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Heroes of Might & Magic V: Tribes of the East

Maps and everything in-between

I must say that I was very satisfied with the new campaigns: they're very lengthy, and the maps are fun, varied and challenging. It is obvious that a lot of extra scripting has gone into them, so players won't always be faced with the typical Heroes "gather resources, upgrade your town, build units, wipe out all baddies" game mechanic. Instead they get a lot of nifty objectives (such as enlisting some priests and carrying out a ritual in one of the missions) and game mechanic modifications (such as Zehir's teleporting castle, and weekly chance to trade in experience + resources for some extra units). All in all, the gameplay in the campaigns has improved considerably, and really seems to top any Heroes game in that department.

Once you hear this character (the protagonist during one of the campaigns) you will instantly want to slap him off his elephant. Yes, he is that annoying.

The players will have to carry out all kinds of map specific tasks, like performing a ritual in this picture.

Unfortunately, despite replacing each character's rather puzzling gestures (random spell casting and flailing around of every limb) when speaking with some lip-syncing and pre-scripted movements, the in-game cut-scenes are plain simply embarrassingly bad. Even though the game generally has a decent story, these animations seem to be torture instead of the rewards they should be after completing certain objectives. Whilst the visuals during these could be forgiven if we'd forget about being in the year 2007, the abysmal voice-acting really destroys every last bit of remaining joy one can get from them.

At least the soundtrack doesn't disappoint. The epic orchestral music once again fits the game perfectly, but then again, this aspect has been a very strong point of every HoMM game released since Heroes II.

Graphics and the technology behind the game

Whilst the in-game graphics still manage to convince us with the colourful visuals and exceptionally well crafted art-design, they've definitely aged since the game was originally released. This isn't all that apparent when zoomed out on the adventure map / during battles though, and the castle views are still gorgeous, and given how interesting and well designed all the creatures and the adventure map entities are, this shouldn't be a problem. The overall looks of the game are still pretty impressive for a turn based strategy game.

The somewhat technically outdated engine allows for very low minimum requirements, meaning that gamers with a higher end AMD Athlon XP / Intel Pentium 4 processor can easily enjoy this game, even on 512 MB of RAM (although 1 GB is recommended, due to issues described later on) and a lower end graphics card, such as an ATI Radeon 9800 / NVIDIA GeForce 6600. If this sounds too good to be true, then let me tell you that, in a way, it is. The game runs fine most of the time, even on such lower end systems, but there are some oddities that can be real deal-breakers.

Switching to the lowest possible settings when zoomed out...

...has barely any impact on the visuals, but can give a quite pleasant boost in performance.

One of these is the fact that even on higher end dual core systems with 2 GB RAM and a top end graphics card, the performance can get painfully bad after several hours of gaming. Especially lengthy battles seem to have a huge impact on performance, so it seems to be a question of bad memory management (throwing more RAM into your setup may help for a while, but ultimately it will only delay the slowdowns and the time to when you'll have to quit and restart the game). Also, whilst it may be nice to gaze over the colourful landscapes in the adventure screen, tilting the camera can drop the FPS even on high end systems to the low double digit region, and even lower on larger maps, so whilst this feature is there, I'd strongly advise against using it.

There are a few settings that one can play around with, in hopes of getting some extra performance out of the game, but these still do not remedy the above mentioned issues. Users of low-end systems may want to drop the quality settings somewhat for a gain in performance, and since the game doesn't lose a lot in terms of visuals even on the lowest setting when zoomed out completely, this shouldn't be a real setback most of the time (the game doesn't look all that great zoomed in anyway). However, these lower quality settings do severely affect one part of the game, which doesn't stand out as anything great to begin with, namely the cutscenes.

Played on low settings, a PlayStation 2 would point and laugh at the cut-scenes...

...on high it would merely smirk and snicker.

Using an ageing turn-based strategy game's in-game visuals to create the "movies" may not have been such a great choice, since up close and personal the characters can look awful, in-game animations in RTS games released around 2003 didn't look a lot worse than this, and the lower graphics settings further underlines this.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: New Features & GameplayPage 3: Art, Design & HardwarePage 4: Final Thoughts & Scores

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