M&M: Heroes VII - Review @ Girl Gamers UK

HiddenX · November 2, 2015

Girls Gamers UK has reviewed Might & Magic Heroes VII:

Take a hero to the land of Ashan in Ubisoft’s ongoing fantasy turn-based strategy series.

The Might & Magic Heroes series has been around for a fair while now, and developers Limbic Entertainment take us to the land of Ashan for this seventh title in the series.

´Might & Magic Heroes VII is, as were all of the games before it, a game with two distinct sides. On the one hand, you have the whole exploration and management side, and on the other hand are the strategic combat encounters.

The player takes their hero and is given a large map to roam around. Each turn, the player is able to move a certain distance along the various paths. These paths and the open areas are littered with little icons representing different things of interest, such as resources, treasures and enemies.

Collecting the resources will give the player the opportunity to improve their city. This all takes place within a city management set of screens, and the player is able to add all manner of new buildings to their city for various purposes, be they to recruit new or replacement troop types, increase their income or the city defence, or even to hire new heroes who come with their own small army.

[...]

Unfortunately, little has changed from the previous Might & Magic Heroes outings, and things are starting to feel a little stale now. It is okay to say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but games still have to evolve, and Might & Magic Heroes VII hasn’t. The UI is nice and intuitive, but there seems to be a lack of polish and quite a few bugs that sour the experience. To top this off, there is very little guidance for newcomers to the game and Might & Magic Heroes is not the most straight forward game to grasp without prior knowledge.

For fans of the series, myself included, Might & Magic Heroes VII offers a substantial amount of content and will entertain for many hours, despite the lack of evolution or change. For those new to the series, this turn-based strategy title may well prove too much of an uphill battle.

Score: 7/10

More information.

HiddenX · November 2, 2015

Thank you for the info, Eye!

cptbarkey · November 2, 2015

someday there will come a point where people just say "heroes 3 was perfection and cannot be improved upon."

original sin 2 is hopefully following the correct path, waste little time on the engine, and focus on content.

forgottenlor · November 2, 2015

I've actually seen some positive comments about this game. The biggest problem right now is that it is not optimized and older computers are having massive problems running it.

Wisdom · November 2, 2015

forgottenlor said:
I've actually seen some positive comments about this game. The biggest problem right now is that it is not optimized and older computers are having massive problems running it.

I struggle with sympathy here. Even in the business world I get tired of hearing "but we want to use our own backbone network developed in 1972 and somehow modify your products to work! Why arent your products backwards compatible. Also, can we get this on 5inch floppies?"

Somewhere someone has to draw a line and wonder just how much its costing to sacrifice top end capability to support ancient technology.

At least I have the benefit of knowing what our top prospects have, the gaming industry has a much wider scope.

Wisdom · November 2, 2015

For customer satisfaction and ease of use, we've chiseled the user manual into 7000 stone tablets. FedEx expects an 80 day delivery window and 32 trucks. Please have staff available to assist with the unloading. Also require an engineers report on the load bearing structures these tablets will be housed in.

Caidh · November 3, 2015

Wisdom said:
I struggle with sympathy here. Even in the business world I get tired of hearing "but we want to use our own backbone network developed in 1972 and somehow modify your products to work! Why arent your products backwards compatible. Also, can we get this on 5inch floppies?"

Somewhere someone has to draw a line and wonder just how much its costing to sacrifice top end capability to support ancient technology.

At least I have the benefit of knowing what our top prospects have, the gaming industry has a much wider scope.

When someone wants to play the latest game with top of the line graphics on older hardware (Witcher 3 for example), that's one thing. Heroes 7 looks like it was made 5 years ago, there's no excuse for a game with that level of graphics that it SHOULDN'T run on slightly older hardware.

Wisdom · November 3, 2015

Yes and no. There is more to hardware than simply graphics. Th' amount of processing required, the types and speed of calculations required, the method and coding used, how it works with different versions of Windows etc etc.

Sid M's Civilization had some major issues with older machines because they couldnt handle the back end processing involved. They had some hard choices to make.

Also.... 5 year machine can be realistically 10year old parts depending on what they bought. Lots of people quote build dates of their pc rigs but neglect to mention that in 2010 they bought cheap parts made in 2005 and unsupported by now.

jpnole · November 3, 2015

Who do they have doing reviews on that site? The actual review was in the last 2 paragraphs and it sure didn't read like a 7/10.

It has a Steam recommendation rating of 36%, among the lowest of any major release in recent memory. Not touching this with a 10 foot pole.

joxer · November 3, 2015

Steam reviews… LOL
99.9% positive for Neptunia, a game that insults you with joystick tooltips.
99.9% negative reviews for Raven's Cry just because and by people who didn't even play more than an hour but copypasted Polygon/Gamespot "reviews".

Honestly, start to trust only RPGwatch reviews.
A few members here already wrote their impressions in other threads (buggy most certainly, but an underwhelming and under average - no).
I still didn't buy it and will do it on some sale. Not because od Steam crybabies but because I already have too many games waiting in line.

forgottenlor · November 3, 2015

Wisdom said:
For customer satisfaction and ease of use, we've chiseled the user manual into 7000 stone tablets. FedEx expects an 80 day delivery window and 32 trucks. Please have staff available to assist with the unloading. Also require an engineers report on the load bearing structures these tablets will be housed in.

I agree with you in principle, but no one understands why Heroes 7 runs so poorly. The same thing happened with Might and Magic X. Neither games seems particularly complicated, and Heroes 7 doesn't seem to do anything revolutionary gameplay or graphicwise. Just saying. That doesn't mean its a good or bad game. I've read on the heroes site some pretty good things about it, so I will buy it when the price goes down.

lackblogger · November 3, 2015

Going back to what cptbarkey said, is there actually a demand for new HoMM games? As in are there people on their forums constantly badgering them for new games in huge numbers? Do people write long lamenting essays and walls of text on worldwide forums pining for the next edition in the series? Or do they just make them and then people get interested?

HoMM is a great game, I've played a good many hours, but after just 3 installments I can't see why anyone would want to play another installment. They don't look like they change that radically from game to game and it's not like each edition adds 5 new playable factions or anything. The same with King's Bounty, after the first two, there's not much more to say really.

What are people looking for with a new HoMM?

joxer · November 3, 2015

It's like asking what are people looking for with new Need For Speed.

lackblogger · November 3, 2015

joxer said:
It's like asking what are people looking for with new Need For Speed.

Well, I assume you're right, but having never played Need For Speed I can't accurately determine if the scenario is exactly the same. So I shall just talk about a couple of games that everyone here should recognise:

Take Icewind Dale. It's pretty combat heavy. However the first one was fresh and lovely even still. Then came the sequel, IWD2. It was pretty combat heavy and the attempts to insert more world interaction probably annoyed more people than it pleased, because it bloated the game by trying to do too many things. It also didn't really give you much of a new world, there was lots of reused ideas and locations.

Now, did anyone, does anyone, pine for Icewind Dale 3? Not really, not even from its most ardent fans. The good original, the dodgy but ok sequel, job done, let's move onto other things.

Now take Balduer's Gate, a game universe with far more world interaction, each successive iteration/expansion adding more social elements. The first was pretty boring and the second was beloved and the expansions adored. And people have spent 15 years in a state of frustrated demand for a third one. You could still fill up many walls of text from people explaining why they want a third one.

So you can understand why some games get many iterations while others don't and although the reasons why might vary from game to game, HoMM strikes me as one of those games where you don't really want to own every iteration nor get hyped for new iterations - so I was wondering if anyone could illustrate why it's fun to get a new HoMM.

Hastar · November 3, 2015

Remember the HoMM series is on its third owner. They are trying to get a return on their investment. If New World Computing still owned it I would be the first in line to buy this series.

ChienAboyeur · November 4, 2015

lackblogger said:
What are people looking for with a new HoMM?

Another HoMM.

Sir_Brennus · November 4, 2015

A lot of talking points here.

1. Performance: You have to consider that by UBI-Soft standards this is a very low budget title because of the limited audience. Limbic had to do it with the same shoe string budget like they did MMX. That's the reason why they have to rely on cheap to free engines, tools and middleware that are not as optimized as they could be. The testing isn't on par with AC or SD titles which are bugfests, too. I'd very surprised if HOMM6+7 weren't cheaper than 3-5 (adjusted to inflation).

2. Evolution: This is dangerous territory. HOMM3 wasn't perfect by all means. The heroes lacked personality, the campaigns lacked urgency and the "story" was laughable. In an ideal world we would've gotten all these things in HOMM4 (with HOMM3 engine, naturally), but we got other innovations nobody asked for, just to justify another iteration. HOMM fans would've loved to buy it, but noone else would have. And a giant corporation like UBI always looks out for the "other" customers.

Lev · November 4, 2015

Save/load games do not really work well for me these days.

fatknacker50 · November 4, 2015

Sir_Brennus said:
A lot of talking points here.

1. Performance: You have to consider that by UBI-Soft standards this is a very low budget title because of the limited audience. Limbic had to do it with the same shoe string budget like they did MMX. That's the reason why they have to rely on cheap to free engines, tools and middleware that are not as optimized as they could be. The testing isn't on par with AC or SD titles which are bugfests, too. I'd very surprised if HOMM6+7 weren't cheaper than 3-5 (adjusted to inflation).

Please… they fleeced plenty of people for MMX, saying it was because of a shoe string budget is just bollocks. They're a second rate Dev team who focus solely on a cash and grab principle, the clues in the name, LIMBIC.

ChienAboyeur · November 4, 2015

Sir_Brennus said:
. And a giant corporation like UBI always looks out for the "other" customers.

Players who buy this type of products might already be considered as the "other" customers by Ubisoft, relatively to Ubisoft's main products and the associated main target.

M&M: Heroes VII - Review @ Girl Gamers UK

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