A turn-based strategy and role-playing game hybrid. Reinforce your town, build armies and level up your heroes to wage war against other heroes.

Release Date

Pros

The music is good and suits the game.

There is a good learn as you play tutorial during the first few missions of the single player campaign. It is quite beginner friendly.

The heroes can now attack. This is an improvement from Heroes of Might and Magic III, where they cannot. I do not know if this feature was in Heroes of Might and Magic IV as I have not played that game.

The game is now in 3D and it looks very good. You can zoom in, out and turn the camera to get better view of things. The tactical battle view can also be zoomed and turned. There are also close ups of the animations sometimes.

There are six factions, seven resource types and loads of monsters, spells and artifacts. Variety is a big strong point for HOMM5.

To help you get a grasp of all the many different things , there is in game information for everything. With a bit of reading you will know exactly how to best use your paladins or which spells to cast when.

The Heroes of Might and Magic series have the best blend of a role-playing game and a turn-based strategy game. HOMM5 continues this great hybrid gameplay. Strategy and a strong army are important, but levelling up your hero also plays a big part in the game.

The game comes with a map editor and there are lots of custom maps out there. There is a nice collection at maps4heroes.

There are also mods for the game. Check out Age of Heroes and Celestial Heavens.

There are six single player campaigns, one campaign for each faction. The whole story is quite good and flows from one faction to the next. As such, it is important to play the campaigns in order to follow the plot. If you want to try out the different factions quickly, you must get the mod that enables all the missions for all the campaigns without completing them in order. Or play a single scenario where you can choose your faction.

Cons

Wide screen is not supported properly. Everything looks fat.

Other Points

Heroes of Might and Magic V is pretty much Heroes of Might and Magic III with better graphics, better sound, better music and a few new features. Anyone familiar with HOMM3 will be right at home with HOMM5. I have never played HOMM4 so I do not know how that compares to these other two.

Biases

Reviewed version 1.60 for HOMM5.

I really liked Heroes Of Might And Magic II and III, Jagged Alliance, UFO: Enemy Unknown and XCOM: Terror From the Deep.

I have not played Heroes of Might and Magic IV.

I have only completed two out of the six campaigns and have only tried out three out of the six factions.

DRM

The game appears to be DRM free. It is strange as the manual has got serial keys in it but I have not been asked to enter it. The disc is not required in the drive to play either.

It is possible that the serial keys are required for installing the expansion packs or for playing online. Both I have not done.

Heroes of Might and Magic V is available DRM free from GOG.com.

Patches

1.60 – I am not sure why but the file is named heroes_might_magic_5_1.06_eu.exe. In the game it clearly says 1.60.

Minimum Requirements (as stated on box)

• Operation System: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
• Processor: 3GHz Intel Pentium 4 or similare processor
• Memory: 1GB RAM
• Video Card: DirectX 9.0c compliant, 128 MB DirectX-compliant, Shader 2.0-enabled
• Direct X: DirectX 9.0c (included on disc)
• DVD-ROM Drive
• Hard Drive: 6GB
• Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible
• Peripherals: Mouse, keyboard
• *Supported Video Cards at Time of Release (This part taken from the readme file as it was too difficult to read the tiny print of video cards)
  Desktop
  NVIDIA: (SE/GE/GS/GT/GTS/GTO/GTX/GTX+/GX2)
  NVIDIA GeForce FX 59×0
  NVIDIA GeForce 6100/6150/6200/6250/6500/6600/6610/6700/6800
  NVIDIA GeForce 7100/7200/7300/7350/7500/7600/7650/7800/7900/7950
  NVIDIA GeForce 8200/8300/8400/8500/8600/8800
  NVIDIA GeForce 9200/9300/9400/9500/9600/9800
  NVIDIA GeForce 120/130/140
  NVIDIA GeForce 250/260/275/280/285/295ATI Radeon:
  ATI Radeon 9600/9700/9800
  ATI Radeon X300/X550/X600/X700/X800/X850
  ATI Radeon X1050/X1300/X1550/X1600/X1650/X1800/X1900/X1950
  ATI Radeon HD2400/HD2600/HD2900
  ATI Radeon HD3400/HD3450/HD3650/HD3600/HD3850/HD3870
  ATI Radeon HD4300/HD4350/HD4550/HD4500/HD4600/HD4650/HD4830/HD4850/HD4870/HD4890Mobile:
  NVIDIA: (SE/G/GE/GS/GT/GTS/GTX)
  GeForce Go 7950/Go 7900/Go 7800/Go 7700/Go 7600/Go 7400/Go 7300/Go 7200/7150M/7000M
  GeForce 8800M/8700M/8600M/8400M/8200M
  GeForce 9800M/9700M/9650M/9600M/9500M/9400M/9300M/9300M/9200M/9100M
  GeForce 160M/130M/120M/110M/107M/105M/103M/102M
  GeForce 260M/280M

  Radeon:
  Mobility Radeon 9600/9700/9800
  Mobility Radeon X300/X600/X700/X800
  Mobility Radeon X1300/X1350/X1400/X1450/X1600/X1700/X1800/X1900
  Mobility Radeon X2300/HD2300/HD2400/HD2600
  Mobility Radeon X3100/X3200

Computer Played On

• Windows 7 64 bit.
• Intel Core i5 2.3GHz
• 4Gb RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M 1Gb RAM
• Conexant SmartAudio with egg speakers or earphones. Or Logitech G35.
• Graphics settings are set to whatever I feel comfortable with playing on this PC. They are usually not set to the highest settings. All screenshots are taken with my settings.