Genre: StrategyDeveloper: New World ComputingYear: 1995
Rating: 0.00 / 10.00
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Inspired by the earlier King's bounty and the famous Might and magic series, New World Computing conceived a totally new brand, that outshines most other medieval fantasy strategy games from its time. It actually has no relation with the Might and magic CRPG series.
Heroes, as it became widely known, sometimes feels like a colorful medieval CRPG, but it's not. There is a story line, but it is quite pointless and weak in the first game of the series (there're more options available from Heroes II on, and the story lines are far better). Instead, Heroes I focuses on the variety of units and scenarios and ease of play.
In the standard game you can choose one of many maps (scenarios) to play against one or more opponents. The campaign game is where the story unfolds, but it's pretty much just a new set of scenarios that you have to complete in a given order, where story has little importance. Either way, the game consists of managing a medieval fantasy kingdom, in control of champions (aka "heroes") that will wander all over the game world and command your minions into battle. These champions can get experience points, spells and artifacts that make their armies more powerful. There are four types of champions, the barbarian, the knight, the sorceress and the warlock, each related to a type of castle, that has a specific set of units. Barbarian castles have orcs and goblins, warlock castles have gargoyles and minotaurs and so on.
Sounds complex? It should take many hours for you to be familiar with all kinds of artifacts, units, spells, but Heroes is very easy and intuitive to play. After a few turns you already know how combat works, hot to gain control of resources, build-up your castles, get new recruits... done, you already know how to manage your kingdom. Vanquishing other players should take a little more, but it's not that painful.
Many claim that Heroes is unbalanced, but I don't see it as a problem. All players can capture all kinds of castles and take advantage of them. Bah, who's affraid of dragons anyway? Get yourself a good strategy, use your resources wisely and put them to sleep. You won't go far relying only on the individual quality of your units.
One of my favorite features in Heroes is the multiplayer support -- in four different flavors. It's great because even if you don't manage to set up a network (it's a DOS game after all) you can use hot seat and challenge (or team up with) your friends on a match.
The multitude of scenarios and other options makes for an extremely replayable game. Even today, all editions of Heroes are fun and addictive, you should keep that in mind.
