Heroes of Might and Magic is the first in a series of famous turn-based strategy games. It is actually not the first one I played – that would be Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which will be reviewed later.

There’s a meta story behind the series: As the title implies, it is based in the Might and Magic universe (a western RPG series that I have not played and cannot really get into because I hate oldschool western RPGs) – however, it was designed after New World Computing (the company that made Might and Magic) was purchased by a new publisher, 3DO. (It’s still designed by Might and Magic‘s lead designer, though.) The basic design and engine of the game is actually based on an earlier New World Computing game, King’s Bounty, which I have never played but which Wikipedia tells me is basically a simpler form of this game.

The game doesn’t really have much connection to Might and Magic, honestly. The plot (inasmuch as there is one) states that a guy called Morglin Ironfist had to flee through a magic portal to a new land after his cousin usurped the throne. He finds himself in a world governed by three other warlords, all vying for control of the continent. Proving his usurpation to be justified, he decides to join the fray and pit himself against the other warlords, resulting in a four-way war for control of the continent.

You play as one of the four warlords, each of which controls a different faction and has a remarkably different playstyle. Every faction has six creature “tiers” associated with it – higher-level creatures are stronger but have lower weekly growth rates. The four faction types are based on their hero types – knights (Morglin’s faction), barbarians, warlocks, and sorceresses. Knights are very, very boring. Their troops are all just various types of humans, and all of their troops are pretty bad overall. Their only saving grace is that they’re cheap as dirt and have slightly higher-than-average growth rates, but they still suck. In particular, their lowest-level creature, peasants, are the flat-out worst creature in the game, bar none. And I don’t just mean “tricky to work with”, I mean effectively unusable. They have the lowest stats possible in every area – and due to the way hero speed is calculated, they actually hurt you by slowing down your hero. They die like flies and can’t inflict any meaningful damage whatsoever. To make matters even worse, there’s a special enemy troop that adds to its own stack every time it kills another troop – attacking them with any low-level troop is dangerous, but with peasants it is suicide, no exceptions. Surely the knight faction has something to counterbalance this awful deadweight, I thought. Nope, their other creatures are also terrible, just not as much.

They also have no flying creatures and only one archer-type, allowing everyone else to run circles around them. The lack of flying creatures means they’re also terrible at castle sieges, since they can’t fly over the castle walls.

Barbarians I didn’t play around with much. It seems that they’re designed to be good in the early game, but lag behind in the late game. Fittingly, their creatures tend to be glass cannons – high attack power but poor defense ratings, necessitating an “attack before attacked” strategy. Their creatures are all the grotesque things demonized in Tolkienesque works – goblins, orcs, trolls, etc. They also have wolves as a mid-level troop – it’s their fastest and a very solid unit (provided they attack first). Their heroes also get a movement bonus on rough terrain (which slows other heroes down), so they make great scouts. What really hurts them, though, is their ultimate creature (the cyclops). It’s slow and just generally not that good in comparison to the phoenix and dragon, who can fly everywhere. (One glaring aspect of this is that the cyclops can’t take as much advantage of the two-hex attack since walkers are so much harder to position right.) Like the knight faction, they have no fliers, but that’s somewhat counterbalanced by the fact that they have the best archer unit in the game.

Warlocks are the objectively the best faction 99% of the time. They’re sort of the opposite of barbarians – their troops are very expensive (so it can take a while for you to get moving), but they are incredibly powerful. Their troops are mythological creatures – centaurs, gargoyles, gryphons, minotaurs, hydras, and dragons, which are the best troop in the game. Centaurs have the most hit points out of all the tier-1 creatures, plus they’re archers. Gargoyles are incredibly sturdy, making them good archer-blockers – since they’re fast and fliers (giving them infinite movement), they can just sit next to enemy archers and prevent them from doing anything. Gryphons are also fliers, and have infinite retaliations, allowing you to just place them next to enemies and have their opponents slaughter themselves as they continually attack your gryphons (particularly fun with weakling archers). Minotaurs are the most ordinary warlock troop, but they’re sturdy melee fighters, making them a good garrison unit. Hydras are incredibly difficult to set up properly, but if you do, they’re awesome. They have the special ability to attack all enemies adjacent to them, they don’t trigger enemy retaliations, and they have infinite retaliations themselves. (Although I wonder if that last part was a bug – it does seem to make them crazy overpowered.) They’re built like tanks, making them incredibly difficult to take down, and if the enemy tries to swarm them, the hydra can easily slaughter all of them at once. Their only downside is that they’re very slow, but they will save your bacon if they’re your last unit (or may kill you if they’re your enemy’s last unit). Dragons are simply awesome in almost every conceivable way. I believe they were supposed to be balanced by having the lowest growth rate of tier-6 creatures, but there’s a structure you can build that increases the growth rate of all troops by 2, which really undercuts that. For example, cyclopses have a base growth rate of 2 – but while the difference between 1 dragon and 2 cyclopses may be enough to balance them, the difference between 3 dragons and 4 cyclopses is in the dragon’s favor.

However, the faction I actually played as was the sorceresses’. It’s a touchy-feely nature-themed faction, with troops like elves, dwarves, and phoenixes – basically, the “girly” monsters (reinforced by the fact that the sorceresses are the only female heroes). I think they’re probably the most well-balanced of the four factions. Their tier-1 troop, though. Let me tell you about them. They’re pixies. They’re fliers, allowing you to lock down enemy archers easily, but, well. Here is a video of the opening cutscene, where they are crushed to death by a piece of paper. This grossly overexaggerates their survivability. (Still sturdier than peasants, though.)

Elves are decent archers (though rather fragile), and they also have druids, which are much better (and sturdier) archers. I found myself liking the unicorns, though – they’re decently fast, but not so fast that they immediately throw themselves into enemy fire and get killed, and they’re one of the few sorceress troops that isn’t made of tissue paper. As a result, I ended up acquiring a large stockpile of them while all my other troops died, making them a pretty powerful last resort if things went south. Phoenixes are essentially just weaker dragons.

As you may have been able to tell from this, the game is not well-balanced at all. It’s a bit unfortunate that they put so much thought and detail into all the troops, but the end result is that, if you’re a sorceress or warlock, you can just steamroll everything else by the mid- to late-game. Barbarians are okay if you’re an aggressive player, I think, but since I tend to be more cautious, I didn’t like them much. This poor balance extends to the magic element of “might and magic” – though the game likes to pretend that they’re both acceptable playstyles, nothing could be farther from the truth. Magic is clearly nothing but a supplement to the actual fighting, not able to do much more than give a slight nudge to your chances of winning. Perhaps if you could use spells at will – but you’re limited to one spell per turn, and battles rarely last long enough for that to matter. To make matters worse, there’s no way to truly strategize with magic. Your heroes learn spells by visiting mage guilds in towns, which can be upgraded to provide higher-level spells… however, the spells you get are completely random, and each town only gives out three of each level. So much for strategy! You can’t even go everywhere once to get an imprint of a spell – you have a limited number of casts for each spell (based on your hero’s stats), and once you use them all up, that spell disappears from your spellbook. Furthermore, mage guilds are the most expensive structures to build, requiring a large amount of every single resource at every upgrade level. The “might” stats, on the other hand, are always a benefit, providing a passive bonus to your troops’ attack and defense stats. It’s more boring, but also much more practical. All in all, magic just feels like a tacked-on afterthought.

Furthermore, in practice, the magic element is best used with sacrificial heroes. Oftentimes, I found myself attacking weak scout heroes that I thought I could quickly dispatch – however, one of their creatures would survive, and on their turn, they’d just cast a lightning bolt spell, damaging one of my vital creature stacks, and then immediately flee, preventing me from doing anything. It’s incredibly frustrating, especially since I am obsessive about resurrecting as many troops as possible so I don’t lose them. Plus, the only real powerful spell is a battlefield nuke that damages everyone, so it’s only useable when you’re losing and want to do as much damage as possible on the way down. In sum, magic is only good if you’re going to lose anyway.

There’s a resource management element where you have to build up your castle to get creature dwellings, mage guilds, etc., and they all cost different amounts of resources. There are three “tiers” of resources, kind of – generic gold coins, the great fantasy staple, are used for everything, including recruiting troops. Wood and ore are basic materials used for most buildings, then there are “special” resources used for mage guilds and higher-level creature dwellings. Cyclopses, dragons, and phoenixes also require one unit of a special resource in addition to their gold cost to recruit. Resources can be found lying around the world in small piles, but you can also tag mines located around the game world to get a steady income. You can have a bit of a guerrilla warfare thing going on where you vie for control of the mines, darting in and out to reclaim them once they’re lost. The computer seems to obsess over this – I didn’t, though. Every faction seems keyed to one of the four special resources (gems for knights, crystal for barbarians, sulfur for warlocks, and mercury for sorceresses), and you don’t really need any of the others unless you go for mage guild upgrades. The final, tier-6 creature dwelling is a fairly major resource drain, but after you build it, that’s it – you don’t really need to worry about resources ever again. This can be done within the first month. I often saw my resource totals going up into the triple digits, with nothing to really spend them on aside from mage guilds. There are a few special structures you can build as well – a tavern to increase morale for defending troops, a thieves’ guild to give you information on how other factions are doing, and a well that increases every creature’s growth rates by the same amount (as I mentioned, this is gamebreaking for higher-level troops). Aside from the well, though, I didn’t bother with them much – and each faction has the exact same layout, there are no buildings unique to each faction or anything.

There are RPG elements as well – they couldn’t very well call this a Might and Magic franchise if they didn’t, I suppose. This is the Heroes series’ main claim to fame, I believe, and what sets it apart from most other strategy games. They’re rather understated, though, and I don’t feel that maps last long enough for it to really matter. Your heroes have four stats – attack (which adds an equivalent buff to their troops’ attack stat), defense (ditto), spell power (determines the duration or effectiveness of spells), and knowledge (determines how many charges of each spell heroes can memorize). Upon level up, heroes will gain 1 point in one of the four stats. This seems to be chosen at random, but certain heroes have greater chances of increasing certain stats than others, I think? I know that’s how it is in later games, but I don’t know if it’s true here. You can also increase these stats through artifacts scattered throughout the map. Most of them are just very boring “+X to stat Y” types, though there are some that have more unique effects, like increasing movement speed on the map. However, the game lacks one very important tenet of the RPG: making us invested in the characters. Every class has about nine different heroes in them, but their names and portraits are literally the only difference between them. They have no personality, no backstory, nothing unique about them to make us care. They just exist to fulfill a role.

The gameplay itself is, unfortunately, rather tedious. It’s overall a pretty typical turn-based strategy game, and it falls into the pitfalls common to the genre. Maps take forever, for one thing, and are often repetitive. It’s mainly just a contest of who can get the most and best troops the fastest, and then it’s only a matter of time before you steamroller the opposition. Because movement is so limited, it’s very difficult to keep all of your holdings adequately defended once you’ve captured lots of castles. It tends to result in the enemy slipping past your defenses and going on a town-capturing spree while you have to double back and stop them. It’s not a legitimate threat, only an annoyance that prolongs the inevitable. Maps have a definite two steps forward, one step back feel to them because of this. Who will win is generally determined very early on, but to actually win you need to trudge through a war of attrition. It’s a slog. I feel like the game has an inverse difficulty curve – at the beginning, when you only have one castle and have almost none of the map explored, things are very difficult as you juggle your limited resources and fight enemies about on-par with you. However, the more castles you get (and therefore the more troops you can recruit), the easier the game becomes, until it turns into hide-and-seek with your invincible army hunting down an enemy that’s still stubbornly clinging to life.

The battles themselves seem to make a token effort to having tactical depth, but in the end there’s not a whole lot you can do. The creatures you recruit are grouped into “stacks”. This is represented on the battlefield as a single image that contains a group of multiple creatures. All of their stats are basically added together to create one big super-unit. This, of course, has the side-effect of them becoming weaker if you wear their numbers down. It’s a good thing you can group troops like this, because the battle maps themselves are pretty small. Combined with fliers having infinite movement, things tend to get into close-quarter combat fast – and once they do, the side with the bigger number wins and there’s little you can do to change that. I think retaliations are the only real strategic element – after being attacked, troops will retaliate with their own attack if there are any left, but only once per round. There are exceptions to this – certain troops have infinite retaliations, or don’t trigger enemy retaliations when they attack. As such, a common strategy is to attack a powerful enemy with a weak troop to make them waste their retaliation, then swarm them with other troops without fear of retaliation. Even still, the game doesn’t offer much tactical depth – battles are often just speedbumps for the overall strategic game. Maybe if the magic system had more depth and thought put into it, but, well.

Something interesting, though: as I said before, each faction produces 6 distinct creature types. However, heroes can only carry a maximum of 5 different creatures with them, so you have to pick which one to leave behind. (This just makes peasants even more ridiculous, since all they accomplish is taking up a space that could be occupied by something actually capable of fighting.) I thought this limiting factor was rather interesting, forcing players to pick and choose instead of being able to have everything, although I didn’t find myself having any trouble deciding which troop to give up except for the warlock faction.

There’s a campaign mode, but I didn’t finish it – it was too repetitive. All the maps are just “kill everyone else”, over and over. I think I got to the final stage, but it’s this massive free-for-all thing that seems like it’s just going to be an even longer version of the previous stage, and…no. Just no. I think the game has plenty of potential to be fun, but only in short intervals. A single map is probably enough for you to see everything the game has to offer – the campaign mode will do nothing but wear away at your patience. I don’t know, maybe I’m just really bad at this and there’s some secret playstyle that’ll make the game actually fun?