I have very fond memories of university holidays playing Heroes of Might and Magic II and III, and whenever a new game comes out in the series I take note because perhaps this time they will hit that formula again in a fresh way with a game that involves exploration, strategy and awesome fantasy battles.

Black Hole Entertainment seems to have done this with Might & Magic: Heroes VI. It’s not perfect. There aren’t enough factions, no town screens, not enough skirmish maps and more than a few bugs, but it’s a very entertaining strategy RPG. Just, as before, be prepared to put aside entire weeks to play through it. Like Civilization, this is one time-sink of a game series.

Explore, recruit, build and battle

In any of the Heroes games you move your heroes around a map and explore, recruiting units, collecting resources, fighting neutral groups of monsters and attacking enemy castles, slowly conquering the entire map. It’s turn-based, and each of your heroes can move a certain distance on each turn. You can also construct one building in each of your towns or castles on each turn, if you have enough resources.

There are four resources, namely gold, wood, iron and blood crystal, which is a significant streamlining from previous games where there were seven. When your battle begins the view changes from a map of the area to a tactical battle map on which you control each unit you have with minute detail (or you can choose for this to be automatic) in a turn-based battle.

The battles are the most interesting part – everything else you do is in preparation for them. They take place on one screen, with the attacker on the left and the defender on the right. The battlefield is made up of a grid of squares, and each unit can move a certain distance and attack. Usually the defending unit will retaliate, but this happens after the damage is done, so if you kill a whole stack of units they won’t retaliate.

You can have up to seven stacks of units in your army, each of an unlimited number (or, at least, I haven’t seen a limit, but I haven’t got over 1000 yet). Every unit is unique and each faction has seven different units (with an upgraded version of each). Each faction has at least one ranged unit, which are vitally important on the battlefield and must be defended because they do much more damage using their ranged attack than their melee attack if an enemy closes in.

Some units can cast spells on the battlefield, some have special retaliation characteristics, others are great for defending as they absorb damage taken by nearby creatures, and others still can lay traps on the battlefield. On top of this your hero can cast spells that can completely change the course of the battle or perform a ranged attack from the sidelines. In battles where you’re attacking an enemy castle you also have to overcome their not-insignificant castle defences to win. The permutations in battle are endless.

Prepare meals in advance: this is going to take a while

A Heroes game can take many, many hours - even the smaller scenarios in the campaign game take a few hours each. Fortunately the developers have streamlined things a bit. Each of your towns has dwellings associated with it, and these dwellings produce units at the start of each week (that is, every seven turns). In Heroes III, for example, you would have to go to each town recruiting those new units each week, but in Heroes VI you can recruit all your units from one place.

You also don’t need to run round the map collecting weekly resources from buildings like windmills because they’re not there. You also don’t need to run around flagging everything – Black Hole has introduced the concept of regions to take care of this. Each fort/town/castle controls a region which can have a number of mines, lumber mills, ore pits, whatever makes blood crystals, or unit dwellings. Conquering the town that controls those buildings gets you control of all of them at once. This makes towns even more important than before, and siege battles are the climax of most maps.

Controlling towns gives you more units, so often the game becomes a race to control the most towns and thus gain the advantage in terms of numbers. One new idea is the ability to convert a conquered town to your faction. This costs a bunch of resources (more if the town is highly upgraded) but can be very beneficial as it is generally better to have lots of a few types of units than few of more types (mainly because you can only have seven stacks in each hero’s army).

The skill-tree is more like a skill-forest

Sheer numbers of units are not enough to win Heroes VI though - a good grasp of strategy and tactics is needed. When your hero levels up they will receive an ability point to spend, and here there is a wealth of options available. You can choose a skill from five different schools of Might and seven different schools of Magic, with a set of options within each of those. Many of the skills can be upgraded to a level two skill once your hero gets to level five, and these become much more powerful. For example, you might learn ‘Regeneration,’ a spell that heals units (and resurrects dead ones) a bit each turn. Later you could upgrade that to ‘Mass Regeneration’ which will regenerate all your units each turn (by a smaller amount, so it’s still not always the best option).

You won’t level up that many times in a game – at least not enough to get all the skills and spells, so you will need to be very selective about what you choose. There certainly seem to be some that are more powerful than others, although that probably has more to do with my play-style than a lack of balance. For instance, I would just about always go for ‘Tactics’ – the ability to place my units on the battlefield before the battle begins, instead of them being placed semi-randomly - because I feel that has a significant outcome on some battles. You could just as well choose to enhance your ‘Leadership,’ however, which increases the chance of your units getting a bonus turn each round.

The variations are seemingly endless and they can make a massive difference - a battle could swing on using the right spell or skill at the right time. Fortunately if you lose a battle you can restart it and try again.

In addition to these skills your hero also has a ‘Blood and Tears’ level. As you do defensive, or ‘kind’ things, your Tears points go up, and as you perform attacking spells or generally offensive things, your Blood points go up. When they reach a point you unlock an enhanced skill. Your faction also has a unique ability that levels up as your hero does. I can’t overemphasize the depth of choices in the game, and how they all make significant differences to how things play out. It’s a fantastic strategic and tactical system.

More variety and skirmish maps are needed. And a town view!

There are, however, a few problems with Heroes VI. All previous Heroes games had a town view – a screen that displayed your town and changed as you constructed buildings. This was the main town screen from where you did everything – you would click on the marketplace to trade your resources, click on the tavern to hire new heroes, etc. This has been replaced with a simple bunch of menu buttons, which is not nearly as satisfying. There is a 3D town view but it’s small, non-interactive and not nearly as effective as the beautiful hand-drawn art of, for example, Heroes III, which gave each faction its own atmosphere. There are reports that Black Hole are working on a town view for the game, which is great news.

Secondly, the lack of factions is a little disappointing. I understand the amount of effort that goes in to making the animations for so many units, so it’s also understandable, but when older games had eight factions, having only five feels much less varied - I miss the Tower with its golems and titans. I do appreciate the effort to make a more consistent Might & Magic world – the factions in this game are the same as those in Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes (a superb puzzle game), although the art style is significantly different. I hope Ubisoft will commission an expansion that comes with a few more factions.

The over-world maps lack a little in variety, too, and while the campaign is of significant length the number of skirmish scenarios is very small. The opening cinematic is brilliant, but most of the script and voice-acting is very knowingly B-grade.

So most of my complaints are content related and have the potential to all be fixed if Ubisoft shows commitment to the platform Black Hole has created. But the game has also had a bunch of stability issues. It’s hard to say what is caused by Uplay, Ubisoft’s online system, or Heroes VI itself and its online system, the Conflux. It keeps trying to sync my savegames and failing, for example, and just about every time I try to play I have to wait to patch the game. While this is annoying (especially the first 500MB patch), it’s also a good sign as the developers and publishers are working to make it a more stable game.

Almost there

It’s clear from the start that Black Hole took its cue from Heroes III, still considered by most to be the best game in the series, and some have gone as far as to describe Heroes VI as Heroes III HD. I don’t think it’s quite that good, but I can see the potential in it. I am glad that it is so much improved from the demo I played briefly at Gamescom, which felt woefully unpolished – congratulations to Black Hole for reviving the series with aplomb. With a few more factions, a lot more polish, a less dodgy Uplay DRM and shell, and a town view we might have something that could even surpass the 12 year old classic. Imagine that!

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