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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not bad. Not great., March 14, 2001
"Heroes of Might & Magic" could be considered its own genre, where heroes are moved around a map with their armies to acquire resources that support their military operations, and where battle is carried out in a different mode than the day-to-day exploration. HoMM probably does it best, but that doesn't mean that there isn't room for a lot of good variation. Which brings us to Disciples: Sacred Lands.There's a lot of good variation here: - Heroes' armies are small (no more than six total, including the hero) but advance in skill with combat (and only with combat, avoiding the economy-driven approach of HoMM). This makes distributing and managing the individual troops cruical: it's not just a matter of "hiring another archmage" because you have to hire an apprentice and keep him alive long enough to grow in power. In some scenarios, the troops are limited in level, too, so there's some advantage to spreading the experience around. - Instead of heroes "tagging" resources to control them, controlled cities slowly transform the terrain surrounding them, and capture resources that way. (You have special units that can plant rods in areas where cities don't reach, or to try to "steal" a resource.) This eliminates the HoMM business of having to chase after a weak hero who's stealing all your resources. - Combat is strictly front-row/back-row. This makes it easier to protect weaker missile and support troops, sort of. (A lot of troops can attack back-row troops, but they are less approachable.) So, why the 3-star rating? Mostly, a combination of little things like a very sketchy, typo-filled manual; weak combat graphics (you don't interact with your troops on the combat screen, but using portraits that are alongside the main screen, and the troops don't interact with each other, either); the interface is a little clunky (if you double-click a destination and your hero has movement points, he'll move there, but if he's out of points, the second click will actually erase the point as the destination, and the lack of the move button means that every time you have a destination that's further than one day away, you have to click on the destination every turn); the autosave feature actually seems to penalize you for reloading, which I can sort of see on the harder levels, but which seems sort of juvenille on the easy levels for a game that offers little in the way of a tutorial or any way to know what you're getting into before you get into it. Nonetheless, the game is commendable for taking a general framework and not just saying "me, too". It has more of an intimate feel than HoMM (for better or for worse) and it's definitely rough-around-the-edges, but at the gold edition's price, you could do a lot worse.
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