Eador scored instant brownie points with me by taking a leaf out of Master of Orion’s book and including reams and reams of contextual right-click help information. That is not to say it is difficult to play, or particularly hard to get a handle on. This was not an easy thing to pull off considering how much text there is in the game – hundreds of random events, unit descriptions and ability summaries – but it was absolutely essential to get it right since Eador is by far the most complex HoMM-alike I’ve ever played. The translation surprised me greatly by not being complete garbage 1, with only a few language tics making it through that mostly served to preserve the game’s earnest out-of-breath Russian style. That is, unless your name is Eador: Genesis.Įador is a particularly Russian take on the genre that got an English language release on GoG a month or two back. The trick to making a decent HoMM-alike is in doing this in a way that doesn’t completely overwhelm the player, which means stripping out at least some of the detail. HoMM games don’t just mix a few bits of the RPG genre and a few more bits of the strategy genre together to make their own thing instead they cram in so much of each that you genuinely feel like you’re playing two games at once. Heroes have inventories stuffed with items, cities will be populated by one particular race with its own specialty, and the map is littered with RPG-style special encounters that can bring you tremendous loot or an unwinnable fight. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about that gameplay model, but the unusual thing about HoMM games is their astonishing level of detail. The goal of the game is to kill all the other wizards who are trying to do the same thing. You use those resources to build buildings, train units and hire heroes, you use the heroes to form parties and armies, and you use the armies to go out on adventures and subjugate the surrounding provinces, adding them to your kingdom. The idea is that you start out as the lord/high wizard/immortal undead lich king of a single castle, with only a small amount of starting cash and the resources of the castle’s province to call upon. That’s not just a reflection on their theme, either the chances are that if you can think of a single element from a fantasy game, book or film the chances are it’s made its way into a HoMM game in some form. They’re part RPG, part Civ-alike and all fantasy. HoMM-style games are a fearsomely complex bunch. So, who here has played Heroes of Might and Magic?
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