Maybe I haven't seen a Blizzard cinematic in so long I forget just how well they do things, but something about watching that knight dance his way through all of those skeletons just made me smile.
The gameplay is relatively simple. You get a hero (sometimes more) and an overworld map which if I might add, looks pretty fantastic. Each hero is the figurehead of an army and a hero is required to move troops around the map. You get a certain number of movement points per "day," and once you run out, you end your turn and the other factions get to move their heroes. Coming into contact with an enemy starts up combat.
Combat plays out in a very simple way too. The attackers units start out on the left side of the grid, the defender on the right side. Units each have their own stat values that determine how strong they are, what turn order they go in, how often they critical etc. You move your units in order and make them bludgeon the hell out of each other.
You get "stacks" of these units. So, if I had say, 500 archers, I'd have one unit on the grid, that had 500x the health and attack of a single archer. Whenever an enemy damages that stack, a certain number of archers die. So say I take enough damage to lose 50, now my damage is only 450x that of a single archer unit. Healing effects give life back to the top unit in the stack until it is healed, and then resurrect the fallen units in that stack. Units can counter-attack, normally only against melee attackers, and cause damage back to whomever attacked them.
These game play elements are the core that make this very simple game also very complicated. Planning moves ahead of time will allow you to take enemy forces out without losing a single unit in your army, while recklessly attacking generally results in a large amount of losses. Losses you normally can't afford. There happens to be a mechanic that occurs on the overworld map, wherein reinforcements only come once a week, at the start of the week. This is great, but you only get maybe 60 units per week. The enemies only get maybe 5-20 units added to their armies, but the sheer volume of neutral enemies on the map guarding treasures causes you to want to play carefully if you want to obtain them all.
I could go on about the game play but I'll save that for another time. For now I'd like to talk about the graphics and the design of the units. The graphics aren't exactly groundbreaking, but there's a lot of little details added into the environment and the unit models that really make the game come to life. The GUI is friggin' superb. It's not cluttered up with anything and it just looks crisp and clean.
I'm not going to go into details about the creatures, I'll just post a picture.
That ghost just looks awesome, and YES, the ghoul has wolverine claws.
Having never been into the Might and Magic scene, I wasn't sure what I was going to be getting into in the creatures department, but damn, that ghoul is just cool.
That's all I've got to say for now, kind of abrupt ending to this post, I know, but I opened up the game to get a nice screenshot of those claws and that ghost and the GUI, and now I just really really want to play the game!
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