Heroes of Might and Magic V (PC)

Multiplayer

You can play in Hot Seat mode, where up to 4 players can play on the same computer and swap turns. A LAN game or connect to Ubi.com’s own gameplay service. You can play against each other or in teamplay mode where you can make alliances with the other players to outwit a superior foe.

The game introduces two modes, called Duel and Ghost Mode. Ghost Mode being a fairly involved human only game and Duel being a battle between heroes rather than heroes and armies.

Multiplayer can also have turn based or active battle settings; there are numerous ways to define the game being played and various settings to increase or decrease the timer and so on. All in all it’s a pretty fun experience and Ghost Mode certainly ups the ante in bizarre-ness.

Players are given one Ghost each and can take on the roles of the Ghost. They can influence the normal world (where other players are) by doing things like haunting enemy mines, giving them an increase in production or cursing enemy mines lowering their output. The Ghost can also possess neutral creatures and take them over to provide a challenge for the other players. Ghost Mode ends if your player is attacked in the real world. Ghosts make excellent scouts and the mode itself is insanely fun if a little strange to begin with.

A last swing of the sword

In an age of powerful physics systems and eye-popping, mind-blowing special effects it’s nice to see a return to turn based action. Heroes of Might and Magic has always been a firm favourite of the turn based players along with the glorious X-Com games and this incarnation of the series stays fairly strong to its roots.

I experienced a couple of timeouts with the MP and a few lag issues that lowered my overall score, as well as the voice acting problem that was mentioned earlier. The dodgy voice acting is however a staple for various games like these and we can’t really hold that against them, well I can, but that’s only my opinion.

One bonus in HoM&M’s favour is that Starforce (we’ll not go into that little debacle) has been removed from the product. Now I have myself not experienced any real problems with Starforce but I take issue with any company that installs things on my system without telling me. So bonus to Ubisoft for taking the path away from software protection that infringes on my computer.

And that’s about it. HoM&M V is a great game that has some excellent SP gaming as well as some decent MP gaming for those people who like to trash human players online or a LAN.