It has been a long time since I have been so definitively frustrated with a game and its mechanics. I honestly cannot remember the last game where I walked away yelling, “FINE! Be that way” and never returned to it again. It takes a lot to get me there, but here we are right now.
While I certainly appreciate the thought and dedication that went into creating Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes – Definitive Edition from developer DotEmu, this game is intense and at times incredibly frustrating. I think the mixture of strategy, RPG, and puzzle certainly lends a lot of difficulty to the gameplay, but the main crux of my issues lies within the mechanics/controls and unfair enemy advantage during battles. It’s a good game on the surface but it certainly could have been so much better.
Let’s hack and slash through this review.
Short story, long gameplay
The story for Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes – Definitive Edition takes place 40 years before Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes V. Five different heroes from different regions are in a desperate struggle with some demonic baddies. The demons have infiltrated every aspect of their world in hopes of causing chaos and ultimate destruction. The heroes must band together to prevent their world from going into peril and save what they can before it’s too late.
The story is worthy of any role-playing game narrative. It contains heroes, defined bad folks, and it has a lot of here and there with allegiances that are on the brink of collapse. On a story level, this is a good game that lays out what narrative it’s trying to execute and takes the gamer through. This is probably the most together part of the game that makes sense in how it unravels. It does harken back to a late 80s/90s type of RPG storyline you would encounter during those decades. Simple, yet intriguing.
If you’re coming here looking for a story, then you certainly are in for a good ride. Now, when you mix gameplay into that soup, the feelings change a bit.
Decent Soup
First, the positive, because you should always start with the positive when critiquing a game (write that down). The gameplay’s ambition to mix and mingle several genres together successfully is admirable. The RPG elements in Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes – Definitive Edition are simple in their structure. You can pick and choose fighters of a large variety who come with their own set of strategic rules. You have a bevy of weapons and buffs you can acquire, as well as mix and match, that help power up your characters during a fight and make your life easier. You even have a touch of non-linear gameplay structure that makes it feel like you’re in control of the story, even though you’re very much on a linear path most of the game.
Puzzle and strategy are the next genres in this game, where you must strategically move fighters on the battlefield to successfully defeat an enemy. I wasn’t expecting this type of gameplay, but I did enjoy it on a base level. It certainly piqued my interest immediately and had me thinking through fighters a lot harder than I did in previous RPGs. Not quite the level of an Advanced Wars, but good strategy nonetheless.
The last piece to the gameplay was the puzzle component. This was an interesting part, as the game occasionally threw a wrench in your battle. For example, there was a part where I was saving an old elf that lived on top of a large ancient tree. While battling, the game tasked me with avoiding hitting the old man who was wandering across the field of war. Mixing that type of puzzle in with strategic warfare made for a frustrating time, but was a different take. And there were more opportunities with limited movements on the battlefield to compete during the gameplay. This was a clever component and a very impressive piece.
Your fighters
How the game works is neat. You have a group of fighters that run around with your character and are placed on a multiple-column/row battlefield with a line drawn in the middle. You position those fighters in groups of three to attack (you can do groups of six as well, but there is a space limitation that you must consider) and a row of three to four to create a blockade of sorts. If you’re a master at Microsoft Excel, then you can visualize that concept.
The secondary characters, or what I would like to call the mids, are more powerful creatures that take on a couple of those fighters to create a more powerful attack. For example, there might be a forest wizard with a deer’s head that can ingest two fighters and build up their attack across multiple rounds and unleash it on the enemies causing massive destruction. While the base-level fighters are just a round or two away from attacking, these mid-fighters are three or four rounds away. And, if you haven’t guessed yet, the fighters must prep their attack within multiple rounds before executing. The rounds are defined by three moves and then over to the enemy (think turn-based) and the player must weigh whether it’s worth it to build up a big attack using multiple rounds or chip away using smaller, less powerful fighters more quickly. It’s a strategic dilemma and one that works great in this type of gameplay design.
Then there are biggins. The big and powerful fighters are wonderful, if not slightly overpowered at times. They take at least four rounds to prep and execute their moves, but if you can make it that far, then you’ll find a lot of value in their execution. For example, some dragons take up many spaces on the game’s Excel spreadsheet (four rows, two columns) that require four fighters to sacrifice their lives to activate the dragon. Creating that space can be a nightmare at times but if you end up doing it, then you’re going to find a significant amount of damage dealt to the enemies. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Mostly, but having that in your arsenal during a fight is invaluable.
This is a huge plus in the overall gameplay design and seeing different types of characters at your disposal is quite cool. There are a lot.
Gameplay structure
The gameplay structure and how a match ultimately works within Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes – Definitive Edition isn’t too complicated. You are given a set number of characters, not by your choosing, at the beginning of a match that flows into your Excel spreadsheet randomly. You must move around and restructure three characters at a time per round before it’s the enemy’s turn. You go back and forth with this type of strategy until you build up offensive lines, and defensive lines, or are waiting for characters to combine to create a powerful mid or big brute situation.
Once the offensive groups have their random round countdown hit zero, they attack the other side. At any given point during the three-character selection, you can replenish your side as you lose characters to defense or offense. Much like the beginning of the game, the new characters coming in are random and randomly placed on the Excel spreadsheet. For the record, this isn’t a real Excel spreadsheet, I’m just providing your brain with some visuals to help with my descriptions. Columns and rows, folks. Columns and rows.
The goal of these constant attacks is to take down the commander you’re playing against. When you break through their lines, you cause damage to that commander. Damage is determined by how much undisrupted power is built up by the opposing characters, meaning if they get hit by the enemy, then your character loses some attack power, and how well your character executes the hit. You can have some quick matches at times, or you can have matches that last about 10-20 minutes. It all depends on your characters, buffs, and what items you may or may not have equipped (you gain items through big battles).
On the XP side of the tracks, you do build up and level your characters which equals out to more hit points (HP) and how much more damage they can deal at any given time. And you’re just not leveling up your main characters, you’re also leveling up the characters on the battlefield. So meta and I love this portion of the RPG structure.
On paper, the gameplay for Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes – Definitive Edition is amazing. It puts your strategy and puzzle skills to the test and pokes at that part of your brain that activates a strong cognitive interest in preparing and executing RPG gameplay. It was the driving reason that I enjoyed this game.
So, where did the gameplay hiccup? Let’s start with controls.
Controls – I swear it isn’t me
The mechanics and controls were working against me the entire review session. While I appreciate the fact that I can’t randomly move fighters in columns to other columns, as you can only select the last one in the column to move elsewhere, not the middle or upper part of the column, there were so many times where I misfired moving someone. For example, if I had two green fairies in a column and I needed to move a third over to create an offensive strike, sometimes I would accidentally pick another fighter and move them, which instantly took away one of my moves. I know what you’re thinking, “This sounds like a you issue, Stevens”, but I thought that too until I kept doing it repeatedly.
There is some weird movement disconnect in the PlayStation version of this game, which has me accidentally choosing the wrong fighter multiple times. It’s like a delayed command in movement. When I was playing, I made contact with the controller in anticipation that everything was good but chose the wrong character because there was a delay in movement and button-pushing. This is a mechanic issue that is certainly not 1:1 in its execution in the game.
Randomness is a bit lopsided
The other issue with the game and this is a big issue when it comes to balance and fairness, is how the randomness of the player and the enemy generally end up. The player’s random fighter order is truly random. It’s a hodge-podge of moving a lot of fighters around in an extended amount of time to prep for battle. Every time you call up new fighters, they are truly a mixed bag of nuts on the battlefield. As for the enemy? Total opposite most of the time.
The enemy usually has their random shit together when they receive fighters from their fighter stock. Most of the fighters are usually at or near ready order for an offensive attack, which makes the entire situation unfair and lacking any room for error. Your fate will be unveiled about three rounds into any given match. You can pretty much guess if you have a chance or not early on in a match depending on what fighters you acquire and how long it takes you to put them in any type of strategic order. The enemy line always seemed ready to go by round two of nearly every fight. If you hiccup with the controls and misplace someone in a different line, your odds of winning the match dramatically drop, and drop hard. Trust me, in my optimistic reviewer way, I usually give games a lot of go before reaching a pessimistic view, and this game was doing its best to try my optimistic patience. The enemy was constantly at an advantage during fights, even the early ones in the game, and it never let up. Generally, in an RPG, the game goes easy on you at the beginning and then gradually gets more difficult, but every fight was a lopsided, grind-y affair in Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes – Definitive Edition that always had me going against the high ground like I was Anakin Skywalker. Most of the time, I ended up like Anakin at the bottom of the hill.
Anyway, both complaints have a significant impact on the gameplay. Right out of the gate, you’ll be fighting against both and while controls are manageable, the constant lopsided fighting affair isn’t. Each battle is going to feel like a chore, which is regretful because this game could have been so much fun.
Overall, I love everything that DotEmu was trying to do here. It’s a good blueprint that has some potential for improvement. How this was executed was decent, but produced mostly frustration due to the unbalanced advantage the enemy seemed to always have during matches.
On that note, let’s wrap this review up.
Conclusion
Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes – Definitive Edition from DotEmu is a decent game thanks to a clever mixture of RPG, puzzle, and strategy structure. It has a compelling storyline that reminds you of an 80s/90s RPG gaming world, and it has plenty of characters to play around with on the battlefield. It falls short with unbalanced gameplay that always leans towards enemy advantage and the control mechanics that can be incredibly finicky at times.
