Heroes of Might & Magic V
 

http://www.mightandmagic.com/HeroesV/


The demo for this game is out, and it looks pretty cool. I'm not really into the Might & Magic series, but this game looks really promising, and the demo rocks. In the demo you can play one mission of the good-guys-campaign. The goal is to save some princess, make sure some people survive and capture a town.

edit: seems there are 2 missions and one custom campaign.

Wow. The game definitely looks like the style has changed. It's so much less cartoony than before. I'm downloading the demo now. I hope it's as good as the previous installments.

Is this RTS or RPG? I can't tell.

A mix of both.

It's HoM&M.

It's a genre on itself.

Does it still play like HOMM though? The series went to shit with homm4 and I'm afraid that by going 3d it got the same treatment as Settlers 5 did (which got turned into a generalized rts game). I'm feeling sick already from the thought of a mmorpg Heroes game.

I've never had personal problems with Starforce, but for those that do, this game is Starforce protected.

Anyway, this looks pretty good so I'm downloading the demo. Will post impressions later.

I played HoMM3 and HoMM4. I must say HoMM4 is quite, unimpressive. (The music on the other hand, is a whole 'nother story).

HoMM5. Quite mixed expectations. I hope the music will be good, though.

The Demo is starforce protected too

The game won't be Starforce protected, neither will Spellforce 2 be. They decided not to protect the game with that.

And obviously the demo is protected, to make sure they don't use the exe of the demo to crack the retail version.

Not only is this game no longer protected by starforce, but apparently UBI has dropped starforce altogether. This is good news indeed.

It's been a while since a game took over my time as much as the demo did. I played the custom map and started at 11pm on Friday night and when finished the map, I looked at the clock and realized it was 3am.

I will say though, that either I'm rusty at the Strategic role-playing genre, or the game is much much harder than it should be. The haven campaign map is a real nail biter even with a good strategy and a firm grasp on how to use your army well. (protect your marksmen at all cost, and make sure he is free to use his ranged attacks because 70 of them can drop at least 4 of the 5 devils in the first seige by the inferno team)

I'm a big HoMM fan (the dude in my sig is from HoMM 5) and I've got this game pre-ordered. Although the demo didn't blow me away, the game still isn't finished, and there will undoubtedly be expansion(s) to fix it up so I know I would be buying the game anyway.

Well, apparently it's done now! For anybody who bootlegs games, I believe that it was released earlier today.

Indeed.

Having played it, all I have to say is using a modified WC3 engine ruined the game. It could have been a really fun game, but because they used it the game both looks and plays like shit on the strategy maps (and its not a problem with my rig, I can run ES4 Oblivion more smoothly) I wish they had stuck to the Homm4 graphics.

Picked up the limited edition yesterday. It plays very similar to HOMM III, but with a major graphics upgrade. It looks pretty, but the new graphics do sometimes make it tough to find things on the world map. The AI seems OK (which is a huge improvement from HOMM IV), but not great. A few minor quibbles:

- I much prefer scenarios over Campaigns. I find that campaigns in TBS games tend to be way too 'puzzle' oriented (you have to find the exact way the developers intended the map to be played), which turns me off. Problem is, there are a grand total of 9 scenarios, and a few of them just simply aren't any good. There is also no scenario editor included, so we can't expect anything from the community. I would kill for a Random Map Generator (a la HOMMIII), but that likely won't come until the expansion.

- The documentation is pretty poor. You'll be left guessing or experimenting with a lot of powers and items because it's not clear exactly what they do.

- The difficulty is all out of whack. You'll cruise through 3 campaign levels, then get blindsided by something that takes a dozen tries to get through. Again, the puzzle aspect that bugs me.

- The music - as in all HOMM games - is fantastic. But the 'soundtrack' that is included with the limited edition is only playable from a DVD player. That's rather irritating, considering that's really the only reason I picked up the limited edition.

Overall, I'd say if you liked HOMM II or III, then give this one a shot. It's fun, and hopefully they improve it with patches and expansions.

God, I really want to play this game. Sadly I only use low-end spec Pentium III laptop which nearly is impossible to play this high-end-spec-hungry pc game :(

Is it even better than HOMM III?