Sorry about the delays. I still hope to crank out a tasty mega-review soon that’ll explain where I think HOMMV fits within the history and future of the turn-based strategy genre. There might not be much point other than historical completeness, but its mostly written anyway so why not. In the mean time any HOMM aficionado will want to read trusty old Richard Hallas’ IMG review of HOMM. He’s pretty fair and certainly thorough, and ultimately comes out feeling positively about the game by assigning it a 7.75/10.

One thing I entirely agree with in Richard’s review is how HOMMV doesn’t quite reclaim that sense of immersiveness that marked earlier versions. To be emphatic however, this isn’t so much an “old school purist vs. new school innovator” dichotomy as it is a fundamental hallmark of strategy games. What always attracted me to HOMM was its great sense of developmental pacing and unfolding scale. Right off the bat there was stuff to do and AI to skirmish with, but as the game unfolded, the scale just got grander and grander as the pacing built to a crescendo. The map would then climax at a win/lose tipping point marked by a few major battles before concluding with a fairly short denouement.

Ultimately I feel these important qualities are lost because HOMMV is unable to duplicate that grand sense of scale or pacing that made earlier iterations so engrossing and time flow so easily. The early portions of the game are fairly dull and repetitious. Long development times generally lead to all-or-nothing tangles with isolated AI players. Almost every map I’ve played feels sparse in terms of strategic objectives: instead of deep, chess-like branching of options, the path to victory is typically quite linear. The “tipping point” often seems to come quite early in the game and as a result of purely efficient play rather than strategic insight. The remainder of the map is accordingly rendered a drawn-out, snooze-button mopping-up job. Or else you encounter an end-game AI so strong the fight is a bleeding-white attrition march of doom. The tragedy of HOMMV is that properly even pacing and spacing is so fundamentally absent that it minimizes the many very nuanced gameplay mechanics and innovations introduced in the latest installment.

Ultimately I attribute most of this to the shift to a 3D engine. I’m not against a move to 3D but I think Ubi really botched the way they made this move. If you look at how other broadly “strategic” games made the move to 3D — Galactic Civilization II, Sim City 4, WarCraft III — they retain a very strong sense of a “grid”. This is absolutely necessary to maintain proportionality and scale between the objects on the map and a conciseness in the user interface. Without these it is very difficult to foster the sense of flow that makes a game feel engrossing. HOMMV breaks the grid by basically using an engine suited to third-person adventure games with no snap-to points. As a result, the maps are very “natural” but not at all concise, and the player spends far too much time panning and zooming the camera and fussing with extremely basic operations like flagging a mine or entering a town. This is exacerbated by fairly high processing requirements that can lead to stutters and interruptions that also just get in the way of playing a strategy game. The sum of these constant niggling interruptions ruins the flow of the game and takes away what is so fundamental to the strategy genre: an uninterrupted level of pure thought.

I’ve tried to like the game more and have given it many opportunities to hook me but it just hasn’t happened. It’s pretty and it has some great ideas, but it just ends up being tedious. I think most turn-bases strategy lovers will get a week or two of play out of HOMMV before leaving for greener pastures. Bottom line, I think HOMMV could have been the best in the series if the shift to 3D had been done right and by someone who truly understood what made earlier versions so engrossing.

Given all that and the lack of an OSX map editor producing Mac-made maps worth showcasing, I reckon I’ll be pretty much closing up shop on this fan blog once the final review is posted. I’m unfortunately just not terribly motivated to keep playing HOMMV at this point. There might be some use for a Mac-centric page that keeps tabs on the Freeverse port, but I reckon the Freeverse forums will probably suffice for that.

If anyone feels like carrying on this website by all means let me know.