GAME FORMULA

Heroes of Might and Magic is one of those conservative and self-sufficient series, from the continuation of which only one thing is expected: a repetition of the old. Like chess. Is the board a different color? Yes, sure. More figures? Well, let it be. But only so that there must be sixty-four squares, and the knights move in the letter “G”. And so that no one dares to call the rook a tour! The fans won't forgive.

One thing follows another, like the little rhyme about the house that Jack built. Here is the castle, here are the creatures that are born in this castle every week, here is the hero-commander who leads these creatures, here are the resources for which this hero fights, and here is the field lined with cells on which he fights. Take out one brick and the whole pyramid will crumble. Therefore, sequels are of no interest to anyone on their own. For twelve years now, everyone has been worried about only one question - how close is it to the original?

Compared to the classics, the game has become simpler in certain components: before the battle, the exact number of creatures in the enemy squad is shown, and an unsuccessful battle is offered to be replayed without loading a save.

To the guillotine of these impudents

Short - and superficial! - description Might and Magic: Heroes 6 fits into two words: “Very far.” At first, you don’t play as much as you kill yourself, just like the publishers and developers abused the game. Everything alien to “Heroes”, everything outrageous and incomprehensible, which angered fans even in the beta version, ended up in the final game.

There were seven resources - now there are four. Mines can no longer be occupied simply by a hero running there - you need to capture the nearest city or fort. The towers of magic have disappeared - now spells are learned on the same basis as ordinary skills: when gaining a new level, you have to choose between, say, leadership and a fire arrow. Instead of city screens, there were still pathetic, shaking pictures, which the developers themselves called stubs at the last gamescom. All the buildings on the map were redrawn, all the icons were redone, all the units were rethought, throwing half of the creatures out of the game.

A mandatory performance when storming a castle is the destruction of the fortress walls. And not so much with a catapult, but with units. For two or three turns, they usually line up along the wall and gnaw at it little by little (just like in the fourth part).

Everything takes its course

And then suddenly insight comes. It’s like with a foreign language: I struggled, crammed, didn’t understand - and suddenly I spoke. You learn the new logic of the gameplay somewhere in the third hour, and all that is needed is to stop perceiving “Heroes 6” as a single whole. No matter how you put it together, the sixth part breaks down into three components - tactical, role-playing and strategic.

Tactical - these are good old battles on a checkered field. Here, fortunately, almost nothing has changed since the fifth part: units move once per turn, the order is determined by morale, heroes do not directly participate in the battle. Each unit is rendered with academic care, and each is doing something different. While waiting for their turn, crossbowmen, clanking their armor, leisurely clean the grooves for bolts, Cerberus heads talk to one another, and wanizame, upright sharks from the new faction, play jazz on a shell-covered oar. The bestiary is wonderful - all creatures are living, they breathe, itch, get bored, you can simply put them opposite each other and study them with pleasure.

The cities of the enemy faction can be rebuilt, and not many resources are spent on this. Be afraid! Now hundreds and thousands of creatures of the same type in the army are neither a rarity nor a luxury.

The role-playing component is, of course, the development of the hero. In Heroes 6, the role-playing system has become more complex and now looks like skill trees. There are many of them - as many as ten! - and they are divided into specializations: the character’s personal qualities (charisma, physical strength), tactical skills, schools of magic. Skills and spells are mostly moved from the classics, but there are also discoveries. For example, heroes can suspend the operation of other people's mines for a week or speed up the development of a city - so that two buildings can be built per turn, rather than one.

Well, strategy is about conquering the world. It is like a patchwork quilt, stitched together from zones of influence with mines and creature dwellings. They cannot be captured without conquering the nearest fort or city (the first is different in that you cannot build anything or hire creatures in it), and the struggle to expand the empire turns into redrawing the global map, rather than the petty capture of individual buildings. The activity is fascinating, but rather painful, because there is simply no point in traveling for a hero without a large army: he will not win anything on foreign territory. Moreover, now you can redeem all creatures from all cities at once in one place, and the enemy is always ready to meet you with his entire army.

Once you get used to it and learn to deal with all this, you’ll stick for a long time. The game allows you to feel your rapid, excited pulse; you fall in love with her and play greedily and furiously. The heroes turn into heroin, the gameplay flies along, and you can exhale: everything has grown together. Revived the series.

To make it clearer where someone else’s territory ends and where your own begins, there are even special obelisks installed on the maps, painted in the player’s color.

The shortest profession in the world

And then it all ends.

By inertia, continuing to play and admire, you suddenly realize with despair: yes, these are normal “Heroes”, not the experimental fourth part, but... why are they needed? Everyone is satisfied with either the third series or the fifth. The sixth is also not bad, but everything old was transferred here without a soul, and everything new was added without a purpose.

Creatures? They are very nice, and the sea castle was a pleasant surprise, but half of the “old men” have disappeared, the units are unbalanced and overloaded with skills. You forget about them, confuse them, and it starts to irritate. Deprived of the talents of New World Computing, Black Hole employees simply do not know any sense of proportion.

Where the old magic of “Heroes” is felt is on the battlefields. If the whole game was made with such care, it would not be worth it. Alas, the reality of the new “Heroes” is death screens, freezes, missing units and offspring of minus 34,000 creatures.

Heroes? Well, the developers have achieved their goal: all skills are open immediately, you can see where you need to invest points to gain access to the next ability. This makes leveling more predictable, but does not save you from the same type. There are still many fewer points than the skills themselves, so you inevitably have to choose. You memorize the best skills very quickly - and, as before, you learn them from card to card. As for spells, they are now filtered out of the game by a teaspoon a day. And since they have a cooldown, on the battlefield you have to think hard about which of the three damage-dealing skills to use now and which later. The head is swelling again, and the irritation is growing.

World map? In comparison with the third "Heroes" it is confused and empty. There are few interactive objects on it - only beautiful, but stupid bushes and trees, behind which you can’t even see the road. Of the buildings, the most common are mines and forts, then - buildings of experience and skills, and occasionally - some chat spheres and markets. But the map still looks as if someone had already plundered it before you. Everything around is so colorful and at the same time bare, there is no spirit of exploration.

The sixth “Heroes” are making full use of the Internet. For example, every now and then there are chat spheres on the map through which you can send messages to other players. The Russians say: “Vote, don’t vote, you’ll still get a penis.”

Locks? You can't look at them without tears. After the city screens of the threequel - priceless exhibits of meticulous handcraft - and after the breathtaking screensavers of the fifth part, these framed pictures are simply a mockery. And the reduced amount of resources, designed to make construction more thoughtful, only slows it down and again irritates it.

Everything else is nothing more than frills sewn onto the remains of phenomenal mechanics. The magic is lost, the fairy tale has run away. You can play the sixth “Heroes”, even for hours, but you can’t fall in love with them.

Opinion

Alexander Trifonov, site manager

“The creation of the new part of the series was entrusted to guest workers - the result is predictable”

To be honest, I initially didn’t expect anything good from the sixth “Heroes”. When the development of the fifth part was entrusted to the domestic Nival, I rejoiced along with all the fans of the series - after all, its revival was entrusted to a world-class studio, already famous for creating high-quality strategies. With the sixth part, it's the other way around. To “construct” the sequel, instead of a reputable company, Ubisoft hired migrant workers from Black Hole, who have not made a single decent game in their lifetime. The result is predictable. Of course, the Hungarians tried, but the lack of experience and budget affects literally everything - from the terrible interface to the same city screens that they promised to implement in full form for the release, and even postponed the release for this, but never did. The saddest thing in this whole story is that in the current economic realities it could not have turned out any other way. Only Free2Play projects bring any decent income on today's PC market, and there was no point in Ubisoft investing a lot of money in the development of a niche hardcore strategy that everyone would download from torrents anyway. Have you noticed that the turn-based strategy genre has quietly died on PC over the past few years? "Heroes 6" is a clear example of why.

Damn it! My army, sent to reconnoiter the lands around the castle, encountered a well-armed enemy army. The vanguard of brave warriors drew their katanas, determined to strike back at the enemy if they attacked. And so the refined oriental style of sparkling swords and laminar armor came to a life-and-death clash with the colorful madness of Indian feathers and bulky obsidian weapons. All this could easily be mistaken for a crazy fantasy from the series Total War, if not for the snake tails of the eastern warriors and the huge fangs of the local Indians. Before us is the long-awaited Might and Magic: Heroes 6, Ladies and Gentlemen! And if you think that the appearance of the game is its most important difference from the previous parts, then get ready to be further surprised. The new part is replete with numerous changes, but whether they benefited the game or not, we’ll figure it out now.

Dancing with Orcs

Although the external style of the game is influenced by the development team from Black Hole made a decent bet. The skirmish described in the introduction is nothing more than a clash between the armies of two of the five factions in the game. The fighters, decorated with feathers in the manner of the Aztec Indians, are played by orcs familiar from previous games. The newcomers to the series, the united peoples of Hashima, sport sharp katanas and dragons in an oriental style. All factions in the game have a unique ethno-style, and this is reflected not only in the appearance of the units, but also in the architectural style of their castles. The well-known asceticism of the necromancers took on the cone-shaped ancient Egyptian forms, people gravitate towards everything pompous and gothic, and the demons even took the Rome of the era of Nero, Caligula and other impartial emperors as a basis.

Overall, the visual style of the game has changed for the better. The castles look bright and original; the fairy-tale touch in the depiction of characters inherent in the previous part has disappeared. We were also pleased with the animation of the units, including their humorous scenes that entertained us as the battle progressed. It’s gratifying that when you get closer, the picture doesn’t become less attractive, showing three-dimensional objects on the maps in all their glory. It will not be possible to examine this beauty from different angles, because the camera in the game is static and does not allow you to control itself. Otherwise, everything is ordinary - the familiar cell marking the battlefield, allowing you to direct the squad in eight different directions. Except that icons have appeared next to the battle menu, on which you can attach current spells or skills.

Bloody tears

But as soon as you dig a little deeper, innovations begin to literally hurt the eyes of orthodox fans of the series. Firstly, sixthly " Heroes“The approach to the main heroes of the occasion, that is, the heroes themselves, has been thoroughly redesigned. A shift has been made towards the role-playing component, which connects your actions with the skills you achieve. The role of the Dark and Light sides of the Force is played by the path of Dragon Blood and Dragon Tears, respectively. By taking the side of one or another doctrine, your heroes will not only change in appearance, but will also acquire specific improvements for each class, giving access to unique abilities. You can take the side of Blood predictably - do not spare enemy units fleeing the battlefield and upgrade your attacking skills. It is easy to guess that those who choose the path of Tears will have to show generosity towards the defeated enemy in order to be subsequently rewarded with bonuses to defense. It is gratifying that the two paths are not mutually exclusive. You can successfully accumulate Tears and Blood points by choosing to achieve a certain level of improvement for your class.

Free elections

In general, skills can now be chosen independently when the hero reaches a certain level. This also applies to magic spells, which in this part have migrated to the category of skills. True, the range of your choice is influenced by several parameters at once. The already mentioned above reputation, faction and the hero’s penchant for power attacks or magic. At a certain point in development, magical skills will become unavailable to a warrior, and combat attacks to a magician (third level of skills). The free image of the heroes is completed by their ability to walk unaccompanied by friendly units in search of, for example, resources.

Unitary economics

And their number has been reduced to four items. True, getting them has become a little more difficult. You can still capture an individual mine and get the resource you need from it, but this will only last as long as your hero is in close proximity. As soon as he goes away for a “smoke break,” control will be lost. To establish a stable supply of materials, you will have to capture the settlement closest to the mine, subsequently rebuilding it under your faction.

The construction process has also undergone some simplifications. Architectural excesses include magic towers and blacksmiths, but a number of basic buildings like the town hall and magistrate remain in place. Also, each faction has 4 unique buildings - two of the second level and two of the third. However, only two of them can be built in each castle. But no matter how many castles you have, you will no longer have to bother with collecting troops. Produced from different estates, the units are magically assembled at the designated fortress.

The hired creatures also suffered strange metamorphoses. On the one hand, the number of their levels has been reduced from seven to three. There are still seven types of units themselves - three at the initial and special levels and one at the highest third level for each side.

Difficulties of modernization

Who would have thought that behind a simple rearrangement of words on the “facade” of the game there are so many changes hidden in its “interior”. Not all fans will appreciate the modernization done. It will seem to many that a number of changes in Might and Magic: Heroes 6 akin to replacing soft armchairs with office chairs - it smacks of a desire to make everything simpler and more accessible. Undoubtedly, there are interesting ideas in the game, but you will only be able to fully enjoy them after the release of a hefty pile of patches that will eliminate large and small technical flaws in the execution.

Game profile

Full title: Might & Magic: Heroes 6 ("»)

Developer: Black Hole Entertainment

Publisher: Ubisoft Entertainment ,

Publisher in the CIS: – « Buka"

Genre: Turn Based Strategy

Official site: http://might-and-magic.ubi.com/heroes-6/en-GB/home/

Russian game page: http://www.buka.ru/cgi-bin/show.pl?id=537

Our resume

Idea: And it’s been a while since we’ve had new “Heroes”...

Graphic arts:Technically outdated The graphic style is good, but completely secondary

Sound: The theme music, composed by Paul Romero for Heroes of Might and Magic 2, is the most interesting thing here. However, they are out of place in the local landscape

A game: Probably, those who like to ride a “heroic” horse for a campaign or two will be pleased. Those who were expecting a deep and thoughtful game in which every game - an adventure and a challenge - will be disappointed. These are no longer the same hardcore “Heroes”

Verdict GameWay!

3 /5 (A bit weak)

Buy a licensed disc with the game Might & Magic: Heroes 6

Buy a license key for the game Might & Magic: Heroes 6

Balance is a great thing, don’t say it. A few seemingly minor changes, a couple of clarifying touches, and what was played at the beta stage as a mockery of the series looks like a completely wow game after release. Fortunately, since the first press reviews - the developers Might &Magic:Heroes 6, corrected the most obvious bugs and shortcomings, and also fixed holes in the balance.

I won’t say anything bad about the new “Heroes”! Good, however, too, because the game does not represent anything interesting for the sharp and nimble mind of a veteran strategist. It seems that give me the technical task: to specifically make a clone of the “heroes” as boring as a toothpaste advertisement, and the result will be something like a new Black Hole project.

The series has always stood on the relative simplicity of the rules and the tight balance of turning into ease of mastery, almost paradoxically combined with impressive strategic depth.

There is lightness in the sixth part, let’s say, maybe even too much of it. But that deep balance of gameplay elements, which ensured the success of the best parts of the series, is not in the game at all.

The main idea when developing Heroes 6 There was, apparently, an attempt, by simplifying the game rules and discarding outdated elements, to make the game friendlier for the novice mass player. This is where its main problem grows - the developers overdid it and threw out too many elements that were fundamentally important for true “heroic” gameplay. Simplicity has replaced balance.

So, for example, there are now only four types of resources, they are very easy to obtain and therefore development is almost automatic. The balance did not spend the night here, and developing the city is boring. But everything is simple.

All troops available in all cities and villages of the kingdom can be bought at any time in any city or fort. This innovation kills any need to think strategically in an offensive and bring in reinforcements in a timely manner. But in Heroes 6 it's simple.

As if this were not enough, any city or fort of an “alien” race can, by investing a certain amount of resources, be instantly rebuilt into your own. Once! – and magically, where rivers of lava had just flowed and terrible demons were walking, green lawns with neat houses of honest taxpayers appear. This simplification eliminates any possibility that the player will use troops from a castle other than his own and that the presence of outsiders will negatively affect the overall morale of the squad. Another serious strategic layer was simply crossed out. But everything is simple.

All buildings (mines that provide an additional increase in the settlement's troops) located in the city's control zone can no longer be captured until the city itself is captured. To take control, for example, of a sawmill without capturing the city, you can only leave the hero standing in it - as soon as he moves, the building immediately comes under the control of the owner of the area. This simplification, again, greatly narrows the scope for strategic play on the map and reduces to almost nothing resource wars, the need to control the territory and protect it from enemy hero-infiltrators.

All this makes the strategic game on the map completely formulaic and boring. No in Heroes 6 that feeling of the importance of decisions made at every turn. When we say the choice of whom to beat - the gremlins guarding the mine, or the golems guarding the chest, it really decides a lot. Moreover, it can have a variety of consequences. There is no sense of adventure when exploring the map, even for the thousandth time, is an exciting activity. And at the same time you feel that the world on the other side of the monitor is alive, and there is something to do in it. IN Might &Magic:Heroes 6 everything is reduced to simple and boring functionality, leaving almost no interesting choices for the player.

The combat isn't very impressive either. Of course, the complete madness with the wild efficiency of healing units did not survive to release. However, other problems with balance, for example, the very high speed of units, and the almost complete impossibility of building any well-thought-out tactics in battle (for example, preventing this shooter from attacking by covering him with infantry) have not gone away.

What do you order to do and plan if the heaviest infantryman crosses the battlefield in two turns (and under acceleration he can handle it in one), and the battlefields are large enough so that he can run around those who are trying to block his path and attack the one without any penalties? whoever he wants? As a result, the fight looks like a fairly simple exchange of blows and lacks any serious tactical possibilities. The main thing is to choose the right targets for attacks and concentrate the damage well. It's easy to learn and unpretentious. And it's boring.

A truly interesting innovation "Heroes 6" we can only name a new system of hero development. All possible skills, passive abilities and spells are now divided into many different schools. And now the player himself decides what to spend the skill point received at the level on - on the “ice arrow” spell, or on a passive ability that gives additional experience at the end of the battle.

However, it must be said that the skills do not seem to be very balanced - the magician is almost useless now. What's the use of an ice arrow with damage that doesn't reach a hundred, if you can, using a warrior's skill, without losing a drop of mana, enhance the attack of, say, a crossbowman so that the damage gain is fivefold?

Checking the balance properly in a fight with a living player is not a trivial task at all. Not only is the game menu interface simply prohibitively unintuitive and inconvenient, but connecting with anyone is a big problem.

I don’t know what went wrong with Black Hole and Ubisoft, but an attempt to connect to the game usually ends with a message recommending that you check your network connection, saying that something is wrong with it. Of course, sooner or later there will be someone with whom there will be a connection, but playing with a specific person, for example, with a friend, is often simply impossible. For a project of this level, such shortcomings are unacceptable.

The graphic style is not bad, but completely secondary. By the way, there was no normal city screen in the beta, and this is a very big and unjustified blow to the atmosphere of the game. The lion's share of purely aesthetic pleasure from the “heroes” was precisely admiring the beauty of their cities. Here, instead, is some kind of nondescript window... simple and functional, yes... And in order, for example, to improve a warrior, you must definitely go to the recruiting troops tab. Otherwise, this option is simply not available - a typical error in the interface, and an error that is not justified in any way, given that such a problem did not exist before.

Campaign "Heroes 6", framed as a kind of family saga and not bad in its own way. However, it suffers from the same balance problems. Example. At the end of the mission, you need to defeat the enemy who has accumulated enormous forces. His increase in troops in one city is equal to, or simply exceeds, what the player receives by controlling the entire map! At such moments, I want to think about why I’m wasting my time on the tedious passage of this game, instead of doing something more useful for myself and society.

However, the campaigns "Heroes 6" can't be called bad. They, after all, provide the lion's share of the pleasure that the game can bring to the player. Fans of the story campaigns in the previous parts will probably like it. The main thing is not to gorge on something more after the game is completed.

Only some of the melodies written by Paul Romero for Heroes of Might and Magic 2 remind us of the good days of the series. True, those same magical harpsichord plucks that so perfectly complemented the journey through the green lawns of HoMM 2, and sounded so wonderful in themselves, as if -they lose from what they sound in this game. The landscape here is not suitable for them, no matter what you say...

By the standards of the Heroes of Might & Magic game series, he is a dinosaur. He reached 2011, having outlived many relatives and, by and large, should have turned into a fossil long ago. The first part turned sixteen this year. It took XCOM about the same amount of time to mutate into a shooter.

Might & Magic Heroes VI

Platform PC

Genre step-by-step strategy

Developer Black Hole Entertainment

Publisher Ubisoft

Game formula

Heroes of Might & Magic III + 20 years of evolution = Might & Magic Heroes VI

Grade

Bright picture; new ideas; monsters; spells and role system

The voice acting is at parody level; imbalance; technical errors

An outdated but charming game more for die-hard fans than newcomers

Graphic arts

Sound

Playability

Verdict

The release of the sixth episode is a good reason to check your pulse. How's the classic? Can old mechanics still keep you glued to your computer all night? Or is Ubisoft, like the characters in Weekend at Bernie's, trying to make money by hanging around with a pomaded corpse?

First impressions rather hint at "Weekend". After the beautifully drawn elves of Heroes of Might & Magic V from the sixth part, for some reason they were removed altogether. The whole nation seemed to have fallen into a hole in the budget, and it seems that this gap was not the only one. The beautiful screens of cities, which traditionally appeared in “Heroes” as something between an art gallery and an animated screensaver, have been reduced in size several times. Now they resemble tight embrasures. It is noticeable that the developers saved money. For example, the actors voicing the main characters sometimes sound like random passers-by taken from the street.

But to hell with it, the main thing here is the gameplay. Apparently, it was on this component that Black Hole spent most of its time. Several new gears were screwed into the old mechanics of the game, with them “Heroes” seemed to shake up and come to life.

Remember how it happened in previous episodes? A huge map, ten generals, one of whom, the strongest, clears enemy territory, fighting in hexagonal battles, and the rest work as errand boys. At these levels, did the game literally begin to drown in micromanagement? In previous projects, sometimes it was necessary to drive in crowds many low-level heroes who existed solely to move troops from distant fortresses. Each part of the series tried to solve this problem in different ways. In one they came up with portal spells, and in Heroes of Might & Magic IV, armies were even allowed to run around the map without being accompanied by commanders.

Black Hole cut the Gordian knot in its own way. Now soldiers from all castles can be bought in any of them. No courier locomotives - just go as the main military leader to the nearest fortress and there, as if on shelves, a full assortment of royal troops will be waiting for him.

At the same time, the studio dealt with the problem of resource theft. You can still invade enemy territory, like the Mongols did in China, and seize other people's sawmills and mines. But as soon as your general steps outside the gates of the enterprise, it will go back to the enemy. The map in the sixth "Heroes" is controlled by zones - in order to recapture all the houses at once, you need to take possession of the castle in the center.

These seemingly simple changes led to a whole chain of consequences. Most importantly, perhaps, the secondary characters turned into lines of useless portraits. There’s simply no point in hanging around with them, and now “Heroes” resembles King’s Bounty even more. 99% of the problems here are solved by just one general.

So could Black Hole bring this fossil back to life? Rather yes than no. Although, despite their efforts, the studio was not able to completely eliminate all the problems.

To make running around the levels alone not boring, the authors have reworked the role-playing system, the number of options of which literally makes your eyes wide open. The game offers ten branches to level up each character. Half of them were intended for knights, the second contains spells from different schools. There, your counterpart can become an expert in dark magic and a defense specialist. In addition, like in some Mass Effect, the morality of military leaders is taken into account. By making appropriate decisions in a number of plot branches, you can turn the hero into a stern tyrant or a patient nun. Each path will provide certain bonuses in battle. Because of this, the sixth “Heroes” resembles an RPG more than other projects in the series. This also applies to additional quests - on each map you will meet several characters who will ask you for a favor, and there are unexpectedly many of them. Heroes have a traditional quest log, usually containing four to six quests.

So could Black Hole bring this fossil back to life? Rather yes than no. Although, despite their efforts, the studio was not able to completely eliminate all the problems. So, Heroes VI can sometimes be terribly boring, especially when the game drags on. Random monsters on the map constantly multiply, and after a hundred moves the gamer may discover that there are too many enemies. Newbies won't like these little things. But the sixth part will certainly please old fans.

The game has become more accessible and at the same time deeper. Despite the amateurish voice acting, there is a good, sometimes almost “George Martin” plot, and many of Black Hole’s ideas made “Heroes” more interesting. In the ranking of sequels, this part will most likely be ranked above Heroes of Might & Magic V (although below Heroes of Might & Magic III).

Another thing is that she just had a strong competitor. In September, Ubisoft finally ported the console Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes to PC. It's a 2D strategy game, and the easiest way to describe it is as a cross between Heroes and Bejeweled. There is also a large map and tactical battles, sometimes quite hardcore, despite the casual gameplay, but there are no tedious clearing of the territory and no need to run after the army to the castle. I advise you to look.

Is it fair to compare the series? Heroes of Might and Magic(change of places and further hello Ubisoft) and Starcraft? Comparing the history of series, of course, is of little use - the franchises have gone through completely different historical paths, stepped on different rakes (yes, SC also had hot days in the frying pan, but, as already said, of a different kind) and came to the present day in a completely different way. different states, but if we talk specifically about Heroes of Might and Magic 6 and Starcraft 2, then some analogies can be easily drawn. The developers of both cult games tried to cope with essentially the same task - to preserve the signature gameplay and drive and at the same time improve everything that could be improved, as well as add something special. The whole point of both sequels is in the details, insignificant and at the same time critical.

And online services. But more on that later.

Magic from online

What I'm getting at: at one time, this same Starcraft 2 received a forest of criticism for the fact that the game was very similar to Starcraft 1. Why exactly this is bad is still an open question, but the fact remains that many people don’t like it when developers They don't fix what isn't broken. “Heroes 6” is an identical case in which the basic mechanics and meaning of the gameplay remained unchanged, and in the eyes of the guardians of universal progress, this approach is the main drawback of the recently released strategy. Accordingly, the deeper under the skin of a gamer the “they are selling us a ten-year-old game!” syndrome sits, the worse it will become for him from heroic races on maps and sieges of beautiful and not so beautiful castles. Read, as they say, contraindications and beware of allergic reactions.

Well, if you don’t suffer from this illness or just sincerely love “Heroes,” then let’s figure out what’s been tweaked in the relatively ideal strategic formula this time.

According to the tradition that has developed over the past few years, the launch of PC projects, the release of the sixth part of “Heroes” took place against the backdrop of failures of online services, blocking access to some to a certain portion of the content, and to the entire game. The portion of digital keys that came to Russia at a certain moment either reset to zero or not, after which some players could not enter the game at all, and for some (I was in this group) “Heroes” started, but the function responsible for a lot of things Conflux system. A day or two later, new keys were sent to everyone, and everything worked, but the start was, as they say, lost.

Now about the Conflux system, which I already promised to talk about twice. Ubisoft's HoMM-focused online service is responsible for collecting statistics, distributing achievements and other bonuses for accumulated experience, and also looking for opponents for multiplayer.

The network growth on the body of the game is generally the most noticeable change in the gameplay. The point is that achievements received from the network provide access to many heroic abilities and properties, as well as artifacts and all sorts of things that are simply impossible to open while outside Conflux.

Here they are, network bonuses.

Well, we are good users, with license keys, we can do everything until they cut the cable for us. Even upgrade your heroes on two fronts at once. There is even some special pleasure in such parallel development of one’s heroic dynasty. After all, if earlier fantasy warriors had only one crooked, but such an interesting career ladder, now there are as many as one and a half of them: one is like a full-fledged system, a classic pumping system, and another half is goodies for the puppeteer who plays hour after hour. If you put these pieces together, it turns out that de facto nothing new appeared in “Heroes”, and the Christmas tree decorations for Conflux were stripped from the branches of the traditional system, leaving the latter half-naked.

For this combination the developers get a solid A+. You have to be able to spend effort, time and resources on tearing a piece out of the game, attaching a fifth wheel to it, putting it on faulty online rails and returning it to its original place under the guise of some kind of novelty. Five years well spent!

Oh yes, this same Conflux also has a system for exchanging notes on battlefields a la Demon/Dark Souls. Useless (the question is, what should gamers lie about and warn each other about in HoMM 6? Oh, those common online fences), but funny.

What do we have?

In terms of plot, HoMM 6 is another video game “Forsyte Saga” with all that it implies. Let us rejoice in the fact that following the family troubles of the main characters is a purely optional matter, you can skip the dialogues, and you can’t read the briefings that precede traditionally well-tailored missions. Perhaps the scriptwriters even tried to tell us an interesting story, but until the gamer’s own imagination turns on, imagining endless meadows behind the pixelated grass, and behind the statistics numbers - hordes of warriors armed to the teeth, supported by no off-screen acting, flat dialogues for good, justice, honor and their antipodes do not evoke absolutely any emotions.

It’s even stupid to describe the gameplay of HoMM 6. If you played HoMM 3 or even just HoMM 5, then all you need to talk about is exactly what details the famous Devil was hiding in this time, well, if the “heroic” series, and at the same time in general all the turn-based strategies have passed you by at the last moment, then you don’t really need “Heroes 6”, it would be much better (in every sense) to buy something from the classics that have stuck in your teeth.

Because the new TBS are worse than the old ones. It's just worse, and there's nothing you can do about it. New projects in this genre are largely created for those who have managed to play the old ones to pieces, but continue to love the genre and want more. Well, and a certain number of young gamers who fundamentally do not recognize old games.

Now that I have explained to everyone the basics of leading fantasy armies, it’s time to go over not imaginary, but real innovations. Firstly, the local military and magical elites have finally switched to a more unified currency. You will no longer see ten resource saws on the map, each producing its own special precious and not so precious stones. There are only four resources left - money (aka gold), wood, ore (just “ore”, stones look like stones) and blood crystals. And praise be to all the local gods for this. The spirit of the good old strategies from the nineties, of course, with this turn of events has faded slightly, and completely orthodox gamers are unlikely to be happy with this, but this time the developers amputated the correct appendage.

After adjusting the mined buns to some, but general, culinary standards, it became much easier to figure out which strike on which mine would force the enemy to reconsider their budget for purchasing dragons. But it has become more difficult to keep captured resource mines on literally foreign territory - the merry carousel of army catch-ups has also gone under the knife. From now on, each building on the map depends on nearby cities, and a first-level hero in the company of a couple of archers will not be able to lead the enemy’s main army of thousands by the nose, because as soon as our three saboteurs fall from the mine we just visited on the tour, it will immediately come back under control ruler in charge of the local regional center. The game didn't get any worse after this change; better, however, too - it’s not that the awl has been replaced by soap, but there is nothing particularly critical in this change, the heroic routes and tactics have changed, but that’s all.

The third change that is noticeable at first glance is a common-sense approach to racial problems in captured cities, once embodied in Age of Wonders 2, has finally come to HoMM. After each major victory, it became possible to organize resettlement of peoples. You play for orcs - and all your cities will be orcish, the rest can be driven out of their homes. Logical, convenient and - once again - well, finally!

But the crooked interface inherited from the fifth part was not fixed. The location of the buttons is illogical, unintuitive, and inconvenient; it is difficult to understand which icon is responsible for what. Well, yes, if the strategy does not need Korean APM, then it is not necessary to give precise, quick tools to your hands. The fans will endure it.

Fire and vampirism and fire again

The balance of the game is strange. Well, why be ashamed - there is no balance in the game. And it’s not even about the brutal bonuses obtained in Conflux - spells are scattered along the leveling branches, it seems, at random. One of the most glaring examples is “Vampirism,” a powerful “buff” that can be learned almost at the very first level. An army thoughtfully enchanted with the simplest spells becomes many times more dangerous and impudent, sweeping away all the sorcerers who decided to devote themselves to other magic. Plus, while some abilities/spells must be learned by every first hero, others, uh, 80% are generally not clear why they are needed and what they give. Take the updated “Tactics”, without which from now on troops will appear on the battlefield on random cells. Completely random, the two outer columns have been removed for the simplest construction, have fun as you wish.

But this does not interfere with enjoying the game. As usual, we were buried to the top with these various abilities, skills and sorceries, and then sprinkled on top. What difference does it make if one candy is sweeter than another, if there are about two hundred different ones here? The questions of assembling the magic bender of everything - this is already the second or third bottom in “Heroes”, to which you still have to swim, and for the first tens of hours you can just cheerfully grab everything that shines closer and brighter.
Otherwise, we are treated to more or less the same game from 1999 with graphical upgrades. Which is, by and large, good.

It cannot be said that Heroes of Might and Magic 3 at one time completely “closed” the genre of turn-based fantasy strategies (after all, after the main HoMM, Age of Wonders and other King’s Bounty were released on major holidays), but for its own series it became the pinnacle, beyond which made it impossible to see not only all subsequent projects, but also the path along which “Heroes of Might and Magic” could move forward. Having seriously stumbled with the fourth iteration of HoMM, the developers were unable to find the right path, but the game makers who replaced them concluded that the best decision was to move back, somewhere closer to that very third part. In a word, after the 1999 masterpiece, there was no life in the world of “Heroes”, and the seemingly more or less lively and profitable franchise de facto froze in place, finding itself hostage to its position.