Granted, some basic abilities — especially the reliance on melee bashing from some Might-oriented units — remain the same from faction to faction in Might & Magic: Heroes VII. But the graphic look and feel of the armies change, sometimes dramatically, and the different maps also offer a varied appeal, though with fewer changes in gameplay.
Above: Heroes are your key units in M&M — until they disappear on you.
What you won’t like
More bugs than a June picnic in the Everglades
I consider myself fairly forgiving of the occasional glitch, especially in PC games, where the next bug-fixing patch typically hovers just over the horizon. But the huge number of issues that cropped up — especially those that players appeared to have reported weeks or months before — felt incredibly sloppy.
It would crash on launch. Sometimes it would crash during play. Sometimes my heroes would disappear. Sometimes menus wouldn’t accept a choice until I closed and opened several times in succession. Graphical bugs were less common, but I encountered plenty of oddities. And I’ll get to multiplayer in a minute.
Full disclosure here: As I said, I ran the game on Windows 10, and the requirements for Might & Magic: Heroes VII fairly clearly call for Windows 7/8.1. I followed all steps listed in the launch-day blog (including the day-one patch) to eradicate as many issues as I could before writing this review.
That said, Windows 10 launched as a free update for owners of those Windows versions back in July. It’s not exactly reasonable to assume that your player base won’t have taken advantage of that upgrade, and it’s not like the developer didn’t have time to do at least some Win10 quality assurance: I’ve been running stable builds of the OS since early this year.
And many of the bugs I encountered had been previously reported by players using the recommended Windows variants. As of last night, 24 hours after release, about 20 significant “known issues” remained on Ubisoft’s sticky forum thread on the topic for all users. Many had been reported by players significantly in advance of release.
Above: Curse you, teasing multiplayer screen. I’ll never be able to play through one of those matches.
Multiplayer that won’t play
This is a corollary on the bugs issue, but it’s an important one: I was unable to play a single multiplayer game through to completion versus Internet opponents. (I didn’t get a chance to test LAN play.) It would crash, or my army would fail to load, or combat would simply stop working properly for me or for my opponent.
That’s a shame, because I was looking forward to trying out some of these mechanics out against actual humans. Typically, live-person play offers the drawback that some overpowered units become the “only” choices for successful fights. Unfortunately, this version of M&M makes that the case even against the A.I., so I wouldn’t have been giving anything up for more-intelligent opponents.
Above: The green and white dots represent the path M&M suggests for this hero’s journey. Unfortunately, it may take me 47 clicks to complete it.
Delays, delays, delays
Moving around the map is absolutely painful. One moment a click to set a path, then another to make my hero move, worked perfectly. We’d sail to the end of their movement abilities and the end of the turn.
The next, I would end up gritting my teeth and madly double-clicking to make my hero move two paces at a time down a clearly marked path the game showed me it already knew how to run.
Combat was sometimes the same. Auto-resolution typically played out poorly (no fair, game A.I., if you’re going to play badly, both teams should), so I ended up having to manually battle through nearly every one of my conflicts that weren’t wildly imbalanced.
Those battles went fine, but some abilities just took far too long to animate or complete, making the contests drag on.
Above: This battle isn’t going to play out well. But in anything less challenging, those piles of archers would be more than a match for most evildoers.
Depth that isn’t, really
I mentioned earlier that M&M offers many dials to tweak and buttons to push in building, recruiting, and fighting with your armies. But realistically, you can often ignore almost all of them.