You have received bears
I’ve spent all month enjoying Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes on the DS. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a video game in a long time. They’ve managed to find a way to integrate RPG elements with a puzzle game like Puzzle Quest did a few years ago, but their core mechanic doesn’t end up introducing a feeling of unfair competition from the AI— the introduction of new units onto the field is appropriately “random” for both your board and your opponent’s, and the rest is all strategy.
The art style is appealing, and I really like the way the story is broken up into multiple chapters, with each chapter featuring a different set of units and abilities. It lets the game frequently introduce new ideas without having to just constantly scale up the complexity, which wouldn’t work in the long-term for a game like this without doing something wacky like expanding the grid size and requiring larger configurations to make attacks/defenses.
There are a few rough edges, the sorts of things that AAA titles would have ironed out through million-dollar playtesting programs with complicated metrics tracking and so on, but nothing too bad. In some campaigns it’s best to ignore the side quests for fear of losing too many resources if you don’t play ultra-conservatively; in other campaigns the side quests are easy and give items that make the main campaign much easier. That ends up just upping the difficulty, though, which I’m ultimately okay with.
The only thing that I’ve thought over long and hard and been unable to come up with a reason for why it wasn’t included is an undo button. A quick bit of context for anyone who hasn’t played it: each turn you take starts with 3 “moves”, which can be refunded for getting combos. Once you run out of moves, your turn is over and your opponent gets a turn. In some ways, the process of making these move decisions reminds me of the Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack/Puzzle League series’ “Puzzle” mode. This mode contained a handy button for “undo”, which allowed you to rewind your most recent move. There’s no way to do this in M&M: CoH, and as long as you contain it to within your turn, I don’t see how that would hurt anything. It would make learning how to find and make large combos much more easily.
Small complaints aside, this game is a fantastic DS game for anyone who likes RPGs or puzzle games. The campaign is of a decent length, and if you can find other people who have it, the multiplayer should provide a lot of depth. I hope to find people at PAX East in March to play this with, so if you’re going to be there, get this game and bring it with you!
—Casey
