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Very Pretty, Reasonably Playable, but nothing original

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: May 01, 2008
Author: Amazon User

First, let's deal with the elephant in the room. This game is perfectly described as "Heroes of Might and Magic In Space". No more, no less. Despite the vagueness of their game descriptions, it is not a 4X space game, it is not a Privateer-style space RPG. It doesn't even try to adapt the gameplay to the setting - in this game, space is absolutely full of impassible asteroid fields, force walls, and other conceits to force your "fleets" to wind through them exactly like the armies in HoMM wind around mountains and oceans. I liked the HoMM games, but after five iterations I really have played out that style of game so I didn't spend more than a couple of hours on this once I realized its nature.

This is also a bargain-priced game. As such games go, you get a lot more than you are paying for in some areas, but you should not expect anything really original.

Those two thing said, I must mention that the graphical and sound production values are amazingly good. The rendering of characters and map objects, as well as interiors, is gorgeous (the ships of your fleet are less so, tiny and nondescript), the sound effects are good, and most surprisingly the voice acting is excellent. The scripts for the English voice acting were also well-translated and idiomatic. The on-screen text is not as perfectly translated but my complaints about it are not in the translation but in how little there is of it.

The absolute worst thing about this game (if you can stomach the cheesy maps) is how poorly explained it is. If you have not played HoMM, your chance of even figuring out the game interface is slim. The tiny leaflet in the box utterly fails to describe the gameplay, let alone define the terms you need to figure out in order to map your knowledge of HoMM to this game. For example, there is no description of the hero classes or skills. It took me a while to figure out that "space", "time", and "technology" are the spell colleges, though once I built a "research facility" it was obvious that "upgrades" are spells. There are no descriptions, on-screen or in the leaflet I won't call a manual, of the different ships (creatures) you can build (recruit) at the different kinds of space stations (towns). And in combat or while recruiting/upgrading, there are no tooltips to tell you the abilities of your ship types - why does this one rocketship thingie have a ranged attack but that one doesn't? How good is that ranged attack? What improvement am I buying by upgrading this stack?

Even in the interiors like the bar (bar) or research facility (mage tower), you have to hover the mouse over a character to get a titlebar at the top of the screen to tell you who they are, and that isn't always much information - some of the characters just say something when clicked while others are part of the gameplay.

Overall, if you really love HoMM games and are looking for a new one this game will probably be worth the relatively cheap price. And the production values are a nice change in a bargain title. But in the end, this is still a budget title, and has nothing in it you haven't seen before.

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