Heroes of Might and Magic Online Preview
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Being an online-only title, you'd expect a fairly robust quest system, and to be fair there are in excess of a hundred campaigns across varying factions, along with a guild system and a player vs. player combat arena. The confusing aspect is that the world now consists of three levels - the aforementioned real-time level where you can pick up quests, along with managing your troops and castle improvements, and the traditional two levels found in original Heroes titles (move and conquer, along with combat). It's as if the development team have tried to totally reproduce all the interesting elements from the single-player campaigns and custom maps designed for Heroes III, and squeeze them into a 2.5D environment with an overhead management arena added as an afterthought.
If you can tolerate the poor layout, bad animation, bloated and unwelcome online lobby system and atrocious graphical presentation, you'll almost certainly be disappointed by the lack of detail shown in the maps. Most Heroes III maps, and to a lesser extent Heroes V, contained a vast wealth of treasure and resources, scattered with foes designed to whittle away your army base and encourage careful stockpiling and structure building. The same general concepts apply in Heroes Online, however it's done so badly that it makes you wonder what exactly you're fighting for. The immediacy of trading resources for town structures has been managed out of the game, and with it, any real sense of enjoyment.
