Heroes of Might and Magic IV

The Good
I like innovation. Somehow I get the feeling that most games I play nowadays are just clones of each other. So when I see a franchise try to reinvent itself I have to give it credit. HoMM 4 is a major rehaul of Heores gameplay, making this game unique as even the fifth installment to the series is more closely related to the third game than this one.

While I disagree with the direction the developers took with this game (as you might have gathered from the title), they did have some good ideas:

Probably the best idea was making heroes specialize depending on their skills. Better yet, the advantages from such specialization depend on how difficult it is to get the specialization in the first place. For instance, investing in scouting and chaos magic (which is easy for Chaos heroes) will turn your hero into a Fire Diviner with 20% bonus to all fire spells. However, specializing in three magic schools (a hard task for any hero) will give you a 20% bonus with all spells. Staying on the subject of skills, I liked that you need to acquire certain secondary skills before you could reach a higher level in your main skill. In previous HoMMs you could reach master Wisdom in just a couple of levels, allowing you to learn and cast any spell in the game. Here you need to spend 15 levels (luckily there are locations and objects that can speed up your progress) to master just one school of magic! In the end the forces you to focus your heroes on one or two tasks, and employ a combination of at least two heroes with different specializations in most battles for best results. Such strategy is demanding from the very start (branching off into other skills may give your heroes an immediate advantage, but may harm your goal) and adds much depth to the game.

The other great addition was creature abilities. HoMM creatures always had abilities, but usually only high level creature had any useful abilities - low level creatures' abilities (with some notable exceptions) were merely bonus perks instead of game changing powers. In HoMM 4 the creature finally reach their full potential: From spellcasters with large repertoire of spells, to battle-mage like monster with one spell but high health and damage, to abilities that work on the adventure map, all creature powers have huge impact on the game. Having such varied creatures allowed the designers to get away with limiting the selection of creatures in each town. Unlike previous games, you now must choose only one creature dwelling out of two for 2nd, 3rd and 4th level creatures. Creature abilities play a huge role in this decision as you try to pick between recruiting mages (pathetic physical abilities, but great magical powers that deplete during the battle) or golems (very powerful, but slow, fighters who are completely immune to magic). Since spellcaster creatures employ the same spells that heroes could learn, having a spellcaster creature is like having an auxiliary hero in your army, but one whose spell points can quickly drain in a long battle.

Other improvements are less significant: Graphics are improved, but the overall effect could be better. Wandering creatures can actually have the option to wander over the adventure map, capturing unprepared heroes off guard. The plot is very detailed - each campaign map starts with several pages of introduction and there are even more story related messages throughout each campaign level.

The Bad
Unfortunately, all these improvements are for naught. For every good idea there was an abyss of bad implementations and design that made the good ideas irrelevant.

I started with the new hero design in the previous section and so I will do here. In previous HoMM games heroes were an essential part of the game as they were the only ones that could transport armies and perform any action on the adventure map. They were generals - in battles they provided passive benefits with their skills and cast spells, but never took damage. Their success or failure was entirely dependent on the performance of their army as a whole. Not in HoMM 4! Oh no, now heroes are part of your fighting force. Their attributes provide no bonus to their troops (there is skill tree for that) and unless they are very high level, almost any creature stack can kill them by sneezing in their general direction; medusas can turn them to stone with a single hit, any spellcaster unit can kill them with a single spell and even might heroes that invested heavily in combat skills and magic resistance would succumb fairly quickly to a concentrated attack. The game does offer a way to keep your heroes alive (and while they can always be resurrected after combat or rescued from an enemy city after defeat, you must keep your heroes alive if you hope that they'll gain any experience) by drinking immortality potions and hiding behind your troops to break line-of-sight attacks and magics. However, these potion can restore only one life (meaning that two killing attacks in a row will take out the hero anyway) each and all your efforts to defend your heroes will either prove futile against a determined opponent or will cripple your overall battle efforts. And they might as well die because you don't need them.

That's right, in Heroes of Might and Magic 4, the heroes themselves aren't that needed. All creatures can move on their own (strong creatures move faster than any hero unless that hero has Pathfinding), fight on their own and recruit new creatures from dwellings on their own. Heroes are still needed to capture building and towns, as well as provide bonuses in battle. But since it takes so long to level up a hero to a decent skill level, and since a determined opponent (particularly if you;re playing against people and not against the computer) will keep killing off your heroes before they can level up significantly, you won't see much use out of your heroes unless you play the campaigns. And even there keeping your main character alive will be frustrating in larger battles.

If that wasn't enough, the battles themselves have been ruined by bad battlefield design. Whoever made this game forgot why most turn-based strategy games (from chess to Civilization 5) employ a board (or a board-like grid) and decided to place the battles on an isometric open field. This field has no clear markings and even after finishing all the campaigns I can't understand how much an enemy unit can advance, where to place my units to break the line-of-sight of ranged units, and when my creatures are positioned close enough to be attacked by dragon's breath (hits one unit and the one behind it) or a hydra's multiheaded strike (hits all nearby units). This basically ends any real tactical considerations that made the previous (and the next) games so good. With no tactical thought the game cannot be considered a good strategy.

Lastly, I have to take issue with the days system in this game. In all other HoMM games weeks are crucial for your creature growth as all dwellings replenish on the first day of the week. In HoMM they decided to abandon that and have creatures grow continuously with different rate for different creatures. And yet the weeks/months system wasn't completely abandoned: It was kept exclusively to annoy the player at the end of each month when the adventure map is filled to the brim with random hostile creatures that disrupt your supply lines. This was done in previous games too, but then only weak units appeared and even they were in small numbers (perfect for necromancers to stock up on skeletons or new heroes to gain a couple of early levels), In HoMM 4 even very strong creatures are seeded all over the map, and the groups are strong enough to require a force of medium strength to destroy them without casualties on your side. It's hard to see what does this decision add to game, beside annoying the player every 30 days.

Additional grievances include bad AI that tends to go on suicidal attacks against much stronger neutral enemies, a lack of cutscenes and a plot that isn't nearly as epic or interesting as the one in HoMM 3, despite being more detailed. Even the graphics aren't enough to warrant a glance at this game.

The Bottom Line
This game was an experiment, but the result was a lurching monstrosity that is an embarrassment to the whole HoMM family. There is absolutely no reason to buy this game, other than complete devotion to HoMM franchise. If you want better graphics and gameplay go for HoMM 5, if you want excellent gameplay and slightly worse graphics go for HoMM 3, but avoid this game like the plague it is.