Heroes of Might & Magic IV
$21.95		(Win95/98/ME/2000/XP) (DVD Case) (M&MHERO4PR)

Publisher: UbiSoft

Game

ESRB Rating: Everyone - Animated violence

Ratings:

from The Adrenaline Vault

92 from ActionTrip

It's All New Period!

Some prophecies of doom come true. Escape the flames licking at your back and jump quickly through a portal into another world for only the bold will be allowed to live. Embrace a wondrous new land. Uncover its ancient mysteries, battle its deadly creatures, and explore its forgotten past. Here lies gods who have been silent all too long. Here lies a realm that can only be claimed by the strong, the crafty, or the wise. It is yours to conquer!

It's All New, Period. The Reinvention of the Award Winning Franchise Heroes of Might and Magic® IV is more than a sequel - it's a celebration of both the old and the new. With an all-new engine that features a new magic system, new campaigns, new hero-character classes, and gameplay that varies according to how you play, you'll be amazed at how much the Heroes™ you know and love has improved!

Players familiar with the Heroes series will immediately notice many improvements to the familiar interface and gameplay: Now you can actively lead multiple hero-characters into battle to fight alongside troops for an intense combat experience. You'll encounter all-new heroes and over 60 creatures in 6 massive campaigns and 24 scenarios. With an all-new game engine, lifelike isometric view, breathtaking graphics and richly detailed landscapes, the adventure map comes alive! Heroes™ IV combines the latest technology with the best features of the classic strategy game. With 48 Hero Classes and all-new skill and magic systems, summon all your strategic insight, tactical cunning and leadership abilities to ascend to the throne of this perilous new world!

Newcomers to Heroes of Might and Magic® will find that, while the game includes very detailed scenarios and hero possibilities, the series itself is renowned for its ease of use. Much of your time will be spent exploring the maps and continents, collecting resources, and engaging the enemy in battle. Visit towns, explore forests, raid castles…each of these places is a new opportunity to build up your army, earn gold, and gain new territory and hero-characters by creatures

Features:

General

• For the first time ever, bring hero-characters into battle as super-soldiers in your army!
• All-new game engine!
• All-new isometric viewpoint and informative interface.
• Tweak the new personal scenarios and map editor to make levels and quests for your friends!
• Over 140 hours of gameplay and 6 unique campaigns.
• 11 starting Hero classes, 37 advanced classes - choose the specific classes of each member in your army!
• All-new magic system - Complete Hero customization at your fingertips.
• 60 varied creature classes to control.

Adventure Map

• More than 300 Adventure Map structures to interact with.
• Resource mines appear in multiple states: undeveloped resource deposit, working mine, abandoned mine (guarded by creatures), and run-out mine (no longer producing resources).
• New "Fog of War" map effect: clear for recently explored terrain, gray in areas visited in the past, and black for areas not yet visited.
• Watch out for Wandering Monsters. If they find any of your armies and they think they can take them out, prepare for battle!
• Creature stacks controlled by the player will run away if overpowered, join your army if they feel like it, or fight.

Hero Classes, Creatures and Armies

• Each player can control up to 8 armies, each consisting of up to 7 individual hero-characters and/or troops of creatures!
• 11 starting Hero Classes, each with two starting skills (Barbarians have 3), and 37 advanced Hero Classes. 9 Hero Primary Skills, each with 3 associated Secondary Skills (27 total).
• 66 types of creatures!
• Hero-characters and creatures have similar stats: Damage, Hit Points, Speed, Movement, Spell Points, Shots, Luck, and Morale.
• Hero-characters of any class can equip themselves with any artifact.
• Creatures have a backpack so that they may carry but not equip artifacts.

Combat

• Each combat screen grid can be a different terrain, with associated bonuses and negatives for Hero Classes/Creatures.
• Hero Classes can participate in combat; they can move, attack, defend and retaliate just like creatures!
• Combatants can face in 8 different directions on the Combat Screen.
• In siege combat, Creatures at the base of a town wall can attack defenders at the top of a wall and vice-versa!

Towns

• Six town types: Academy, Haven, Preserve, Asylum, Necropolis and Stronghold.
• "Outpost" towns may be captured by the player and converted into any of the six town types!
• 5 Schools of Magic: Life, Order, Death, Chaos, and Nature.

Requirements:

Windows 95/98 /Me/2000/XP Pentium II 300 MHz, 128MB RAM, 4x speed CD-ROM drive, 750MB free hard disk space, all major DirectX compatible sound cards, DirectX 7.0 compatible, capable of 800x600 16-bit high color display, keyboard, mouse.

Multiplayer: 28.8 modem or greater (modem/Internet play); TCP/IP or IPX (network play).

Reviews:

The Adrenaline Vault by Gavin Carter

"As in the previous titles, the gameplay revolves around your Heroes, units that can lead armies, gain experience and skills, and confer bonuses on your population. Heroes IV introduces some changes to their management... Another change in Heroes is they're no longer disembodied, spell-flinging entities in combat; they're actual battlefield units, weak and fragile at first, but as they advance, they can become as powerful as any large assembly of troops. This adds more strategy to the battles, since enemies often prioritize your Hero over other units. Keeping your Hero protected is a must,.."

"From a qualitative standpoint, Heroes of Might and Magic IV has brought turn-based strategy back into the limelight of PC gaming. The title takes everything that has ever been great about the series and elevates it to the next level. The changes revitalize the Heroes formula and provide more strategic gameplay than the series has ever offered. Although the title takes some minor steps backward with the interface and some rough visuals, I'm going to be playing Heroes IV for a long time. Even without online multiplayer or the map editor, the development team has packed about three standard games worth of content into the package. Anyone who's a fan of quality PC gaming should not hesitate to pick up Heroes IV."

ActionTrip by Ranko "Arjuna" Trifkovic

"Thing is that HMM4 presents a great combination of the old addictive gameplay, a new spell, combat and hero system and perfectly designed 2D isometric (the so-called 2½D) graphics, inspiring music and magical atmosphere which kept me glued to the screen constantly for thirty hours until I finished the first of the ten campaigns."

"In this sequel, heroes can act as units and participate in combat. The advantages are obvious, but this also increases the possibility for the hero to get slain... The new combat system also allows one of the eight possible armies to be composed out of heroes only (up to seven of them). Armies without heroes are now also capable of moving around the map (important novelty), which makes gameplay far more tactically flexible. These army formations are still incapable of capturing resources, but they can steal artifacts and gold."

"Maps & Campaigns: These are far more versatile and rich than they ever were. There is a large number of buildings we are already used to (mines, stations, schools, libraries, fountains, treasure, etc.) and a certain amount of new ones. The campaigns are beautiful, and they always use the space on the map to full extent... Maps now have a "reset" date -- if you wonder around the map for too long, the "one-use only" structures and monsters will start to re-spawn. Before playing each map, you can set whether you want neutral armies to act like guards, or whether you would like them to roam the map. This is a very interesting option that can make the game far more difficult."

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