Heroes of Might and Magic IV Review

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Heroes of Might and Magic IV

Review by Steerpike April 2002

History 101

The HOMM pedigree isn’t as glorious as that of, say, Pong—but a game with ancestry spanning twelve years seems pretty august all the same. Heroes of Might and Magic spawned from King’s Bounty, a multiplatform title that I originally played on my Sega Genesis in 1991. If there’s one lesson to be learned from the Heroes quadruplet, it’s that “more of the same” is no more a bad thing than “big government.” It all depends on how you implement it. Because the truth is, Heroes 4 is pretty much a direct Punnet Square descendant of King’s Bounty, and it’s just as great as ever.

Heroes of Might and Magic IV is a turn-based strategy game with adventurous/roleplaying elements. You take the role of a commander of heroes (recruited at local taverns, where all heroes hang out), who in turn command armies of fantastic creatures. In addition to stampeding over death-deserving enemies, you get to capture towns and direct the construction of facilities that improve your chances of winning the game by providing resources, more creatures for your armies, or skill improvement.

An ungodly amount of playtime is available here. Six massive campaigns represent the bulk of the single-player experience, while more than a dozen individual scenarios are available, not to mention a campaign editor that allows you to build your own adventures. Multiplay is currently available only in a hotseat format, but a true online patch is in the works.

The game is effectively divided into three activities: manipulating towns, roaming the countryside in search of adventure, and crushing your enemies in combat. Like its predecessors, HOMM4 elegantly blends these facets to produce a friendly, turn-based atmosphere so addictive that you may find yourself late for your own wedding if you start playing on the morning of.

Sim City

You choose an alignment to start, and this alignment dictates not only what creatures you’ll be able to work with, and which structures are available to you, but the disposition of the rest of the world and your hero roster as well. While you can feel free to recruit heroes of other alignments, rest assured that Tree Sprites are not going to enjoy serving under a general who’s been a walking corpse for three thousand years. If you want heroes of opposing alignments, either make sure they’re able to control the morale of their people or build them an army that matches their disposition.

Dyed-in-the-wool strategists scoff at games like this, just as they sneer at “real-time strategy.” As in that vaunted genre, success in HOMM4 is based largely on numbers and careful attention to the needs of your armies. Issues such as morale, luck, and (of course) some amount of strategy certainly play a part, but the real strategy of the game is mastering the art and science of manipulating your corner of the world to produce big numbers of big troops.

Much of this is dependent on your ability to quickly gather and protect your resource flow. Gold, mercury, gems, crystals, ore, and wood are all necessary in varying amounts, and if you don’t snap up the structures that produce them, you’re going to find yourself out of the game. Even the most experienced players will operate at a deficit of something, which is a sign of very good play balancing.

You can recruit creatures from structures you build in town (you’d think they’d build dragon pens outside of town, just because of the manure problem, but you’d be wrong) or from neutral structures on the landscape. Other facilities in town manufacture equipment or provide valuable training for your heroes. While city management is nowhere near as demanding as overseeing a base in Starcraft, it’s imperative that you always play with one eye on the needs of your cities. Ignore them at their (and your) peril. But while there are lots of buildings for each alignment, and few duplicates, town management in general has always seemed somewhat tacked on to me. Eventually towns get everything they need, and the game may only be half over.

Ready to Rumble

Game turns are divided into days, with each day seeing the production of some resources and creatures. You move about, fight battles, give build orders, and then end your turn for the day. Players can always head back to town and beef up their army after a nasty defeat, and the longer you let your creatures breed, the more fresh troops are available.

The majority of gameplay takes place in the world screen, where you and enemy heroes roam a colorful landscape chock full of high-fantasy experiences. You can scarcely move an onscreen inch without running into some bizarre encounter or another, all of which serve to improve (or reduce) some aspect of your hero or army. If you’re into high-fantasy exploration, HOMM4 is a game for you.

Control on the world screen is generally acceptable, though the pathing is occasionally peculiar—I’ve had heroes do figure eights around a structure before reaching the door—and a less-cluttered toolbar would have meant more screen real estate for the game. I realize that iconic buttons are appealing, but poorly made ones take up way too much space. Despite a few minor drawbacks, however, the lion’s share of play in this environment is endless fun as you explore the world and experience strange events.

The universe of HOMM4 is so brightly colored and cheerful that it’s hard to think of it as a gritty strategy game. Imagine the offspring of an unholy union between Fantasy Zone and The Ancient Art of War for an idea of HOMM4’s world screen visuals. They’d better slide the HOMM graphics engine through a 3D accelerator in the next version—not because the sprite based graphics are unappealing (they’re among the best I’ve seen) but because 3D is not just the future, it’s the present—and the HOMM series has to join it.

Earth Versus the Monsters

Combat is also turn-based. In a grand departure from its ancestry, heroes in HOMM4 are directly involved in combat and, at high levels, can make the difference between victory and defeat. It’s not the end of the world if you lose a hero, but I don’t recommend it; even if you win the battle, you may face a long trip back to town to resurrect your poor dead champion.

For combat, HOMM4 provides a handy poster-sized reference chart with pictures and relevant statistics for each troop type in the game. This is especially helpful to newcomers, who may not recognize the benefits and drawbacks of choosing Venom Spawns over Vampires or may be wondering whether a Peasant has a shot at defeating a Dragon Skeleton in single combat (don’t even try it).

Creature animations and graphics in combat are both lovely and enjoyable. The animations range from the whimsical to the fierce.  Rich, high-color graphics really bring out a Faerie Dragon’s eyes, and the liberal dollops of brilliant color are a welcome departure in a world overused to the brown, brown, brown, brown, and brown color scheme of Quake 3 or Return to Wolfenstein.

You win a battle when your troops have eliminated all the enemy forces (or when the enemy drops their weapons and heads for the hills). Victory or loss, you’re treated to a nice cinematic with a statistical breakdown of how things went for you.

Control in combat, too, is generally good—though more than once I’ve accidentally attacked the wrong creature in a cluster of opponents or moved my archers forward when I intended to shoot at something. It’s hard coming up with serious complaints about HOMM4, and control is my only major gripe. Seriously, though, the worst I can say about it is that it could be better. I suspect some of the flaws in the control structure are the result of an attempt to make the game as similar, mechanics-wise, to its predecessors; it may be time to abandon that scheme.

Game audio flows effortlessly between what sounds to me like a dozen or so different musical pieces—orchestral, jazzy, choral—and is so good that I wonder how much of the HOMM4 development budget was blown on hiring music talent. Audio is aggressively present and very much at the forefront throughout the game, which may irritate some players; but for those who appreciate good game audio, you’re not likely to get bored by the score in this one any time soon.

Hero Takes a Bow

Victory conditions are different for each campaign and scenario, and the open nature of play encourages gamers to develop their own strategy. There is no surefire way to dominate; obviously, having tons of powerful troops is the key to the game, but getting to that point and then using them correctly is a nonlinear path.

Hotseat multiplay will keep gamers occupied until the real multiplayer patch ships; however, there are too few team-based scenario maps for hotseat to be a long-term solution. Working together is as much fun as working against one another in HOMM4, and it would have been nice if the designers took this into account when doing their world-building. Meanwhile, fan-made maps are already appearing online, and considering the longevity of HOMM3, it’s only a matter of time before we see official expansion packs to what has already turned out to be one of the best-selling games of the season.

HOMM4 will infect you with what I like to call the “Turn Based Sickness.” Symptoms include loss of temporal perception and inability to perform other functions (including bodily) until “just one more turn” has been completed. It’s only a matter of time before someone starves to death playing a computer game, because they’re so enthralled that they can’t stop for a taco. Police will discover a corpse clutching a mouse, staring blindly at the “End Turn?” screen, an empty can of Coke—the last sustenance this poor soul ever consumed—balanced on a speaker.  HOMM4 is so addictive and so darned cheerful that, when you’re playing it, feeding the cat (or yourself) just doesn’t seem like a critical issue. In Maszlow’s Hierarchy of Needs, HOMM4 falls just above “shelter.” The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: New World Computing Publisher: 3DO Release Date: March 2002

Available for: Windows

Four Fat Chicks Links

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Screenshots

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlarge

System Requirements

PII 300 (PII 450 recommended) 128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended) 4 MB video card 750 MB free hard disk space

Where to Find It

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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