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Heroes of Might and Magic is (are?) a series of games with a deceptively simple premise and an addictive quality to rival hot-buttered toast with cinnamon and crack topping.
Essentially, you, the helpless victim, are in control of one or more castles. In these castles are various dwellings, and in these dwellings are various creatures. (There are also a number of resource generators and power-ups.)
Each castle has a certain flavour, depending on which iteration of the Heroes series you're playing. For example, a Haven will produce knights-in-shining-armour type beings: champions, pikemen, ballistas, monks (who shoot fire), and angels; the spells and heroes avaliable will have a knightly flavour, being all healy and armoury and stuff.
An Asylum, on the other hand, will produce axe-hurling orcs, petrifying medusae, minotaurs, nightmares, and dragons, and allow the player to recruit thieves and chaos magicians to hurl fireballs at the foe.
There are various resources needed to build up your castle and recruit creatures, which you can obtain by flagging mines, sawmills ect., or find lying around in limited amounts. Certain buildings in your castle will also generate extra resources.
The Heroes are different from your regular run-of-the-mill creature. They carry over from fight to fight and adventure to adventure, gaining skills, spells and abilities with experience in the accepted fashion.
The games use standard fantasy tropes to great effect. Elven archers shoot, Thieves sneak, Priests heal; armies of dragons breath fire, armies of genies cast illusions, Bone Dragons fly in and scare everyone, it's all good.
I couldn't tell you exactly why the games are so addictive. They have a certain charm in the way they're put together, with lots of entertaining details and surprising layers of complexity. I love the way that each kind of Hero has an avatar with its own special animation: the Wizard pulls a rabbit out of his hat, the Preist whips out a prayer-book and studies it breifly. Each terrain has its own musical score, which changes as you move your Hero arond the map.
I first started playing the series with Heroes II; I dug the game and played it obsessively. Heroes III did away with some minor gameplay flaws and introduced new troops and a new spell system based (rather tediously) on the four elements, but seemed to lose much of the charm of II.
Heroes IV marked a return to form, with many of the things that made Heroes II so much fun to play restored (the castles play opera again!), although some of the changes were less than impressive (holding a castle is now a total pain in the bum).
I'm currently mired in the Wings of War expansion pack for Heroes IV. Heroes V hits the shelves soon.
May God have mercy on my soul. |
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