Heroes of Might and Magic is New World Computing's first strategy title set it the world of their popular Might and Magic RPGs. As such, it combines traditional strategy and management elements with mild role-playing elements, and the result is a good, entertaining game.
The game bears an incredible resemblance, structurally at least, to New World's previous strategy game Hammer of the Gods. Like that game, it is a 3rd person, overhead map view. As in Hammer, you control small groups of diverse units who wander around the map completing quests. Also like Hammer, combat is resolved on a chess-like board in which armies begin at opposite edges.
There are, however, some significant differences. Aside from its more traditional fantasy setting, Heroes involves somewhat more management than Hammer. You must build different types of dwellings, each of which will produce a number of units at the end of each week. Each different type of dwelling corresponds to one of the 24 different troop types, ranging from sprites and elves to ogres and trolls. You can't build all 24 different troops, though, only the six types that correspond to the type of character you're playing (the Knight makes various human units, the Sorceress the faerie types, the Barbarian the orcs and trolls, and the Warlock gets sundry arcane beasts like centaurs, gargoyles and dragons). After troops are produced by their dwellings, you must still recruit them. This costs money, which your castle produces at 1000 per day. (It's good to be the King.) Capturing additional castles and/or certain types of artifacts will also increase your income.
In order to build the various dwellings, however, you need to expend quantities of six additional resources: ore, sulfur, crystal, wood, mercury and gems. To fulfill that need, there are free quantities of these materials lying around at the beginning of the game, and "mines," which produce one or two units of a particular resource each day. This is simple, but it works, and it may make the game more appealing to players who aren't enamored of hard-core management. I do think it's kind of stupid that a sawmill is considered a "lumber mine," but this is purely semantic, and in no way detracts from the gameplay.
Once you've recruited a number of troops, they can be garrisoned in the city where they were created, or they can be moved into the army of one of your heroes. Heroes, in a nutshell, are what the game is all about. They also contribute the role-playing elements to the game. Each hero has five slots in his army, each of which can hold any number of units of a single type. It is these armies which complete your quests - capturing resources and mines, defeating neutral armies (which are sometimes set to guard artifacts and the caches of resources that are strewn about a the start of the game) as well as the armies of the other players, and seeking out the obelisks which provide pieces of the map to the Ultimate Artifact.
The point-and-click interface, with its context-sensitive mouse cursor, makes moving and commanding your heroes (along with their armies) a snap. In general, left-clicking will make things happen, while right-clicking yields information about what you're clicking on, although this isn't universally consistent. The one annoying thing about the interface is that the first mouse click on a castle centers the screen on it, then the second takes you to the castle screen. This is incredibly irritating - especially since the mouse cursor stays where the castle USED to be - but it's really the only place the interface breaks down. All in all, the game requires barely a glance at the manual.
Ultimately, success or failure depends on your martial accomplishments. To win, you must defeat the other three warlords in the game. To become powerful enough to do this, you must capture other castles and towns. Unfortunately, this is the one part of the game I didn't particularly care for. In combat, the game switches to a screen in which the opposing units are arrayed at the opposite sides of the board, much like a chess game. Like the slots in a hero's army, spaces on the board can be occupied by any number of creatures of the same type - which is downright dumb, since tactics end up revolving around surrounding units which have ranged attacks with fast-moving creatures, so the missile units can only make hand-to-hand attacks (which are at half damage). I hated this about Master of Orion, and I hate it now. It simply makes any real military tactics impossible. Then again, if you're not anything resembling a hard-core wargame fan, perhaps this won't bother you as much as it does me. It certainly isn't bad enough to ruin the game, but it does tend to make combat something of a crapshoot.
In short, Heroes of Might and Magic is a very entertaining game. It's not as beautiful as, say, Caesar II - nor is its interface as sophisticated in its consistency - but it's very good looking, and runs in SVGA, so you don't have to squint at nasty, blocky type. It's not a complex simulation of running a fantasy kingdom; rather, it's like a strategy boardgame about running a fantasy kingdom. Nevertheless, it IS a good game, and if fantasy games or strategy games (or both!) interest you, Heroes of Might and Magic is worth a look.
