raid them, but no more extremely annoying little mine-ninjas. Some may miss it as a tactic, but it was really far more annoying than anything else. It’s much more straight forward to defend an area now, rather than needing to have little heroes trotting around constantly recapping oddball mines.
That said, it’s got lots of somewhat annoying UI inconsistencies and annoyances that I hope get straightened out. Not gamebreaking at all, but annoying.
Overall, a good evolution IMHO, but I’m only a couple maps into the campaign, and haven’t tried multiplayer yet. Deliberately stayed out of the beta :)
Hello. I generally agree with your review, I like the game very much, but – the story, or at least what I saw from it, is at the same retardation level as homm5. And this raven thing Bluebeak – is it supposed to be funny? What is its point? And because Im from slavic backround most of the names are strange to me too – Slava (translated Glory) is a female name here, there is no Sveltana, but there is Svetlana – it seems just like random spelling mistake (I know it is isnt because its dubbed Sveltana in game). Black Hole Entertainment are hungarians (AFAIK), Im sure they could have done better. There are some bugs too – sometimes when I load the game I cannot move the screen with my mouse, sometimes there are black squares when the hero’s flags are supposed to be. I noticed that the game loads the map and then tries to load the game objects too, but sometimes this happens to slow and I have an empty map with my hero and not even the yellow/white dots of the hero’s path are displayed. While I like the faster unit movement, Im not sure why the sound when they rejoice after a victory is also speed up – its just so weird, I decided to play at normal speed. Ive noticed a lot of other small things I cannot remember.
So – before you all acuse me of bitc*ng – I like the game very much, its just that those are nuisances, that while not game/dealbreaking, annoy me
I have the game installed on two machines. On my newest one (pretty much at the bleeding edge), I don’t get any loading issues. On the 2yr old machine (still fast), I occasionally get the map objects loading thing, although if I just wait 2-3 seconds they all load and everything is fine. Never got the black squares or anything like that though.
There is one little bug …bugging me. The cursor is flickering like hell and it seems I’m not the only one with that problem.
Beside that, the game is pretty solid and I don’t regret buying it at all
I only get the flicker at the main screen, and it’s very minor. If I turn on V-sync, I get it all over, and it’s very annoying. I think it might be an SLI-related bug, but not sure.
Nah, I’m using a Singlecore GPU (Radeon 5770. Next time I’ll stick with nvidia, i swear!). V-Sync doesn’t make a huge difference either, at least for me. Well, they aknowledged the problem and are working on a fix. For the time being, well, I’ll get over it
Does it run without steam and offline? I’m a fan of previous games but I wont touch it if its part of the move toward making all games require the internet.
It has Ubisoft’s version of Steam that runs before it, so I believe you have to be online to play it. Not 100% on that though.
What ever happened to the good old days of being able to buy a game, shove the disk in the drive, and play without needing to be signed in to Steam or anything similar?
I recently re-installed Heroes 3 onto my old pc sitting in my spare room, and let the floodgates of nostalgia burst open once again. My god was that game ugly, but also a lot of fun.
The world we live in. You give up the disc stuff to share achievements and titles with others. Win…
No, making an online restriction limits people that don’t have access to good internet connection. I think steam is rather a monopoly that is going to convert all the stand alone titles to MMO like games with cash shops and infinite grind hours. Just my two cents on steam. Its sad to see your favorite franchise being sucked into the steam vortex. :(
My thought about H6MAM are good i like this game very much Its buggy thats true but all new games are and all bugs can be fixed with patch :) Most i like is the terepotaiton system ( i dont know if its a bug but after some uses i cant use the teleportation and its gray)
Units looks great ( especialy necropolis ;) graphic is beutifful in my opinion but animation in the game are not so good The towns on map are nice but i miss the old town screens from previus games
BTW can someone pls tell me how i can kill the last inquisitor in necro mission one cos always when i come there he has such big army that my ghouls ghost and skeletrns have no chance ;)
I heard somewhere that they realising patch to fix town screens Dont know if its true