Playing Heroes 5

I've been playing with a not-so-new game lately - Heroes V - Tribes from the East.


Of course, the image above came from Heroes V itself, where the Haven faction was the main faction, but Tribes from the East sets the Orcs as the main faction. In addition to that, this expansion came with an alternate upgrade for all existing units available making the combination of army more deadly and unique.

Okay, before I delve too much into the details, let's go back to the surface. Heroes V is a strategy turn based game. Yes, I'm a geek who likes strategies and planning. Using 'heroes' in the game, you command an army of creatures battling various kind of armies/creatures or vanquishing other heroes. Your hero can only move a certain number of steps on the map each turn.


See the green path on the map? That's the steps you can take
There are 7 resources in the game - gold, wood, ore, sulfur, crystal, gems, mercury where gold is the most important usually. You normally start with 1 town which you can build 1 particular building each turn providing you have the resources to do so. The view of the town is no doubt pretty nice compared to its previous versions. We have flying cities, dungeon, fortress and many more towns.


For battles, each heroes army are placed at the far end of the left and the right. You'll be able to arrange your creatures accordingly before you make a move. Of course, melee creatures need to move close enough to a target before striking while range and spell casters can shoot at range.


In terms of battle animation, it is rather clean and beautiful. The sound effect is impressive and so are the explosive spell effects.


All in all, it's definitely one of the better looking games in terms of visual for a strategy game. The thing why the game manages to support such high detail of visual without suffering from lags is due to the fact it is a turn based game.

Should this be a Real Time Strategy (RTS) like Warcraft or C&C, I doubt any of the existing computers can support it. Despite the fact I started playing strategy game with RTS, I grew to like Heroes V. I'd say the storyline is really captivating and the lack of cheat (newest version can't play cheat anymore T_T) made me persevered and completed all the missions despite the long hours to complete 1 single mission. Usually 1 mission takes three hours at least to complete.


If you like mythical creatures battling each other (think Dragons, Cyclops, Hydra, Elves, Dwarves, Griffins, Angels, Devils, Colossus and etc) with stunning graphic detail, this would be my recommendation for you.

Now, let me get back to my Necropolis for more undead summoning.

Ciao~

P.S. I can twitter and play the game when I'm ending the turn thanks to Twitter SMS by Channel X. With only RM1/week you get to tweet unlimited and receive all updates from your Twitter account. It's useful when you don't have to Alt + Tab to go out to Windows to tweet and get updates, cuz you get them sent to your phone via SMS.

Cheers
Robb