A single hero, adventuring through the countryside with no “built” units whatsoever and just collecting whatever army members he happens upon, could handle anything but the worst town sieges on normal difficulty in Might & Magic: Heroes VII.
A few overpowered spells and abilities usually dominated a battle, and big stacks of underpowered allies frequently performed as well as those expensive, hard-to-produce advanced units.
M&M: Heroes VII offers you the ability to tweak many of your automated opponents’ settings, in terms of how fast they build up, expand, or become aggressive. I typically didn’t touch them — and didn’t need to in order to succeed with simple combinations.
Above: Ivan and his advisers. They appear just as animated in this screenshot as they are in the video.
Corpse-like animations
The full-screen cutscenes, whether procedurally generated as part of battles or in the stories told by Ivan’s advisers in the campaign, proved incredibly disappointing. They frankly look atrocious: clunky, ugly, reminiscent of games released a decade or more ago.
People are drawn as frozen statues, with little detail. None of the voice acting in campaign cutscenes animates at all; instead, the advisers are left frozen, mouths hanging open, as the game camera pans over them.
The tiny combat animations of your units typically look fine, if sometimes slow. But the chessboard-like battlefields they play on sometimes oddly de-rez, making the game board appear a bit rough.
If this were a tiny indie title, perhaps I could forgive the faults due to lack of financial backing. But the latest installment in one of the premiere fantasy-strategy series ever published, released by the world’s third-largest independent publishing house? Come on.
Above: This Heropedia tells you more about the back stories of your champions, but doesn’t do much to instruct you on how to use them.
No hand-holding for beginners
I was grateful to have some previous experience with this series. Normally I grumble a bit at tutorials — especially the mandatory kind — that lead you through every last menu item and option. And please, for all that is holy, never voice act them.
For a game with this many choices, however, I can only imagine how a beginner to turn-based strategy would have figured out when and how to end a turn, or cast a hero spell, or choose an ability. As far as I could tell, this M&M offers no in-game tutorials of any kind.
The developers designed their controls well, and I’d consider icons and abilities reasonably intuitive, but they’d still sometimes require new players to be mind readers.
Above: A landscape in the Stronghold campaign.
Conclusion
I honestly looked forward to playing Might & Magic: Heroes VII, and the storytelling approach to the campaign felt promising. The varied factions, abilities, resources, and maps appealed to me, and when it wasn’t crashing or making my heroes go poof, the game had some of that “just one more turn” fun.
But over time, M&M managed to suck out every bit of my enthusiasm, until finally it felt like a dull trudge to finish up so I could play something else.
Some of the bugs I experienced — but not all — likely sprung from my play on Windows 10. But even if I had never run into a single technical difficulty, this title would not earn a rave review — it would have earned an additional 25 points for the final score.
Too many factors weigh down the gameplay, too much depth appeared to be there for the sake of providing “options” that weren’t, and frankly, it just wasn’t that fun.
If you’re looking for a lighthearted turn-based fantasy-themed strategy, I recommend you take a gander at Stardock’s solid Sorcerer King — also not perfect, but a darn sight better-implemented and more entertaining than M&M.
If you just want great turn-based strategy and don’t care about the fantasy setting, consider Civilization: Beyond Earth.
As much as I respect this series, I cannot recommend that you purchase Might & Magic: Heroes VII.
Score: 40/100
Might & Magic: Heroes VII is available now for PC. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a download code for purposes of this review.